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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Will Storr
Read between
January 17 - January 23, 2023
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 th...
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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.
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 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
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.
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.
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, where it won plaudits, 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 chimp...
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Many deploy a third incendiary group emotion: disgust.
Tribal propaganda exploits these processes by representing enemies as disease-carrying pests such as cockroaches, rats or lice. In Jew Süss, the Jewish people are portrayed as filthy and unhygienic and are shown teeming into a city as a plague. Even popular conventional stories exploit the power of disgust. Villains from Harry Potter’s
Lord Voldemort to Beowulf’s
Grendel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface have disfigurements that fire these neural networks. In The Twits, Roald Dahl created a typically marvellous confabulation of the disgust principle: ‘If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, ...
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It’s in these ways that story both exposes and enables the worst traits of our species. We willingly allow highly simplistic narratives to deceive us, gleefully accepting as truth any tale that casts us as the moral hero and the other as the two-dimensional villain. We can tell when we’re under its power. When all the good is on our side and all the bad on theirs, our ...
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so simple. Such stories are seductive because our hero-making cognition is determined to convince us of our moral worth. They justify our primitive tribal impulses and seduce us int...
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The question for the child is not, “Do I want to be good?” but “Who do I want to be like?”’ But if Bettelheim is correct, how do we explain antiheroes?
When Humbert finally gets his hands on Lolita, he’s randy but also conflicted, hesitant and guilty. We crucially discover she’s no longer a virgin, having already slept with a boy at summer camp. She’s presented, at least by our unreliable narrator, as unsympathetic – pushy, confident, manipulative and precocious – and because this is the behaviour we’re shown, it’s what we’ll subconsciously and emotionally respond to. Lolita comes to dominate Humbert before deciding to run off with a far more despicable man, Clare Quilty.
Similar manipulations take place on behalf of other antiheroes, not least the protagonist of the television series The Sopranos.
The author Patricia Highsmith indulges in similar manipulations. In Ripley’s Game, the sociopathic con artist Tom Ripley is handsome, eloquent and cultured, just like Humbert. And, like Humbert and Soprano, he’s in conflict with a much more evil villain, Reeves Minot.
There’s a sense in which all protagonists are antiheroes. Most, when we meet them, are flawed and partial and only become truly heroic if and when they manage to change. Any attempt to find a single reason why we find characters root worthy is probably destined to fail. There isn’t one secret to creating empathy but
many. The key lies in the neural networks. Stories work on multiple evolved systems in the brain and a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra, a little trill of moral outrage here, a fanfare of status play over there, a tintinnabulation of tribal identification, a rumble of threatening antagonism, a tantara of wit, a parp of sexual allure, a crescendo of unfair trouble, a warping and wefting hum as the dramatic question is posed and reposed in new and interesting ways – all instruments by which masses of brains can be captivated and manipulated.
Story is a form of play that we domesticated animals use to learn how to control the social world. Archetypal stories about antiheroes often end in their being killed or otherwise humiliated, thus serving their purpose as tribal propaganda.
the awkward fact remains that, as we experience the story unfolding in our minds, we seem to enjoy ‘playing’ the antihero. I wonder if this is because,
Keeping the secret of ourselves from ourselves can be exhausting. This, perhaps, is the subversive truth of stories about antiheroes.
Being freed to
evil, if only in our minds, can be such a...
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Sometime around the year 1600, the art of storytelling changed forever. Nobody knows how he came upon the idea, but William Shakespeare began experimenting with breaking the rules of how the dramatic question had previously been handled. The Professor of humanities Stephen Greenblatt writes that his true leap
into genius took place when he made the ‘crucial breakthrough’ of removing one particular class of character information.
play, Hamlet’s ‘madness’ had been tactical and fake, a ruse to buy time and foster the appearance of harm lessness. But in Shakespeare’s version, his suicidal madness is actually real and, writes Greenblatt, ‘nothing to do with the ghost’ that informed him of his father’s murder. Shakespeare continued his experiment with ‘radical excision’ of such character information in the thrilling sequence of plays written between 1603 and 1606, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Why did Othello’s Iago so desperately want to kill his general? Shakespeare obscured and hinted at Iago’s motivations, which were
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Cordelia was expected to claim she loved her father more than her sisters, to which the King would respond, ‘So prove it. Marry who I tell you.’ In Shakespeare’s version, the cause of Lear’s dysfunctional decision is removed. This experimentation in denying neat explanations, writes Greenblatt, resulted in plays that were ‘immeasurably deeper’ than what had gone before.
In making the answer to the dramatic question more mysterious, Shakespeare accessed our infinite wells of curiosity about other people and their oddness, generating a wonderful and enduring obsession with his characters and plays. He also gave us space to insert
ourselves into his stories: we wonder, would I ever do such a thing? What could make me?
Literary storytelling is often dominated not by surface action as much as by the laying out of extensive clues as to why the characters behave as they do. Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach tells of a young couple’s catastrophic honeymoon.
Much of the joy of literary works such as On Chesil Beach is in being raised into a state of tantalised curiosity about the causes and effects of who people are. They’re detective stories, with the reader as sleuth. If their authors explained their characters’ behaviour precisely, the fire of curiosity would risk being extinguished. Moreover, the reader would be left without an active role in the story, and with no
place in which to insert their own interpretations.
If origin damage in story most often occurs in youth, it’s because it’s in the first two decades of life that we’re busy forming ourselves out of our experiences. It’s when our models of reality are being built. (If you want to imagine how bizarre and berserk a person with unbuilt neural models of reality would be like, just imagine
four-year-old.) (Or a fourteen-year-old.) As adults, the hallucination we experience as truth is built out of our pasts. We see and feel and explain the world partly with our damage.
Researchers asked people to watch videos of scenes that were busy with social interactions, such as film of a school corridor. They then tracked their saccades so they could see which elements the participants’ brains were attending to. Those with ‘past histories of
social success’ spent most of their time on people being friendly – smiling, chatting, nodding. But those who’d had high-school experiences of loneliness and social isolation ‘scarcely looked at the positive scenes at all’, writes Prinstein. Instead they spent around eighty per cent of their time looking at people being unfriendly and bullying. ‘It was as if they had watched a completely different movie.’
What we see in our human environments is a product of our
pasts – and, all too often, a product of our own particular damage.
If it spins cause-and-effect tales of violence and threat and prejudice about actually harmless events, that’s what we’ll experience.
they will ultimately have to grapple with antagonistic minds,
is there actually a chance we’re wrong? If this deep, identity-forming belief turns out to be wrong, then who the hell are we? The dramatic question has been triggered. The story has begun.
Are we brave enough to change? This is the question a plot, and a life, asks of each
Humans are directed towards goals.
