The Story Within

I'm writing this from a food court of a mall. It's relatively quiet at this hour before the dinner-time crowd comes. I've already had a light vegetarian dinner and now I'm ready to tackle my blog article of the weekend. Let's see what the subject shall be...

I don't like to write about the local political scene because I think a lot of things are pretty obvious to me. Most people like to think that politics is a battle between a good side and an evil one. We bash politicians for the stupid things they say. We like to say so-and-so is useless, and so-and-so is so obviously corrupt. There could some truth in all these speculations. It is good fun, talking about politics, bashing the government of the day for their ineptitude. We also love conspiracy theories because the human mind is wired for dramatic stories. We process stories better, finding raw facts dull and uninteresting.

Which leads me to the topic that I want to write about, which I've alluded to in a previous article about myth. I made the claim that myths are more powerful than facts, because they tend to stick in the mind. The juicier a story is, the less likely your are able to forget it. Not only do you remember its details well, you even embellish them to make them more exciting.

Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (3 very entertaining and thought-provoking books) also highlighted the power of myths. To quote him in one of his books:

Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. Ever since the stone age, self-reinforcing myths have served to unite human collectives. Indeed, Homo sapiens conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws, and can thereby cooperate effectively.

Which is why 'fake news' is such big news these days. We get a lot of fake news because we 'deserve' them. We like to forward 'informative' stories to friends mostly because we want attention. We want to be the teller of an interesting tale, the life of the party. Such is the nature of human beings. Fake news is the equivalent of junk food in the culinary world. Junk food exists because we love to taste sugar, sodium and fat and so food manufacturers engineered 'food' in such a way that they are so conveniently available and so easy to consume that we get addicted to them.

We deserve the fake news, junk food and stupid politicians that govern us because they are merely a reflection of us as a society. Maybe our stories have become stale; we need leaders who are better story tellers. Perhaps a Stalin or a Hitler or an Ayatollah Khomeini? These people brought change because they had more interesting stories to capture everyone's imagination. If we do not overcome gullibility and continue falling for the more interesting story, we can't blame anyone else for our predicament.

Which is why I extolled the beauty of boredom. It is OK, if life is a bit 'boring' sometimes. We don't need to titillate our senses and attract everyone's attention by forwarding yet another unsubstantiated story to our favourite Whatsapp groups. Observe the story of you yourself--all that chatter that goes on in your head. Isn't it interesting why the mind is so restless? Unravel the mystery of this constantly running story. The outer stories that dominate the headlines--they are no different from the one that keeps on repeating in your head, and everybody else's head.