On Narrative Building
The best shortcuts in life are becoming increasingly dangerous
Human brains are amazing at creating shortcuts. It’s why we can drive a car without remembering the whole trip. It’s the reason great athletes and musicians continuously amaze the rest of us. It’s the reason we can act without thinking; without actively thinking, at least. When you walk, you don’t think about every step, unless there is an external factor making it more difficult or forcing you to be more careful (like carrying a baby down the stairs). These shortcuts are incredibly useful. They free up space in our brain for harder tasks. We only focus and remember when we get cut off on the highway and great athletes push the limit of what is possible with the human body.
On the flip side, these shortcuts can let us down. We fall down the stairs when we don’t see the grocery bag on them. We assume that we can scroll on our phone while we drive since we have taken this route a thousand times. We craft lies to justify actions and we craft narratives without a full grasp of the facts. These shortcuts that our brains create are the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of humans1. This essay will focus on narrative formation and the dangers of unchecked narratives.
How Narratives Spread
I sometimes struggle with the question of whether the narrative creator or the narrative repeater is more at fault. I have landed however, that the creators of narratives are more culpable than repeaters. I believe that the narrative repeater is far more dangerous, but they remain sympathetic to me. Before I go any further I should define these terms. They seem self explanatory, but it is a worthwhile exercise regardless:
Narrative Creator: Those that collect the data points from several sources and create a narrative out of them. The data may be factual or not and the narrative may follow the data or not. Regardless, these people are seen as the arbiters of Truth. See: academics, reporters, journalists, politicians, etc.
Narrative Repeater: Those that hear the narratives and uncritically repeat them to anyone that will listen. Other narratives, not data points, are collected to verify or disprove each other. Often times, these narratives contradict, but they are repeated selectively to prevent hypocritical statements. See: social media activists, news consumers, undergrad students, you and me, etc.
Now, I don’t necessarily think narratives are inherently bad. Narratives are just a tool to portray complex concepts. I think they are incredibly useful for people that have limited time to research topics. The problem comes when the narrative that is presented does not correlate with the data. That is why I hold the belief that the creators of narratives should be held to account for falsities. However, I do think that those who are most likely to repeat narratives loudly and proudly should face some scrutiny if they are wrong. But, the creator of said false narrative should be found and removed from the conversation, not the repeater. This is most pernicious when narratives that are based on false pretense or bad data stick around in the public psyche2.
There are many reason why a false narrative would be created. Some narratives are driven by ideology, some act as a counter to other prevailing narratives, and some are created honestly, but based on faulty data. This is not an exhaustive list. There are as many reasons a narrative exists as there are narratives. Many times the justification is provided post hoc. Regardless, these three themes are the most common I have seen over the past few years. To make my point more clearly, I will look at a few examples from the past decade to show how pervasive these narratives can be. I will state an omnipresent narrative and then list the context surrounding it. I will be attacking both political aisles, since this is definitely not limited to one.
Israel and Palestine
With the onset of the war between Israel and Hamas after the massacre on October 7th, the US, and the world, has been embroiled in competing narratives. These narratives come from several different angles from the supporters of both sides of this war. Let’s go through a couple of these:
Narrative: The Israelis are actively committing a genocide or ethnically cleansing in Gaza and every civilian killed should be considered a war crime.
While there are valid discussions that the actions by Israel in the West Bank could be interpreted as ethnic cleansing. I do not have the information to conclude whether that claim is true or not. However, in Gaza, it is clearly not the case.
This is a war that has devasted the lives of the citizens of Gaza, especially in Gaza City, but it is clear by the actions of the IDF that they do not intend to kill indiscriminately. Rather, they are actively attempting to root out Hamas groups that actively operate among civilians. Furthermore, by starting a war they knew they would not win and would only put civilians in danger, Hamas is more at fault for the deaths of civilians than Israel and should be held to account.
Narrative: Israel is reacting to aggression whenever it attacks surrounding nations or Palestinians and has throughout history.
While many of the wars throughout the past 75 years were the cause of Arab aggression and the current calls to free Palestine “from the river to the sea,” Israel is not a purely innocent actor in the region. The Revisionist Zionist wing in Israel, mainly in the Likud party, has gained a lot of power over the past few decades. They are active in their support for the West Bank Settlements and are not keen on accepting a two-state solution.
Stolen Elections
It feels as though every election is “the most important election in history.” That is clearly hyperbole, but the efforts to overturn or cast doubt on elections is a growing problem and the last two have escalated those attempts. Let’s look at the narratives that have surrounded the 2016 and 2020 elections:
Narrative: The 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump and fraudulently handed to Joe Biden via massive voter fraud.
There has been no evidence of massive voter fraud perpetrated during the 2020 election. It is more likely the insistence that voting-by-mail was bad by Trump lowered his own vote totals. Joe Biden is the president of the United States.
The January 6th riot at the Capitol was an attempt to reject the certification process of the election, but there was never risk of a coup. Donald Trump may or may not have been culpable for this riot. The riots throughout 2020, including at the White House, and the many heated protests at the Capitol by left-wing activists throughout the past few years may have been a secondary impetus for this riot.
The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and systematic softening of Biden election coverage by left-leaning media gave a strong advantage towards Biden. Adjusted voter rolls and mail-in-ballot measures were not properly vetted prior to the election. Trump ran a bad campaign himself and was unable to overcome Biden, despite his lack of campaign events.
Narrative: The 2016 Presidential election was manipulated and stolen from Hillary Clinton in favor of Donald Trump by way of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.
There is no evidence that any collusion occurred in 2015 or 2016 to allow Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. In fact, major motivation for the investigation of these claims came from a fabricated dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign. The same dossier that was used partly as evidence to wiretap one of Trump’s campaign advisors.
Hillary Clinton, like Trump in 2020, did not run a good campaign and ignored several states for months at a time. She was unlikeable and treated the election more as a coronation. Trump also received billions in unearned media and was the election was assumed to be a gimme to Clinton. History proved that that was an act of poor judgement.
COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic, a once-a-century (hopefully) event, led to massive amounts of information to be passed via social media. Much of this information came from official sources and was passed without any scrutiny. The problem is, while random people online provided bad information, the official sources did the same. So the following narratives grew out of this instant deference to experts.
Narrative: Masking and lockdowns had an outsized impact on the death rate of COVID-19 in the United States.
Mask mandates have proven to not lower deaths or transmission of COVID-19 and did not have a strong effect at all. Furthermore, the masks most often used, cloth masks, did not provide much protection from transmission.
Lockdowns, similarly, did not have any major effect on the transmission or death rate of COVID. They did have a negative effect on education and mental health. The cure seemed to be worse than the disease.
The only effective treatment seems to have been the vaccine. However, the problem remains that the efficacy that was advertised did not turn out to be true.
Narrative: The COVID-19 virus originated from natural origins in China, likely passed via a wet market in Wuhan.
It is not entirely conclusive that SARS-CoV-2 accidentally escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), though reports by some government agencies have concluded that is did. This year, the US government suspended funding for this lab due to lax safety protocols.
The basis, largely, for the natural origins hypothesis came via pressure from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the director of the NIH, Francis Collins, among others. Fauci and Collins were both involved in funding research of bat coronaviruses at the WIV via the NIH and NIAID.
Captured by Narratives
If you asked any random person on the street if he or she believed any of these narratives, it is likely at least one of them would be taken as fact. There is no doubt that I believe narratives that do not have the facts to back them up. That is a simple fact of life. I do my best to counteract the narratives that I know I repeat, but it is incredibly difficult to overcome the mental stimulation of echo chambers. Reading books and articles that challenge a narrative can be exhausting and time-consuming, but it is generally worth doing. However, I do not fault those that do not have time to challenge everything that they see on TV or social media. I become less sympathetic to their plight when they repeat the narratives ad nauseum. Narratives can be specious, so it is best to be careful in what you repeat.
I laid out above several official narratives that have been repeated for years. People that attack these narratives are seen as crackpots, even if they are experts in the field. Going against the media zeitgeist is akin to death to those that believe these narratives. The experts and most mainstream sources have lost a lot of the general public’s trust, for good reason. Many of these people and organizations lied often and continuously, despite the evidence to the contrary being widely available.
However, official narratives are not automatically wrong. Some are completely factual. The tendency of pure skepticism of official sources that has grown during the past decade, accelerating during the pandemic, can be just as damaging as narrative repetition. Instantly dismissing mainstream sources can quickly lead to the same problem from a different source. Assuming all official sources have a clear agenda that is shaping narratives is just as fallacious as believing them outright. The data presented by any source needs to be compared with all other data collected to challenge or affirm narratives.
Both sides of this trends towards thought ending cliches. It is what leads to both the “In this house we believe…” signs and “from the river to the sea” being chanted on one side and the election conspiracies and government cabals on the other. In a rapidly polarizing landscape in America, I feel that it is of grave importance to challenge the narratives you believe just as rigorously as those you don’t. Be skeptical, but stop yourself from being cynical. What will bring us back from the brink is a shared understanding of the facts, not the endless competition of narrative building.
There is a lot of scientific study in these shortcuts. From Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky discussing cognitive biases to Kim J. Vicente and Jens Rasmussen discussing cognitive engineering. Trying to emulate how humans think is one of the sources of the AI craze, as well.
