What is the role of storytelling in our world today?  Stories are what people hang on to in order to make sense out of an increasingly chaotic world.  Stories are the lifeblood of political debate and identity.  Stories are the way we recover from the stress of pandemic and get ready for another day on Zoom.  Stories move us, frighten us, embolden us, strengthen us, renew us – the list of things stories can do for us is nearly endless.

Add to that a recent finding:  stories can quite simply and clearly reduce pain.  Children in hospital in Brazil reported less pain and a more positive attitude toward their doctors and nurses after hearing stories versus a control group who got riddles instead (Brockington et al., 2021).

At the highest level, stories are the maps we place on reality to help us understand it.  As we get ready to head off to college, for example, we tell ourselves that we are on a quest to graduate from a university, get a job, and settle down with the right partner.  When we have children, we tell ourselves that through hard work and a lucky break or two they can surpass us on the ladder of success.  And once those children leave the nest, we may start to tell ourselves our own story of our place in the world and the legacy that we wish to leave to our descendants.

Or we may tell a completely different story of a different path, one of rebellion, or renewal, or reinvention.  At every level, stories inspire us and reduce the pain of not knowing what is coming next.

I worry that the kinds of stories we tell ourselves in certain pockets of society today have become fact-free, conspiracy-laden wish-fulfillment fantasies that deny reality, science, and the basic glue that has held modern law-based democratic societies together.

Democracy is a story that we tell ourselves, and it’s one that can’t endure if citizens deny the basic facts of its continuation.  Any good story involves a teller and an audience, and a set of implicit rules, or conditions.  If we fault the story and deny the implicit rules, the story cannot continue to hold sway over us and we will descend into anarchy, mob rule, and despotism.  It’s an unpleasant and alarming prospect, but no longer implausible.

Stories are anything but harmless.  It was a story George Washington told his continental army, the populace, and the British that held the rebellion together over seven years during which Washington lost more battles than he won.  Washington’s story was based in turn on the story of a Roman general, Fabius Maximus, who wore his larger enemy down with skirmishes, rather than fighting large, pitched battles he couldn’t win.

When the young democracy was in danger of breaking down over the issue of slavery in the US Civil War, it was a story told by Abraham Lincoln, standing over the fallen at Gettysburg, that in part held the country together:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Are stories dangerous?  Indeed they are, but without them we cannot create the human meaning that makes our lives worth living.