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“The statue was erected in the village square. It was done under the cover of darkness and the sculptor remained as mysterious as the subject.
The villagers spoke among themselves and speculated. What did it mean? Who had created it? It could have come from anyone, but who was less important. Wondering what became a pastime. Before long the statue and the stories became part of their way of life.
One day a scream tore through the town. The statue was gone without a clue as to how or why it had disappeared. All that was left were the stories.“
One often underlooked art in communicating concepts, ideas and information is storytelling. It is one of the earliest forms of cultural, knowledge and information exchange. Through storytelling, we developed myths, legends, we socialized and passed down knowledge. In fact, Storytelling is the fundamental principle in which our entire religious beliefs are built on. It is impossible to talk about the evolution of culture without discussing storytelling. Whenever humans hear or read stories, it evokes some primal instinct in them that reminds them of their ancestral primitive past. Stories capture our imaginations. And for the most part, have helped us preserve historical records.
As Zipes Jack noted in the book, The irresistible Fairy Tale: “Stories may not actually breathe, but they can animate”. Stories animate human life; that is their work. Stories work with people, for people, and always stories work on people, affecting what people are able to see as real, as possible, and as worth doing or best avoided (Arthur Frank, 2010). For a long time, before we started to study the world around us, we tried to understand ourselves and our world through storytelling. Hence it remains one of the most effective means of communication, an ability that has given us a superior edge compared to our primate relatives.
In my opinion, there is a reason why misinformation spreads more than factual information. It’s because misinformation capitalizes on previously held biases, factual information, on the other hand, is most times, boring and plagued with too much detailed information, with too much detail than is actually necessary. Generally, people are impressed by how much information you know but are inspired by your narration and relatability of the information.
In the wake of the 5G conspiracy, conspiracy theorists employed storytelling to spread misinformation, most times appealing to previously held religious biases and consumer anxiety, employing tales of doom and apocalypse that is found in the major religious texts. I watched in awe as people tried to counter conspiracy theorists with facts, talking about microwave spectrums, radiofrequency radiation, ionizing and non-ionizing radio waves. Even as someone with an engineering background, such terms remind me of my not exactly pleasant science classes and find them boring. Imagine the average Joe who probably hasn’t sat down in a science class his whole life.
Humans evolved all kinds of folklore and fairy tales with heroes and villains, knights in shining armour and damsel in distress and this has been shared repeatedly. For most people, they will live a flatline and not eventful life, there is a constant need to live the eventful and heroic life we have come to know and enjoy, hence any narrative that puts us in that light is embraced. We also empathised with other people who have had experiences similar to ours, humans by nature are emotional beings. The ones that obsess with power and success understand this and have used it as a tool of power and control.
In 2010, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan won the sympathy of Nigerians without any real manifesto. He told them “I had no shoes, if I can make it, you can make it” That was almost the entirety of his campaign. In the 2016 America election, Donald Trump based his entire campaign on the motto “Make America Great Again”. He Created a scenario where immigrants were the Enemy and Americans were the heroes, I watched some of his debates against his most prominent opponent, while she tried to explain her policies, Donald Trump reduced them to simple concepts that were easily comprehensive to the average Americans, “You want to kill babes!”, “We need the wall”, “bring back our jobs”. There are 2 concepts DT employed, He used the hero-villain narrative at every point in the election campaign period, He also always used simplicity when describing his manifesto, His opponent, on the other hand, was too detailed, too much experience might be a disadvantage in communicating ideas some times. In the 1940s, millions of Germans looked on as Adolf Hitler ended the lives of so many innocent jews. With his amazing talent for rhetoric and his crafty use of propaganda, Hitler was able to convince people that the Jews were responsible for their economic retrogression and their loss in the first world war. He waged war on the enemy, a classic case of hero vs villain.
Businesses almost always employ this classic fairytale theme to win the hearts of consumers. It’s always common to see company founders sold as people coming from humble backgrounds, the popular underdog story, or popular companies selling the hero vs villain narrative against their competition.
In 2003, a Stanford dropout named Elizabeth Holmes, great-great-granddaughter to Charles Fleischmann, founded a startup called Theranos, it was building a blood analyser technology that could run thousands of tests just from a single prick of blood, from the comfort of your home. The company earned over $600 million in funding and was valued at $9 billion. Theranos achieved all this feat without exactly having the product they advertised, investors were completely swayed with the underdog story who was going to take on the big Pharma, a 19-year-old knight in shining armour who was going to slay the Big Pharma dragon, Elizabeth Holmes, armed with persuasive skills sold her story with amazing efficiency, everyone wanted a piece in the big pie and no one wanted to be left behind. There were three plots at play here, Charles Fleischmann had built a yeast empire and amassed so much wealth, but the wealth had vanished with successive generations, Elizabeth was seen as the person to restore the empire; The popular Silicon valley college dropout folklore; And an underdog who was fighting the Big Pharma like Steve Jobs had taken on IBM decades before. In her talks, she would tell tales that evoked emotional responses. Unfortunately, in this tale, the Knight was consumed in one big swallow. In 2017, allegations of fraud, lying to investors, lying about financial projections and many more allegations started the decline of Theranos, the company went from 9 billion to zero in a whim.
Storytelling can be used to evoke human emotional responses, this can be used to inform, control, persuade and manipulate, like everything in the possession of man, it can be used for social good or to wreak havoc, as long as humans exist, we will have people armed with the skill to evoke both.
References
- ZIPES, J. (2012). The irresistible fairy tale: the cultural and social history of a genre. Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press
- 100 Word Challenge (2019). Available at: https://fairytalefeminista.wordpress.com/2019/01/29/100-word-challenge/ (Accessed: 30 July 2020).
- Why did Hitler hate the Jews? (2018). Available at: https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/why-did-hitler-hate-jews/ (Accessed: 30 July 2020).