The Science of Storytelling

by Will Storr

  Lear’s commitment to his flawed models is such that when the newly powerful Regan and Goneril begin conspiring to take everything from him, he struggles to perceive what’s happening. As the predictions his models are making about the world increasingly fail, he reacts with denial, either in the form of ape-like rage or simple disbelief. When he discovers Goneril and her husband have put his messenger in the stocks, the insult is literally unbelievable to him. He’s left sputtering and aghast. ‘No, no, they would not … By Jupiter, I swear, no … They could not, would not do ’t. ’Tis worse than murder to do upon respect such violent outrage.’ When Goneril’s assistant refers to him not as his ‘King’ but ‘my Lady’s father’ he’s overcome with fury – ‘You whoreson dog! You slave! You cur!’ – and physically attacks him.

  When the reality of the external world finally becomes undeniable, Lear’s internal model of it cracks apart. His entire self collapses. His theory of control had it that, to successfully manipulate his environment, all he had to do was issue orders. And this wasn’t just a silly idea he could cast off when he realised it was false. It formed the very structure of his perception. It was the world he experienced as real. He saw evidence for its truth everywhere, and rubbished and denied any counter-knowledge, because that’s exactly what brains do. It’s from this sophisticated psychological understanding that the play gets its truth and drama. We can’t simply toss aside our flawed ideas as if they’re a pair of badly fitting trousers. It takes overwhelming evidence to convince us that ‘reality’ is wrong. When we finally realise something’s up, breaking these beliefs apart means breaking ourselves apart. And that’s precisely what happens in many of our most successful stories.

  When Lear does break down, halfway through the play, it feels as if the entire planet’s imploding. In an apocalyptic storm, he rages at skies, like a bleeding chimp brutally deposed by a conspiracy of younger animals. ‘Here I stand, your slave, a poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man … I’ll not weep. I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws.’ He’s reduced to the position of beggar, this embodiment of the corrupt leader whose mistake was to forget that status, in human groups, should be earned.

  Shakespeare knew well the psychological torments that can be unleashed by such a loss of status. In its most dangerous form, this is experienced as humiliation. In Julius Caesar, Cassius is at the heart of a conspiracy to kill the Roman leader who was once a friend. His hatred stems from an incident in childhood during which, on a dare, Cassius and Caesar tried to swim across the Tiber. But on this ‘raw and gusty’ day, Caesar failed. He was reduced to begging Cassius to save his life. His heroic act of costly signalling made, for Cassius, a model of the world in which he was forever superior in status to Caesar. But now they’re grown up and that desperate, soggy boy has ‘become a God, and Cassius is a wretched creature, and must bend his body if Caesar carelessly but nod on him’. The rage that this unfair de-grading causes in Cassius is murderous.

  Psychologists define humiliation as the removal of any ability to claim status. Severe humiliation has been described as ‘an annihilation of the self’. It’s thought to be a uniquely toxic state and is implicated in some of worst behaviours the human animal engages in, from serial murder to honour killings to genocide. In story, an experience of humiliation is often the origin of the antagonist’s dark behaviour, whether it be murderous Cassius or Gone Girl’s scheming Amy Elliot Dunne, who could ‘hear the tale, how everyone would love telling it’ about how ‘Amazing Amy’ had been reduced to the level of those ‘women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity’ and about whom people think ‘poor dumb bitch’.

  Because humiliation is such an apocalyptic punishment, watching villains being punished this way can feel rapturous. As we’re a tribal people with tribal brains, it doesn’t count as humiliation unless other members of the tribe are aware of it. As Professor William Flesch writes, ‘We may hate the villain, but our hatred is meaningless. We want him unmasked to people in his world.’

  3.9

  Babylon, 587 BC. A group of 4,000 high-status men and women were forced out of Jerusalem by King Nebuchadnezzar II. These Judeans journeyed long, and suffered, before finally finding a place to rest in the ancient city of Nippur. But they never forgot their beloved home. In exile, the Judeans determined to keep alive the customs of their people: their moral laws, their rituals, their language, their ways of living, eating and being. In order to do this it was essential that they preserved their stories.

  Because most of these stories only existed orally, Judean scribes began writing them down on a series of scrolls. As they did, something remarkable happened. The ragbag of ancient myths and fables became connected. The scribes turned them into one complete cause-and-effect-laden tale. It began with the creation of the world and the first humans, Adam and Eve, and continued to include their occupation of Jerusalem.

  The story had an astonishingly galvanising effect on this tribe of exiles. It acted as all tribal stories do, helping them function as a cooperative unit. As a list of prescribed behaviours, it enabled members to differentiate themselves from members of outside groups which created a psychological boundary between them and the ‘other’. This same list of behaviours acted as a regulatory check-list against which they could police each other and therefore keep the tribe functional. But it also did much more. The story provided them with a heroic narrative of the world in which they were god’s chosen people whose rightful homeland was Jerusalem. It filled the exiles with a sense of meaning, righteousness and destiny.

  Seventy-one years after their banishment, the Judeans finally had the opportunity to return to their ancestral homelands. Led by a scribe named Ezra, they began their epic journey back to the glorious city they’d heard about only in stories. But when they finally arrived, they were horrified. The descendants of their low-status ancestors, who’d escaped the deportations, were rude, slovenly and interbreeding with other tribes. They weren’t adhering to tribal laws about purity, food, worship or the Sabbath. Jerusalem itself was a crumbling mess.

  For Ezra, such tribal decay was a catastrophe. He went to the temple, where it was believed their group’s god Yahweh resided, and collapsed on the ground, wailing his despair and rage and betrayal. A crowd gathered. Ezra turned on them. They’d gravely offended Yahweh. They didn’t deny it. But what could be done? He knew he had to somehow draw his people back together; to run into them the same tribal electricity that had held the exiles shoulder to shoulder, back in Babylon. There was only one way to do it: by unleashing the incredible power of their origin story.

  Ezra had a wooden stage erected in a public place and sent out word something important was going to happen. A crowd formed. Ezra, flanked by twelve assistants, theatrically presented the scrolls on which their grand tribal narrative had been written. ‘They immediately bowed their heads to the ground, as they would bow in the presence of their god, or their god’s representative, in the temple,’ writes Professor of English Martin Puchner. Something new was happening; something that would change the world forever. These scrolls, and the stories they contained, were being treated as if they themselves were sacred. And so a religion was born. ‘Ezra’s reading created Judaism as we know it.’

  This might have been the first time a written story was treated as sacred, but human tribes have been bound together by such stories for tens of thousands of years. In our hunter-gatherer pasts much of our storytelling would’ve taken place around the campfire under the stars. Outrage and status-drenched tales of hunts and tribal exploits would’ve been told and retold, becoming ever-more magical and strange, eventually taking the form of sacred myth. Such stories would describe the nature of heroic behaviour. Certain characters would be celebrated, and gain status, for acting in ways the tribe approved of. Villainous or cowardly behaviour would trigger moral outrage – an urgent desire to see transgressors punished that would be satisfied in uproariously happy endings. In thi
s way, stories transmitted the values of the tribe. They told listeners exactly how they ought to behave if they wanted to get along and get ahead in that particular group. There’s a sense in which these stories would become the tribe. They’d represent what it stood for in ways purer and clearer than could any flawed human.

  Stories are tribal propaganda. They control their group, manipulating its members into behaving in ways that benefit it. And it works. A recent study of eighteen hunter-gatherer tribes found almost eighty per cent of their stories contained lessons in how they should behave in their dealings with other people. The groups with the greater proportion of storytellers showed the most pro-social behaviour.

  Because one of our deepest and most powerful urges is the gaining of ever more status, our tribal stories tell us how to earn it. A human tribe can be viewed as a status game that all its members are playing, its rules being recorded in its stories. Every human group that has a shared purpose is held together by such stories. A nation has a story it tells about itself, in which its values are encoded, as does a corporation and a religion and a mafia organisation and a political ideology and a cult. The Bible, The Qur’an and the Torah that Ezra presented to his people in Jerusalem are ready-made theories of control that are internalised by their followers, instructing them how to behave in order to achieve connection and status.

  Some of our oldest recorded stories transmit such rules. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which pre-dates Ezra’s story by more than a thousand years and even lends it its episode about a worldwide flood, tells of a King who, like Shakespeare’s Lear, has forgotten that status should be earned. In its first section, the gods send down a challenger, Enkidu, to humble him. King Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends. Together they bravely take on the monster of the forest, Humbaba, using superhuman effort to slay him before triumphantly returning with valuable wood to continue building Gilgamesh’s great city. By the end of the saga, Enkidu has died, but King Gilgamesh is fully humbled, accepting his lot as just another mortal human. We think more of him and thereby reward him with a bump in status.

  That 4,000-year-old epic provides the same tribal function as Mr Nosey. In Roger Hargeaves’s children’s book, the protagonist’s flawed model of the world tells him he’ll only be safe if he sticks his long nose into other people’s business. But the villagers plot against him, first daubing paint on his prying nose, then banging it with a hammer. Finally humbled, Nosey mends his ways, ‘and soon became friends with everybody in Tiddletown’. For shedding his anti-social habits, Nosey is rewarded with connection and status.

  All of us are being silently controlled by any number of instructional stories at once. A unique quality of humans is that we’ve evolved the ability to think our way into many tribes simultaneously. ‘We all belong to multiple in-groups,’ writes Professor Leonard Mlodinow. ‘As a result our self-identification shifts from situation to situation. At different times the same person might think of herself as a woman, an executive, a Disney employee, a Brazilian or a mother, depending on which is relevant – or which makes her feel good at the time.’

  These groups, and their stories of how to behave and gain connection and status, form part of our identity. It’s mostly during adolescence, that period in which we’re composing our ‘grand narrative of self’, that we decide which ‘peer groups’ to join. We seek out people who have similar mental models to us – who have comparable personalities and interests and perceive the world in ways we recognise. Late adolescence sees many choosing a political ideology, left or right – a tribal master-story that fits over our unconscious landscape of feelings and instincts and half-formed suspicions and makes sense of it, suddenly infusing us with a sense of clarity, mission, righteousness and relief. When this happens it can feel as if we’ve encountered revealed truth and our eyes have suddenly been opened. In fact, the opposite has happened. Tribal stories blind us. They allow us to see only half the truth, at best.

  The psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt has explored the stories that competing ideological tribes tell about the world. Take capitalism. For the left, it’s exploitative. The Industrial Revolution gave evil capitalists the technology to use and abuse workers as dumb machine-parts in their factories and mines and reap all the profits. The workers fought back, unionising and electing more enlightened politicians and then, in the 1980s, the capitalists became resurgent, heralding an era of ever-increasing inequality and eco-disaster. For the right, capitalism is liberation. It freed the used and abused workers from exploitation by kings and tyrants and gave them property rights, the rule of law and free markets, motivating them to work and create. And yet this great freedom is under constant attack from leftists who resent the idea that the most productive individuals are properly rewarded for their hard work. They want everyone to be ‘equal and equally poor’.

  What’s insidious about these stories is that they each tell only a partial truth. Capitalism is liberating and it’s also exploitative. Like any complex system it has a trade-off of effects, some good, others bad. But thinking with tribal stories means shutting out such morally unsatisfying complexity. Our storytelling brains transform reality’s chaos into a simple narrative of cause and effect that reassures us that our biased models, and the instincts and emotions they generate, are virtuous and right. And this means casting the opposing tribe into the role of villain.

  The evil truth about humans is that we don’t just compete for status with other people inside our tribes. The tribes we belong to also compete with rival tribes. We’re not harmlessly groupish like starlings or sheep or shoals of mackerel, but violently so. In the twentieth century alone, tribal conflict killed 160 million, whether by genocide, political oppression or war.

  We have this in common with the chimpanzee whose males, sometimes accompanied by females, patrol the boundaries of their territory, halting in silence for as long as an hour to listen for enemy movements. When caught, a ‘foreign’ chimp is savagely beaten to death: arms twisted off, throat torn out and fingernails plucked, genitals ripped off, the warriors gulping down the gushing blood. When all the males of a neighbouring troop are killed or chased out, the victorious chimps take over their territory and the females still in it. The primatologist Professor Frans de Waal writes that ‘it cannot be coincidental that the only animals in which gangs of males expand their territory by deliberately exterminating neighbouring males happen to be humans and chimpanzees. What is the chance of such tendencies evolving independently in two closely related mammals?’

  We still have this primitive cognition. We think in tribal stories. It’s our original sin. Whenever we sense the status of our tribe is threatened by another, these foul networks fire up. In that moment, to the subconscious brain, we’re back in the prehistoric forest or savannah. The storytelling brain enters a state of war. It assigns the opposing group purely selfish motives. It hears their most powerful arguments in a particular mode of spiteful lawyerliness, seeking to misrepresent or discard what they have to say. It uses the most appalling transgressions of their very worst members as a brush to smear them all. It takes its individuals and erases their depth and diversity. It turns them into outlines; morphs their tribe into a herd of silhouettes. It denies those silhouettes the empathy, humanity and patient understanding that it lavishes on its own. And, when it does all this, it makes us feel great, as if we’re the moral hero of an exhilarating story.

  The brain enters this war state because a psychological tribal threat is a threat to its theory of control – its intricate network of millions of beliefs about how one thing causes another. Its theory of control tells it, among many other things, how to get what it most desires, namely connection and status. It forms the scaffolding of the model of the world and self it has been building since birth.

  Of course this model, and its theory of control, is indivisible from who we are. It’s what we’re experiencing, in the black vault of our skulls, as reality itself. It’s hardly surprising we’ll fight to defend it. Because different t
ribes live by different models of control – communists and capitalists, to take a broad example, award their prizes of status and connection for very different behaviours – a tribal challenge is existentially disturbing. It’s not merely a threat to our surface beliefs about this and that, but to the very subconscious structures by which we experience reality.

  It’s also a threat to the status game to which we’ve invested the efforts of our lives. To our subconscious, if another tribe is allowed to win, their victory won’t merely pull us down the hierarchy but will destroy the hierarchy completely. Our loss in status will be complete and irreversible. This removal of the ability to claim status meets the psychologist’s definition of humiliation, that ‘annihilation of the self’ which underlies a saturnine suite of murderous behaviours, from spree shootings to honour killings. When a group’s collective status feels threatened and they fear even the possibility of humiliation by another group, the result can be massacre, crusade and genocide. Such dynamics have played out relatively recently in places such as Rwanda, the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Myanmar, the southern states of America and, of course, Ezra’s precious Jerusalem.

  In such times, tribes deploy the explosive power of story, with all its moral outrage and status play, in order to galvanise and motivate their members against the enemy. In 1915, the film The Birth of a Nation presented African Americans as unintelligent brutes who sexually bullied white women. The three-hour-long story played to sold-out crowds and recruited thousands to the Ku Klux Klan. In 1940, one year before the release of Citizen Kane, the film Jew Süss portrayed Ezra’s descendants as corrupt and showed a high-status Jewish banker, Süss Oppenheimer, raping a blonde German woman, before being hanged in front of grateful crowds in an iron cage. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival, winning the Golden Lion Award, was seen by twenty million and caused viewers to pour en masse into the streets of Berlin chanting, ‘Throw the last of the Jews out of Germany.’ That sexual violence against females appeared in both films and is a territorial dominance behaviour of chimpanzees is surely no coincidence.