Story Mistelling

Beloved vlogbrother, Hank Green, has made or otherwise alluded to the point in a few videos^[1] over the last couple years that sometimes the story is more interesting that the truth.

Compounding this as an actual issue is that some people value the story—or the value of the story as a political tool, say—more than they value the truth.

In other words: some people lie and invent stories to serve their own ends. Uh, no kidding, huh?

I have written about storytelling on this site a disproportionate amount. I am planning on typing the word “storytelling” at least a few hundred more times before I stop posting here.

So, it makes me wonder: have we reached a pivotal point in history where the art of telling stories is intertwined too dramatically and damningly to think of it anything other than as the dark side of the equation: is storytelling a tool for manipulation, lies, and propaganda?

Well, yeah. Obviously.

Though I don’t think Green’s point was meant to be taken as a call to abandon the ship of human tales and interesting fiction.  Instead, it was a call to vigilance.

After all, I could theoretically bop someone on a head with the hammer and thus use it for dark deeds. I could also fix my fence with the same tool. The former use case does not mean we need to ban hammers. It means that we should teach ourselves and our children to be wary of people who bring hammers into places where hammers are not meant to be.

In the same way we should teach ourselves and our children to be wary of fiction and stories implanted into places where they are not meant to be: politics, science, medicine, and more.

Keep telling stories, of course.