WEBVTT - Against Narrative: Are stories bad for us? Part 2 0:00:03.040 --> 0:00:05.840 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff 0:00:05.840 --> 0:00:14.360 Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow 0:00:14.400 --> 0:00:17.240 your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, 0:00:17.280 --> 0:00:19.520 and we're back with part two of our discussion of 0:00:19.600 --> 0:00:23.079 whether stories are bad for us. If you haven't heard 0:00:23.079 --> 0:00:25.000 the first episode, you should probably go back and listen 0:00:25.040 --> 0:00:28.120 to that. It's where we first discussed what got us 0:00:28.360 --> 0:00:32.040 interested in this topic and general thoughts about ways that 0:00:32.120 --> 0:00:35.320 though Robert, you and I we both love narratives, love stories, 0:00:35.360 --> 0:00:38.879 love fiction, that stories might not always be great for 0:00:39.000 --> 0:00:42.239 human civilization. Yeah, it's it's a it's a weird thing 0:00:42.280 --> 0:00:44.400 to think about. But but then again, like part of 0:00:44.440 --> 0:00:47.440 it is because I look back, especially on certain times 0:00:47.440 --> 0:00:51.760 in my life where like a prize narrative above anything 0:00:51.800 --> 0:00:54.200 that was happening in real life. You know, like a 0:00:54.280 --> 0:00:57.800 great book was an escape. A fictional book, Yeah, great, 0:00:57.800 --> 0:01:00.400 great fictional book was an escape. They were great. Unfiction 0:01:00.440 --> 0:01:02.400 book can also be a tremendous escape too, But I 0:01:02.440 --> 0:01:07.240 specifically remember escaping into into various novels, and it was 0:01:07.440 --> 0:01:10.720 there was something so comforting about that. But then there's 0:01:10.760 --> 0:01:14.800 a similar there's there's something similar occurring when we have 0:01:15.000 --> 0:01:19.000 these negative examples of people escaping into narrative, though it 0:01:19.080 --> 0:01:23.319 might not be the pure alternate narrative of say, life 0:01:23.319 --> 0:01:26.600 on another planet or in an imagined age, but just 0:01:26.760 --> 0:01:31.119 a a different version of reality in which things are 0:01:31.160 --> 0:01:35.240 simplified and made more story shaped, with more key with 0:01:35.240 --> 0:01:40.080 with with clearer villains and heroes, and some sort of 0:01:40.080 --> 0:01:44.560 of eventual come upance and uh and redemption. So we 0:01:44.600 --> 0:01:47.480 should brief recap. In the last episode, we talked about 0:01:48.040 --> 0:01:51.200 this idea that maybe stories aren't so great for us. 0:01:51.240 --> 0:01:53.840 That we were inspired to talk about this because I 0:01:53.880 --> 0:01:57.560 read a read an interview with a Duke University professor 0:01:57.640 --> 0:02:00.520 and philosopher of science named Alex Rosenberg, who has written 0:02:00.560 --> 0:02:04.360 a book about How How Well Number One, about how 0:02:04.400 --> 0:02:08.680 we're wired to prefer stories over other types of receiving information, 0:02:09.000 --> 0:02:12.800 and then also about how stories cloud our our views 0:02:12.880 --> 0:02:15.840 of history and that a lot of times we don't 0:02:15.919 --> 0:02:19.240 appreciate what actually happened in the past because we read 0:02:19.240 --> 0:02:22.839 a sort of personal narrative about history that has characters 0:02:22.840 --> 0:02:26.040 with motivations, and we think we identify with those characters, 0:02:26.280 --> 0:02:28.400 and we you know, we engage in theory of mind. 0:02:28.520 --> 0:02:31.359 We put our brain inside their brain, and we think 0:02:31.400 --> 0:02:33.320 we understand history in this way, but in fact it 0:02:33.360 --> 0:02:36.920 just leads to a lot of misunderstanding and false certainty 0:02:37.000 --> 0:02:39.799 about why things happened in the past, right, and then 0:02:39.919 --> 0:02:43.120 sometimes about what's happening in the present and in the future. 0:02:43.680 --> 0:02:46.760 Because he specifically points to the science of global warming 0:02:46.800 --> 0:02:49.920 and how there's a tendency to to for for the 0:02:49.960 --> 0:02:52.200 science of global warming to to lose out to the 0:02:52.320 --> 0:02:55.560 narrative of global warming. And this wouldn't be an issue 0:02:55.560 --> 0:02:58.440 if the narratives were closely aligned with the science, but 0:02:58.560 --> 0:03:02.400 as we see can sadly continue to see, the problem 0:03:02.480 --> 0:03:04.919 is that some of the narratives about global warming run 0:03:05.000 --> 0:03:08.480 counter to what the science is telling us and have 0:03:08.639 --> 0:03:12.200 a have a different agenda. Right. I mean, of course, 0:03:12.240 --> 0:03:16.200 the clear scientific consensus is global warm warming is absolutely real. 0:03:16.280 --> 0:03:19.480 It's going on right now. It's it is primarily driven 0:03:19.520 --> 0:03:22.720 by human behavior, and that behavior is primarily the emission 0:03:22.760 --> 0:03:24.960 of greenhouse gasses, and that if we want to do 0:03:25.040 --> 0:03:27.200 something to stop it, we should stop the emission of 0:03:27.200 --> 0:03:29.519 greenhouse gasses and maybe even at this point try to 0:03:29.560 --> 0:03:31.720 find a way to remove them from the atmosphere, if 0:03:31.760 --> 0:03:35.360 that's even possible. But you know, there there are lots 0:03:35.400 --> 0:03:37.960 of very fun narratives that tell you something else, that 0:03:38.040 --> 0:03:40.400 tell you it's a Chinese hoax, or that tell you, 0:03:40.400 --> 0:03:43.160 you know, there's some evil cabal of globalists who want 0:03:43.200 --> 0:03:45.600 to do X, Y and Z, and they're using this 0:03:45.760 --> 0:03:48.640 scam to you know, I don't you know, keep up 0:03:48.680 --> 0:03:51.000 with all what all that stuff is. But you know 0:03:51.040 --> 0:03:57.080 where you can go to find it YouTube predominantly, Uh, 0:03:57.200 --> 0:03:58.640 you know, but part of it. But a lot of 0:03:58.640 --> 0:04:02.280 this is it's out, Rosenberg describes. You know, a lot 0:04:02.320 --> 0:04:04.800 of it comes down to the fact that we're we're 0:04:04.920 --> 0:04:09.600 using old tricks. Uh. These are basically sort of shortcuts 0:04:09.600 --> 0:04:13.120 in our perception of reality and that all of you know, 0:04:13.160 --> 0:04:17.000 the reality that we have is not like pure objective 0:04:17.080 --> 0:04:20.280 reality like of course, you know, one of the like 0:04:20.360 --> 0:04:23.000 fun little I'll go and go ahead and even call 0:04:23.040 --> 0:04:26.159 it a mind blower that he drops in that ideas 0:04:26.200 --> 0:04:28.560 with Paul Kennedy episode was that you know that that 0:04:28.839 --> 0:04:31.240 we live in a world that doesn't actually have odors 0:04:31.320 --> 0:04:34.440 or colors. That's just our sense world, that's our way, 0:04:34.680 --> 0:04:37.600 that's the way that our our bodies in our minds, uh, 0:04:37.720 --> 0:04:40.960 interpret the stimula. Yeah, there is actually light, and there 0:04:40.960 --> 0:04:44.680 are actually volatile molecules, but the idea of color is 0:04:45.000 --> 0:04:48.600 something that happens only in the brain. Right. We constantly 0:04:48.720 --> 0:04:52.480 air in this perception of the world because it's adaptive. Uh. 0:04:52.640 --> 0:04:54.960 And it's certainly not maladaptive, but you can see how 0:04:55.000 --> 0:04:58.560 it stands in the way of a proper understanding of 0:04:58.560 --> 0:05:02.200 objective reality. If it mattered, like if I don't know, 0:05:02.240 --> 0:05:07.279 if some fantastic scenario presented itself, say there was an 0:05:07.320 --> 0:05:09.760 alien invasion, that's generally a good one to go for, 0:05:10.279 --> 0:05:13.320 and the key to defeating the aliens was a perception 0:05:13.360 --> 0:05:17.039 of reality that did not, uh, did not rely on 0:05:17.040 --> 0:05:21.600 an understanding of reality in which odors and colors exist. 0:05:22.200 --> 0:05:24.479 You know, we're doomed. Yeah, we would. We would be 0:05:24.480 --> 0:05:27.120 doomed because we have this this built in handicap that 0:05:27.160 --> 0:05:30.560 has never been maladaptive up until now. And so one 0:05:30.560 --> 0:05:33.080 of the things he's arguing is that is that storytelling 0:05:33.640 --> 0:05:38.720 was adaptive early on, but then is perhaps increasingly maladaptive 0:05:38.800 --> 0:05:42.200 as we as as civilization becomes more complicated. Oh yeah, 0:05:42.240 --> 0:05:44.240 I mean, this is one of the clear things that 0:05:44.279 --> 0:05:48.479 we've discovered through you know, the recent decades of psychology 0:05:48.480 --> 0:05:52.320 and neuroscience focusing on bias and misperception. You know that 0:05:52.320 --> 0:05:55.400 that's been been a key to to what we've learned 0:05:55.520 --> 0:05:57.720 about the brain in the past few decades, is that 0:05:58.360 --> 0:06:00.320 we we have just all kinds of ways of getting 0:06:00.360 --> 0:06:03.720 reality wrong, and a lot of this is based on heuristics, 0:06:03.839 --> 0:06:08.200 you know, simple, quick, fast, dirty rules that the mind 0:06:08.360 --> 0:06:10.599 uses to try to come up with an answer without 0:06:10.600 --> 0:06:13.000 doing too much work. And in fact, you can more 0:06:13.040 --> 0:06:15.760 often get a more accurate answer by using a slow, 0:06:16.000 --> 0:06:21.000 laborious mechanical process of figuring out what's true. But usually 0:06:21.040 --> 0:06:23.000 it doesn't make sense to do that in real life 0:06:23.040 --> 0:06:25.000 because you just don't have the time and the energy. 0:06:25.080 --> 0:06:28.120 So we use heuristics and we get maybe sometimes roughly 0:06:28.240 --> 0:06:31.839 right answers, maybe sometimes really wrong answers, but in most 0:06:31.880 --> 0:06:34.960 scenarios it doesn't matter enough for us to actually change 0:06:34.960 --> 0:06:38.960 our behavior. And story based thinking about reality, I think, 0:06:39.080 --> 0:06:42.200 is one of these heuristics. Yeah, you know, one one 0:06:42.200 --> 0:06:44.960 thing that came to my mind was how like some 0:06:45.040 --> 0:06:48.680 of my earliest memories, some of them are definitely memories, 0:06:48.880 --> 0:06:52.920 but other things are not so much memories, but me 0:06:53.160 --> 0:06:56.880 remembering stories about something that happened when I was very young. 0:06:57.560 --> 0:07:00.960 And those become a sort of memory. They become a 0:07:01.040 --> 0:07:04.120 kind of false memory of something that that happened. But 0:07:04.480 --> 0:07:06.880 to what degree it happened, like the story, I'm not sure, 0:07:06.920 --> 0:07:09.240 because we do this all the time right where we 0:07:09.320 --> 0:07:12.560 take we oftentimes will take an external story or just 0:07:12.680 --> 0:07:14.880 like the general shape of a story, use that to 0:07:14.960 --> 0:07:18.440 interpret something that happened to us, and then that becomes 0:07:18.480 --> 0:07:22.160 the memory. We are remembering the story that we came 0:07:22.280 --> 0:07:24.600 up with about the thing that happened, as opposed to 0:07:24.720 --> 0:07:29.840 any anything like a purely objective understanding of what occurred. Right, 0:07:29.880 --> 0:07:32.400 And so a classic example of this that I was 0:07:32.480 --> 0:07:35.760 just thinking about is when you sort events into a 0:07:35.800 --> 0:07:38.960 structure of rising tension. You know, it's how like you 0:07:39.000 --> 0:07:41.440 could you could, like take a number of events that 0:07:41.520 --> 0:07:44.720 happened over a course of different days or even different weeks, 0:07:44.760 --> 0:07:47.640 and we're really not all that related. But you're telling 0:07:47.640 --> 0:07:50.720 a story maybe about how you started, you know, why 0:07:50.800 --> 0:07:54.880 you're feeling down right now, and you you introduce like 0:07:55.040 --> 0:07:57.280 one thing that went wrong and then another thing that 0:07:57.320 --> 0:07:59.960 went wrong at a different time, and you you escale 0:08:00.200 --> 0:08:02.520 the tension on the story like you would if you're 0:08:02.520 --> 0:08:06.440 showing the increasingly dangerous obstacles that a hero almost face 0:08:06.520 --> 0:08:09.400 in their journey. Right, Sometimes the things that we pick 0:08:09.440 --> 0:08:11.240 out to put into that story to be like the 0:08:11.280 --> 0:08:13.760 set pieces of the story might not be the real 0:08:13.840 --> 0:08:16.160 causes and effects of what we're trying to explain with 0:08:16.200 --> 0:08:18.640 the story. Why you're actually feeling down now, You don't 0:08:18.680 --> 0:08:21.440 necessarily know why you're feeling down now. Yeah, there are 0:08:21.440 --> 0:08:24.400 a number of reasons we've discussed in the show that 0:08:24.400 --> 0:08:27.440 that are not related to um so much to something 0:08:27.440 --> 0:08:29.080 going on in the mind, that's something going on and 0:08:29.120 --> 0:08:33.120 say with your gut, bacteria, etcetera. And of course we've 0:08:33.160 --> 0:08:35.480 also discussed on the show how even an outright lie 0:08:35.640 --> 0:08:39.480 can impact how we think about something. Um uh, you know, 0:08:39.600 --> 0:08:42.160 and something that's not even presented as a possible truth, 0:08:42.600 --> 0:08:45.320 if we hear it enough times, it can become part 0:08:45.360 --> 0:08:48.800 of our understanding of reality. Yeah, the illusory truth effect. 0:08:49.120 --> 0:08:51.480 You hear something enough, you start to kind of think 0:08:51.480 --> 0:08:54.240 it's true, even if you should know better. And so 0:08:54.559 --> 0:08:58.120 like that situation as well, is just this sort of 0:08:58.240 --> 0:09:00.960 holding our life up to other examples, be it little 0:09:00.960 --> 0:09:05.280 biographies or myths or motion pictures that we've seen. Um. 0:09:05.360 --> 0:09:08.600 It reminds me a bit of something that's discussed in 0:09:08.679 --> 0:09:11.960 Mercelles Eliades The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos 0:09:11.960 --> 0:09:14.079 in History, the book I've I've talked about on the 0:09:14.120 --> 0:09:16.080 show before. It's kind of a you know, an important 0:09:16.559 --> 0:09:20.800 text in religious studies, and in this the author discusses 0:09:20.840 --> 0:09:26.000 how humans uh would have situated themselves within cyclical time. Uh. 0:09:26.040 --> 0:09:28.439 The idea here being that that ancient people thought of 0:09:28.800 --> 0:09:31.480 time is more as cyclical as opposed to linear, not 0:09:31.640 --> 0:09:34.319 something that has a beginning and an end that ultimately 0:09:34.360 --> 0:09:36.720 follows sort of the the ups and downs of a 0:09:36.800 --> 0:09:39.880 narrative plot, but is more of just a continual cycle. 0:09:40.080 --> 0:09:43.200 I guess more like a sitcom in that respect, right, Uh, 0:09:43.240 --> 0:09:45.920 as a as sitcom rather than blockbuster. And so the 0:09:45.920 --> 0:09:48.760 idea here is that ancient people would have viewed time 0:09:48.800 --> 0:09:52.160 as cyclical and that all important acts in life were 0:09:52.240 --> 0:09:54.600 ultimately things that were revealed by the gods, and that 0:09:54.679 --> 0:10:00.560 all humans did was engaged in acts and rituals of repetition. So, 0:10:01.280 --> 0:10:03.360 I don't know, there's something that might define you in life, 0:10:03.400 --> 0:10:08.160 like say, something that is associated with with being a parent, 0:10:08.360 --> 0:10:12.000 or being a warrior, or being a uh, you know, 0:10:12.080 --> 0:10:15.240 a craftsman and artisan. What have you like these things 0:10:15.480 --> 0:10:18.200 are only important because a god did them or some 0:10:18.240 --> 0:10:20.800 sort of divine figure did them, and then you were 0:10:20.840 --> 0:10:24.760 just repeating those things. Um a quote from the book 0:10:25.280 --> 0:10:28.320 An object or act becomes real only in so far 0:10:28.480 --> 0:10:32.240 as it imitates or repeats an archetype. But then again, 0:10:32.320 --> 0:10:35.760 the move to linear time or one way time allows 0:10:35.800 --> 0:10:39.040 for a different sort of narrative structure to emerge um 0:10:39.080 --> 0:10:42.760 and to take root in life, myth and religion, tales 0:10:42.840 --> 0:10:47.480 of fall and ultimately redemption and ultimate justice. Yeah. And 0:10:47.600 --> 0:10:51.480 this is, in in Lad's estimation, negative in that it 0:10:51.520 --> 0:10:54.520 allows for the terror of history, the realization that we 0:10:54.640 --> 0:10:58.520 keep falling and failing and suffering not because of divine 0:10:58.559 --> 0:11:02.040 acts or something set in motion by the gods for repetition, 0:11:02.360 --> 0:11:06.360 but because of our own failings. So we've abandoned mythical thought, 0:11:06.440 --> 0:11:10.200 he argues, and are confronted with this modern terror, these 0:11:10.280 --> 0:11:14.080 modern anxieties because of this way that we view time 0:11:14.800 --> 0:11:16.760 and and ultimately kind of place it in a narrative 0:11:16.800 --> 0:11:19.960 structure in our understanding of what has come before does 0:11:20.160 --> 0:11:23.440 color what comes comes comes later. I mean, the whole 0:11:23.920 --> 0:11:25.440 go back to the idea of you know, those who 0:11:26.360 --> 0:11:29.480 who who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Um 0:11:29.640 --> 0:11:34.040 also reminds me of quote from soreign h Crcy Guard 0:11:35.120 --> 0:11:38.079 from repetition, and I actually I encountered this quote for 0:11:38.120 --> 0:11:43.000 the first time in the intro to uh Alan robe 0:11:43.040 --> 0:11:47.200 Gerlay's novel Repetition. But it goes like this, repetition and 0:11:47.240 --> 0:11:51.120 recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions. For 0:11:51.200 --> 0:11:55.480 what is recollected has been it is repeated backwards, whereas repetition, 0:11:55.559 --> 0:11:59.360 properly so called, is recollected forward. Well, that does tend 0:11:59.360 --> 0:12:03.120 to suggest, I mean, another way of thinking about the 0:12:03.120 --> 0:12:06.800 possible effects of narrative on our lives is that if 0:12:06.800 --> 0:12:09.000 you tell a certain kind of story about yourself, do 0:12:09.040 --> 0:12:11.440 you make it more likely that you do a similar 0:12:11.520 --> 0:12:14.040 kind of story in the future. Right? Is it a 0:12:14.080 --> 0:12:18.040 story about what I was or who I am or 0:12:18.080 --> 0:12:19.840 who I will be? And I didn't think that can 0:12:19.880 --> 0:12:22.280 be instructive to a certain extent, Right, Like I am 0:12:22.320 --> 0:12:24.720 a good person, I am a moral person, and therefore 0:12:25.679 --> 0:12:28.440 I have acted morally and I will act morally. That 0:12:28.559 --> 0:12:31.000 sort of thing. But another thing that I think is 0:12:31.040 --> 0:12:33.880 really important about the psychology of storytelling is just the 0:12:34.160 --> 0:12:37.000 power that stories now when you're not even talking about 0:12:37.000 --> 0:12:41.120 self narrative. You're just talking about narrative, external narratives, fictional stories, 0:12:41.240 --> 0:12:44.040 narratives like we were talking about with global warming. Uh, 0:12:44.160 --> 0:12:47.000 somebody wants to tell a story about an evil conspiracy 0:12:47.120 --> 0:12:50.760 to push this hoax on people. That kind of story 0:12:50.880 --> 0:12:54.280 can be incredibly persuasive and powerful. Stories have the power 0:12:54.360 --> 0:12:57.120 to persuade for good and evil, And this can be 0:12:57.160 --> 0:13:00.480 a really frightening power because they often seem so much 0:13:00.520 --> 0:13:04.040 more persuasive than good evidence. Like if you're a lawyer, 0:13:04.040 --> 0:13:06.560 I mean, it's a truism among lawyers, right that if 0:13:06.640 --> 0:13:09.600 you if you're doing a court case and the evidence 0:13:09.679 --> 0:13:12.040 is against you, if you tell a good enough story, 0:13:12.080 --> 0:13:15.200 you still might win the jury over that. Often, like 0:13:15.559 --> 0:13:18.439 presenting a case to a jury is about telling a 0:13:18.440 --> 0:13:22.160 believable story, and how believable the story is might not 0:13:22.280 --> 0:13:25.560 always correlate to how good the evidence is. And so 0:13:25.600 --> 0:13:29.680 there's plenty of evidence that stories have persuasive power that 0:13:30.000 --> 0:13:32.160 you know that they A lot of this is applied 0:13:32.200 --> 0:13:34.520 like within the business world. You know, you've probably seen 0:13:34.559 --> 0:13:38.240 people doing business presentations or giving ted talks or something 0:13:38.280 --> 0:13:39.760 like that, and they go up and the first thing 0:13:39.800 --> 0:13:41.520 they do is they tell a story. I want to 0:13:41.559 --> 0:13:44.640 tell you a story about a young man who had 0:13:44.640 --> 0:13:47.960 a dream, and that man was me. And you know, 0:13:48.200 --> 0:13:49.640 but they tell you a story and it's got a 0:13:49.760 --> 0:13:52.959 narrative arc, it's got obstacles that the character must face. 0:13:53.040 --> 0:13:56.040 They've got desires, they've got emotions. You you seek to 0:13:56.080 --> 0:13:59.400 have emotional engagement between the audience and the character, and 0:13:59.520 --> 0:14:03.240 that supposedly helps people pay more attention to what you're 0:14:03.240 --> 0:14:07.080 talking about. It helps people retain more information from what 0:14:07.120 --> 0:14:10.240 you said, and it helps you persuade people to your 0:14:10.280 --> 0:14:12.840 point of view, which I guess is all contingent on, 0:14:13.600 --> 0:14:15.760 you know, whether the ultimate point of what you're saying 0:14:15.840 --> 0:14:17.400 is good or not. I mean, you can use this 0:14:17.480 --> 0:14:20.760 for good and you can use it for quite evil purposes. Yeah. 0:14:20.840 --> 0:14:22.840 For instance, on the idea of narrative for good, we 0:14:22.840 --> 0:14:25.480 we've touched on some of the positives of telling stories already, 0:14:25.480 --> 0:14:27.880 but you know, it's worth noting that narrative is sometimes 0:14:27.880 --> 0:14:30.880 part of, you know, of an actual like clinical healing practice, 0:14:31.640 --> 0:14:34.560 such as narrative expressive writing. For instance of May two 0:14:34.600 --> 0:14:38.640 thousand seventeen study in Psychosomatic Medicine, Journal of Bio Behavioral 0:14:38.640 --> 0:14:42.360 Medicine found that the writing about their emotions and creating 0:14:42.360 --> 0:14:46.760 a meaningful narrative of their experience UH may reduce the 0:14:46.920 --> 0:14:53.200 harmful cardiovascular effects of stress related to marital separation and patients. UM. 0:14:53.560 --> 0:14:56.280 But you know, more specifically, like just the idea that 0:14:56.440 --> 0:14:59.640 engaging and narrative can be used in but they're they're 0:14:59.640 --> 0:15:04.560 apew process UM. I also ran across some notes on 0:15:04.600 --> 0:15:09.240 the pros and cons of storytelling from Ethics of Storytelling, Narrative, Hermoneutics, 0:15:09.320 --> 0:15:14.080 History and the Possible by Hannah Maritosa, Professor of Comparative 0:15:14.120 --> 0:15:18.600 Literature at the University of Turku in Finland, and she 0:15:18.680 --> 0:15:20.840 points out that the narrative gives us a sense of 0:15:20.880 --> 0:15:23.800 what is possible within a culture and what could be possible, 0:15:24.320 --> 0:15:26.520 and this is all good. You know, we see empowering 0:15:26.640 --> 0:15:29.480 stories and we think that could be me, or you know, 0:15:29.560 --> 0:15:32.920 I can do something like that. You know, I'm maybe 0:15:32.920 --> 0:15:35.280 I'm not going to go and engage in a boxing match, 0:15:35.360 --> 0:15:37.920 but this boxing movie has shown me that if I 0:15:37.960 --> 0:15:43.080 have the eye of the tiger, then nothing can UM. 0:15:43.200 --> 0:15:46.360 And then also it shapes what we think a good 0:15:46.400 --> 0:15:49.920 life is, what gender norms are, what success is, and 0:15:50.000 --> 0:15:52.600 this can be positive or negative. I mean, it really 0:15:52.640 --> 0:15:55.200 can run run run the gamut here. Yeah, I think 0:15:55.440 --> 0:15:57.720 we tend to. Some research shows that we tend to 0:15:57.960 --> 0:16:00.920 identify with characters in narrow It is much the same 0:16:00.920 --> 0:16:03.760 way we would end up identifying with people in the world. 0:16:04.280 --> 0:16:06.320 And you know, when you see people in the world 0:16:06.360 --> 0:16:09.520 acting a certain way, their values can be contagious, their 0:16:09.560 --> 0:16:12.360 cultural values, their moral values. And I think the same 0:16:12.400 --> 0:16:16.240 can be true and narrative absolutely. She She also points 0:16:16.240 --> 0:16:19.640 to the Nazi regime is giving us a good example 0:16:19.640 --> 0:16:22.480 of what can happen when a strong narrative is developed 0:16:22.520 --> 0:16:25.480 to embolden one people but at the expense of others. 0:16:25.640 --> 0:16:29.920 Nazism was a story. It was a storytelling exercise, you know. 0:16:29.960 --> 0:16:32.440 It was telling a story about a great people, you know, 0:16:32.480 --> 0:16:34.760 who who had once been great and who were now 0:16:34.800 --> 0:16:38.840 being attacked by a conspiracy and parasitized by people who 0:16:38.840 --> 0:16:41.920 were unworthy, and that they would rise from this and 0:16:41.960 --> 0:16:44.200 become great once again. It was, in a way, it 0:16:44.240 --> 0:16:49.080 was kind of like a catastrophic reboot project of a culture. 0:16:49.240 --> 0:16:53.360 Yeah you know, um, yeah sou but also attempting to 0:16:53.400 --> 0:16:56.200 achieve what they this story, they this mythology they had 0:16:56.200 --> 0:16:59.560 about past greatness exactly. Yeah, But speaking of the Nazis, 0:16:59.560 --> 0:17:01.360 she also points out that we have to be careful 0:17:01.440 --> 0:17:04.919 not to demonize evil doers too much in our narrative 0:17:04.960 --> 0:17:08.880 understanding of past horrors in order to quote properly engage 0:17:08.880 --> 0:17:11.520 with the conditions that made the atrocities possible. Well, this 0:17:11.560 --> 0:17:13.879 is getting back to Alex Rosenberg, right, I mean like that, 0:17:14.160 --> 0:17:18.040 often thinking of history as a narrative and seeing you know, 0:17:18.240 --> 0:17:21.480 villains and heroes and stuff in history causes us to 0:17:21.600 --> 0:17:25.680 fail to appreciate some material conditions that brought brought about events. 0:17:26.200 --> 0:17:29.280 You know, when you think about history as stories of 0:17:29.400 --> 0:17:32.879 characters who succeed against all odds, all that and all that, 0:17:32.920 --> 0:17:34.760 and you and you get into that, you you engage 0:17:34.760 --> 0:17:36.479 in theory of mind and you think about what they 0:17:36.480 --> 0:17:39.080 were thinking. You stop thinking about what the price of 0:17:39.119 --> 0:17:41.760 bread was this week and how that influenced what was 0:17:41.800 --> 0:17:45.520 possible within a polity. Absolutely, and you know, with with 0:17:45.560 --> 0:17:48.520 the Nazis particularly, you know, it's interesting to look at 0:17:48.520 --> 0:17:51.760 your cinema, right and and certainly we have we have 0:17:51.800 --> 0:17:54.760 so many examples, even very entertaining examples of just like 0:17:54.880 --> 0:17:58.200 pure storybook Nazis, the rates of the Lost Ark is 0:17:58.240 --> 0:18:00.720 a great example of this, Like the Nazis are just 0:18:00.840 --> 0:18:04.679 straight up cardboard villains, and within the context of Raiders 0:18:04.760 --> 0:18:08.800 the Lost Art, it's arguably okay. But then how do 0:18:08.840 --> 0:18:12.160 you treat characters like this in other works, because you 0:18:12.160 --> 0:18:14.560 you know, to to her point here, you want to 0:18:14.600 --> 0:18:16.960 make sure that there is that human element there, that 0:18:17.000 --> 0:18:20.160 people are realizing that these are not demons, these are 0:18:20.320 --> 0:18:24.320 people and therefore their errors are our potential errors. Yes, 0:18:24.400 --> 0:18:26.680 I think that's very important to see them as people 0:18:26.800 --> 0:18:29.720 so you can realize, like this could happen again, other 0:18:29.760 --> 0:18:32.480 people could become like this, Right, So, like, say you 0:18:32.480 --> 0:18:35.440 look at a character, say like Joseph Mangela, and you 0:18:35.480 --> 0:18:39.240 want to be able to say he was not a monster. 0:18:39.720 --> 0:18:41.879 He you know, not an inhuman monster. He was a 0:18:41.960 --> 0:18:45.560 human who did monstrous things. And let's look at how 0:18:45.600 --> 0:18:48.159 that came to be. Um, you know, how as not 0:18:48.240 --> 0:18:50.680 to create more of them? Right? But then but then 0:18:50.720 --> 0:18:52.560 also I guess you do kind of run the risk 0:18:52.600 --> 0:18:56.159 of like making the characters like this to relate, Like 0:18:56.160 --> 0:18:58.880 you don't want to make them too sympathetic either, right, well, right, 0:18:58.880 --> 0:19:00.600 I mean you don't want to make it'm like, hey, 0:19:00.640 --> 0:19:02.560 you know, wouldn't be so bad to be like, you 0:19:02.600 --> 0:19:07.320 don't want to lose the object lessons the experience. So yeah, 0:19:07.440 --> 0:19:10.240 I think that's just one example of how how complicated 0:19:11.040 --> 0:19:15.480 choosing the form of narrative to place over history or individuals, 0:19:15.480 --> 0:19:18.040 how how problematic it can be, even with something that 0:19:18.200 --> 0:19:22.720 is relatively straightforward, by making sure that mass murderers and 0:19:22.880 --> 0:19:28.800 uh and you know, xenophobic individuals are are properly vilified, 0:19:29.200 --> 0:19:32.040 but vilified to the appropriate degree and in specifically the 0:19:32.040 --> 0:19:36.639 appropriate way. I mean, yes, uh yeah. Coming up with 0:19:36.760 --> 0:19:40.159 stories is it's a it's a task on which you 0:19:40.160 --> 0:19:43.199 have great responsibility on your shoulders, and people take it 0:19:43.240 --> 0:19:46.080 so lightly. I mean, you notice the almost it's almost 0:19:46.080 --> 0:19:49.120 like the level of responsibility goes exactly backwards. I tend 0:19:49.160 --> 0:19:51.600 to notice when people are talking about history in terms 0:19:51.600 --> 0:19:56.399 of uh, you know, minute fact matter about history, the 0:19:57.000 --> 0:19:59.080 you know, the weekly price of bread and a place 0:19:59.119 --> 0:20:01.960 throughout history, that they tend to exercise a lot more 0:20:02.119 --> 0:20:05.520 caution than people who are talking about history in a 0:20:05.520 --> 0:20:08.000 way that tells a narrative story. I mean, I guess 0:20:08.000 --> 0:20:10.480 you're always going to have people doing both, but it 0:20:10.560 --> 0:20:13.399 seems like the person who's putting together a narrative that 0:20:13.480 --> 0:20:16.480 reads like a story with characters. They should be exercising 0:20:16.520 --> 0:20:19.960 ten times as much caution as the person just collecting, 0:20:20.240 --> 0:20:24.200 you know, factual minutia about history. We've got it exactly backwards. 0:20:24.600 --> 0:20:30.240 The way people sling narratives about history is sometimes just breathtaking. Yeah. 0:20:30.760 --> 0:20:33.040 Like one example, not not not to discuss this film 0:20:33.040 --> 0:20:36.879 in too much detail, but uh, the the adaptation of 0:20:37.320 --> 0:20:40.640 three hundred Oh yeah, well, I mean I was thinking 0:20:40.680 --> 0:20:42.879 more about just like you know, the dude shooting his 0:20:42.920 --> 0:20:45.719 mouth off about what the Nazis were really about, you know. 0:20:45.800 --> 0:20:48.639 But but but what you're saying is correct to like 0:20:48.680 --> 0:20:50.480 that's a film that is I don't know, there's like 0:20:50.520 --> 0:20:53.560 three different ways of looking at it. I guess like 0:20:53.560 --> 0:20:56.440 like one is that like this is clearly a case 0:20:56.440 --> 0:21:02.040 where you took a you took an historical, uh military engagement, 0:21:02.640 --> 0:21:05.280 and then you just made one side like the opra 0:21:05.480 --> 0:21:08.720 ultra masculine heroes, and the other side you made into 0:21:08.800 --> 0:21:13.080 like actual mutated debas demons, and then and then said 0:21:13.119 --> 0:21:16.120 that they were the Persians, you know, an entire culture 0:21:16.160 --> 0:21:19.280 and entire people, and that there is a that that's 0:21:19.440 --> 0:21:23.600 inherently reckless to do that, and then it's I've seen 0:21:23.640 --> 0:21:26.520 it defended by saying, well, the whole story is as 0:21:26.640 --> 0:21:30.120 told by this individual, and therefore it's supposed to be 0:21:30.119 --> 0:21:35.000 because it's ultimately about the distortions of storytelling. I don't 0:21:35.000 --> 0:21:37.480 know to what extent that truly holds up. I mean, 0:21:37.520 --> 0:21:39.760 I can see the role for that kind of story 0:21:39.840 --> 0:21:42.720 that's told by an unreliable narrator, but I don't remember 0:21:42.760 --> 0:21:45.360 that really coming through. I don't think I don't remember 0:21:45.359 --> 0:21:49.359 that either. I remember at the time initially kind of 0:21:49.400 --> 0:21:52.040 like naively experiencing it. I think the same way that 0:21:52.080 --> 0:21:55.200 it was perhaps intended, like here's just a crazy story 0:21:55.200 --> 0:21:57.320