It’s All About the Story

I am beginning to realize it is a dangerous assumption to think that people actually want to know the truth.

I was talking to a sheep-type person the other day and made some comment about the moon landing in 1969. I asked, in a matter-of-fact way, “Do you believe we landed on the moon in 1969?” and they said, with no time for pondering the question, “Of course.” I tentatively asked, “Why?” and they said, “Why not?”

Indeed, why not? What do they lose by believing such a contradiction to the world story? What do they gain by not believing it, and believing in something that many people think is ridiculous?

You could ask a similar question about dozens of issues, “Do you believe the Twin Towers came down because Osama Bin Laden flew planes into them?” “Do you believe that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman in 1963?” “Do you believe the Covid vaccines were safe and effective?” “Do you believe the earth is round?”

“Of course, why not?” How about because there is no evidence to the contrary? “Naw, if there were ‘evidence,’ none of it is agreed upon by people in the know. And for what reason would I throw out a belief that has created so much story around it?”

Story.

Human belief systems are fundamentally constructed by “story.” Everything we encounter has a story around it, we would not be able to function without story, definition, and narrative.

Think about it. If I encounter any object in my day-to-day life, there is a story behind it to define it. Some of that story is consensual, meaning it is shared by most other people.

Take a coffee cup as an example. I recognize a coffee cup when I see one, I call it by its name, I have had experience with it, but I also identify it because someone at one time taught me what its identity was—my parents, my school, my friends.

I also have a personal story about the coffee cup, maybe I drink coffee out of it, maybe my wife threw one at me in a fit of rage, or maybe as a little kid I used it in the backyard to dig holes.

Story is very important to humans. And our ability to create stories around objects, people, ideas, ideologies, and situations is very highly advanced. But more importantly, at least how it applies here, the stories we learn about things are difficult to “unlearn.” Not only is it difficult to unlearn, but most of the time if we run into a story that conflicts with the one we have lived with and are comfortable with, we have no desire to switch stories, even if the new story is truth, and the old story is a lie.

The familiar, and relatively safe story, is the preferred story. Although the stories we like to retain can have dark edges to them, they are still familiar. There is enough custard in the middle of the donut of life that it is preferable to a story that is largely ugly, scary, unsafe, and strange.

The “dark edges” we encounter in our familiar story are also familiar. People get cancer, people get in accidents, our kids flunk out of school, they take drugs, and sometimes people we love even die. Sometimes we lose our jobs, sometimes we get hit with a global tragedy, like a disease that runs rampant, or an ugly war that breaks out somewhere in the world, etc. Of course, when we are immersed in these dark edges we don’t like it and we think life sucks.

There is always a typical solution in our story that deals with the dark edges. And there is a typical result. If you get cancer, you then get conventional treatment. Not a treatment that is “outside of the story we have all decided to live,” but treatment within the story: chemo, radiation, surgery. And if that doesn’t work, then the story says, most likely, you die. No one wants to hear deviations from the story, such as alternative cancer treatments. These solutions do not fit the familiar story.

Other dark edges we might find in our story also have typical solutions. For example, when a virus attacks us, the government takes the bull by the horns and comes up with ways to fight it. The story says there are heroes among us, but only the ones the story says are legitimate—the ones the government has told us are experts. “If we all do our part [the story says] we will survive!” So that is what most people do—their best.

They don’t want to hear a new story, a truthful story, because it is often too unusual, it doesn’t “fit” what they have been living their whole life. They don’t want to hear that a character like Anthony Fauci is corrupt, incompetent, or just plain evil. That doesn’t fit the story. He is a famous public figure. That is the story he fits.

The scary part is that these people are not deeply fearful of living a new story (although most say that is why they don’t change stories) but are indifferent to it. “Naw, I don’t think so, I think I’ll stick with this one, I am used to it.” They don’t actually use these words, they may say something more like, “That’s just stupid to think that,” or “I really don’t care,” or “If that were true, it would be on the cover of Time magazine.”

So much stability depends on sticking with the same old stories. If we start looking at new stories, everything will fall apart, which is essentially true. Take the moon landing story as an example. Or even the 9-11 fiasco. How much of the fabric of our world story would be ripped apart if either of those incidents turned out to be different than the story we have been fed? The entire structure of our nation, as well as the entire world, would fall apart, like smoke in the wind. Poof.

I knew of a young couple that visited the Twin Towers site and memorial in NYC recently. They were so impressed, they watched little films about families who lost loved ones in the collapse of the buildings. They were moved to tears looking at the displays and walking the grounds of one of the US’s most profound tragedies. That’s the story. They don’t want to hear that what actually happened there was radically different than the story the memorial tells them. They don’t want to know the emotion they felt in that story was false and not real. Forget it.

Some of us don’t care all too much if the story changes. In fact, in a strange way, we don’t like living this consensual story the world is currently engaged in. We like it when things get shaken up a bit. So we are ready for it when we see the new story coming. We even embrace it. Truth is like a breath of fresh air after we have been breathing the fetid air of deceit and lies. Why is this the case? Maybe something about how we were raised. I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.

As we have witnessed recently, if the story is changed slowly (so it works better for the puppet masters) the masses can adjust to it. It is sudden changes that throw them off. And the agenda can even throw some sudden changes in there once in a while as long as it is well orchestrated. This is called “conditioning” or “indoctrination.”

We saw this with the Covid insanity. And we are currently seeing it with the two major world conflicts that are at the moment keeping the masters busy. It is also good to throw in a little conflict here and there so people have the opportunity to be “saved by the agenda”—wars, climate change, Trump and Republicans, Biden and Kamala, Covid, pandemics, etc.

So, the next time a sheep-type doesn’t want to listen to your deviant story that clashes with their story, think about why. More than likely it is not because you don’t have all the pertinent facts at your fingertips, or that you are a poor orator, or that they just don’t like you. It is more than likely because your story conflicts with theirs, with the “masses’ story,” the one that appears to keep things stable, the story that seems to keep their lives livable, with moments of instant gratification—things to buy, food to eat, sex to have (well, that one doesn’t work as well as it used to), cars to drive, games to play…that is really all that matters to them, you know. One day that too will fall away. But right now, it’s all good.

Todd Hayen PhD is a registered psychotherapist practicing in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He holds a PhD in depth psychotherapy and an MA in Consciousness Studies. He specializes in Jungian, archetypal, psychology. Todd also writes for his own substack, which you can read here

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