The Power of the Narrative

Way back in my flight instructor days, I often found myself frustrated in my search to find really effective methods to convey important overarching concepts during classroom lectures. Simple facts are easy: the regulation says this, the operating handbook says that. The laws of physics are constant. The hard part was always trying to push the “shoulds.” It's wise to use this procedure. It's prudent to avoid that shortcut. But sanity, maturity, responsibility, and good judgment are not things you can instruct people to have. You can't tell a person, “be a good pilot.” You can require them to memorize a rule, but you can't require them to be the kind of person who will choose to follow it when the moment comes. That's a matter of personality and attitude. Once solidified, those things resist all outside influences and become damn-near impossible to drastically change.

Saying, “always use your checklist,” “don’t take unnecessary chances,” and “don't let yourself become complacent or over-confident” is useless. Repeating it often is simply annoying. So I quickly abandoned that approach. Instead, I started to rely on storytelling. A story is a powerful tool.

The stories I used were accident reports, usually taken directly from the NTSB. I would give them copies and then we would go through them together in class, with me reading selected passages and pausing to offer my own remarks or ask questions to keep everyone engaged. The most effective reports were the ones that involved pilots just like them, doing a job just like the one they were training to do, flying the same type of airplane under the same kinds of circumstances. That gets your attention.

After sharing a story with them, I’d ask, “now what could this pilot have done to avoid this outcome?” And then suddenly my students are telling me things like, “he should have used his checklist,” “he shouldn’t have taken unnecessary chances,” and “he shouldn’t have let himself become complacent and over-confident.”

Likewise, you can't just tell people, “social justice is a good thing,” or “excessive economic inequality creates an unhealthy society,” or “vast concentrations of wealth are antithetical to democracy” or “every citizen ought to have access to adequate housing, education, employment, health care, clean air, and safe food and water,” or “treating everyone with respect and compassion is a good thing to do.” It's too big. It’s too abstract. It's also obnoxiously didactic. But you can reach people with stories.

Let me interrupt myself here to clarify that I am not talking about the most hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool racists, sexists, homophobes, islamophobes and so forth. There is no point trying to get through to those people. With rare and notable exceptions, they tend not to change. I'm talking about people who are basically kind and decent when you interact with them on a personal and individual level, but who somehow have absorbed and internalized repeated stereotypes and propaganda as truth with regard to “Other” people . . . “Them.”

These are the folks who are capable of being friendly and polite to a gay black woman they work with or meet at the store, yet don't think that she should be allowed to marry her committed life partner with whom she has been in a loving and devoted exclusive romantic relationship for years, and deny that African-Americans face prejudice and unfair treatment wherever they go. These are the folks who are capable of being perfectly civil to a Mexican migrant worker or Filipina housekeeper, but who vocally express the belief that all undocumented immigrants should be rounded up and forcefully deported, regardless of their circumstances. These are the folks who remain outwardly friendly to their cousin, whose future was salvaged by the fact that she was able to get an abortion at 16, but are emphatic that the procedure should be illegal.

The key to unlocking empathy and changing someone’s mind about a social issue is engaging with the stories of those “Other” people—to get to know “Them.” Aside from the worst of the bullies, megalomaniacs, opportunists, sadists, and narcissists who have their own deeply ingrained reasons for pushing an agenda that denies basic rights to others—they are thankfully a tiny minority—most Americans are good, decent people who want the world to be a better place for everybody. When they support policies promulgated by that first group, it’s mostly because they don’t actually know who “They” really are. All they know about “Them” is what they hear on AM talk radio, and they have no inclination to question it.

The burden, therefore, lies with the storytellers. Our challenge is to create tales that are appealing enough, accessible enough, and universal enough to draw someone in despite the fact that it’s about “Them.” Then it’s no longer about some monolithic, homogeneous, demonized bloc of people who deserve to be marginalized or even punished. Then it’s about one interesting and sympathetic character, a character the reader cares about. The power to tell a story is the power to humanize. It’s a slow, perhaps even multi-generational process, but every mind and heart changed, every life made better, is a victory to be proud of.



My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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