Jan 4th, 2020 - Category: Communication
Have I got a story to tell you, but first let’s play a round of “fill in the blank.”
“It all seemed to be going _____ (so well / so badly). The economy was _____ (booming / crashing) and everyone seemed _____ (better off / worse off than ever). Government was doing an _____ (excellent / terrible) job running the country with _____ (honesty / deception) and _____ (integrity / corruption). Technology was helping society ______ (make great strides forward / destroy itself) faster everyday…”
Whatever our opinions of the current state of the planet, it’s easy to find thousands of like-minded people who share these opinions as well as share the strong attachment to the stories these opinions are based on. For some of us though it goes it bit deeper. It’s not just about the stories, but also exploring how they are created, communicated, and developed over time. Some stories that seem obviously ridiculous to many are deeply held truths for others. For example, the flat earthers, cow tippers, or any one of a large number of conspiracy theorists. Adding to the confusion is a massive body of literature about the origins of our stories and the thinly veiled ancient mythologies behind them. Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst wrote about mythology extensively as did Joseph Campbell whose book on mythology, “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” was one of George Lucas’ inspirations for the original movie, “Star Wars.” Nine feature films later it is a prime example of how ancient mythology still affects us strongly today.
However lately stories are becoming more polarized with large groups of people maintaining an almost fanatical belief in a smaller and smaller number of common themes that mostly boil down to “Us Versus Them.” Why do so many people believe in nationalism, isolationism, and withdrawal when so many others believe global cooperation is our only chance of survival? It’s impossible to comprehend the causes and results of just this one story, much less the divisiveness present in almost every issue discussed today.
One amazing resource that I’ve come across that has helped me is Tim Urban’s website “Wait but Why?” 
which began several years ago with the concept of writing long articles on difficult topics of general interest such as AI, dating, Elon Musk, space exploration, and religion. But it’s his most recent series of posts, “The Story of Us,” that inspired this post. I was hooked right in the first chapter where he explains the problem he came across when trying to understand people’s stories:
I ended up going so deep because as I read through studies and watched the news and read opinion pieces and listened to podcasts and heard people’s life stories, I kept feeling like in each case, I was only seeing a small part of what was happening. And I became obsessed with trying to wrap my head around whatever the big story was that all of these smaller stories were a part of. So I went farther and farther down the rabbit hole, trying to get in a mental helicopter and zoom out far enough to see the complete picture.
During the last few months, he has progressed through several stages of trying to “see the complete picture” mainly by using biology, evolutionary psychology, and the hard data from numerous studies. He breaks down his explanation into sections called Power Games, Value Games, and Thinking in Three Dimensions to finally arrive at the topic of the moment, Politics! The whole series is a VERY long read and he’s not done yet. His most recent article, “Chapter 9: Political Disney World” brings the hundreds of pages he’s already written together cohesively into a fascinating explanation of why modern society is in a crisis of cooperation and how to begin to bridge the gap. He explores how both “sides” (progressive and conservative) are both right and wrong, how “reality” is nothing like the black and white Walt Disney world of good superheroes versus bad super villains, and yet how our primitive, evolutionally-developed, survival-based brains absolutely love and crave to frame the world in these simplistic terms. In this same article, he even goes on to explain the fallacies that are used by each side to promote their type of thinking as superior: misrepresenting reality, misrepresenting arguments, and misrepresenting people. And he backs up each fallacy with dozens of pages of details and examples (and wonderful diagrams).
Tim Urban says the series has one more article so I will certainly be posting a follow-up, but despite the length, the whole series is worth at least skimming. 
I learned more about the structure of my brain, the source of societal “norms,” and the foundations of culture from his writing than the dozens of books I’ve read on these topics over the years.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from Urban’s “Story about Stories” is that maybe the greatest strength of the human species is our built-in capacity to utilize both the powerful survival mechanism of our “primitive mind” as well as the rationality and wisdom of our “higher mind,” the part that separates humans from animals. It’s definitely our of balance at the moment and how we restore that balance is a story that remains to be written.