Tell a story

The Judex newsletter is about and for a conservative judiciary. This article is not exactly on point. It is about why stories are important. Of course, storytelling is a big part of lawyering, so it has some connection. I’m mostly including it, though, because I am interested in this stuff and I wanted to write about it. So, here goes. I hope you like it.

IF YOU want to persuade someone, you must tell a story. For instance, if I wanted to convince you that life is best spent striving to be better, I might tell this story:  

In my earliest memory I am around five years old. I’m standing on the wobbly sheet of plywood laid across some cinder blocks that we call the back porch of our trailer. A man is going in and out of the trailer installing a phone line. As I watch him, I feel shame. I am ashamed of my home. I am embarrassed that the phone man is seeing how we live.

Those feelings of shame and embarrassment were with me throughout my early life. I hated feeling that way. Loathed it. For a long time, I was bitter about it. I rejected the world for putting me in that situation. I had a problem with people in authority because I believed they were better and luckier than me. I did not want to participate in their world. I put no effort into school. I gave no thought to my future. I was on the path to a hard and menial life. The bitterness almost caused me to stay stuck right there.

One summer in my late teens, I worked for a farmer fixing fences. It was tough work and brutally hot. After one painful day, I said to myself, out loud, “there has to be something better than this.” I was thinking about how hard the work was. How hot it was. How most of the people that worked in my family worked at the local factory where the pay was low and the temperature was high. I saw clearly stretching out before me a best-case scenario of working in that factory. A worst-case scenario looked like a life of drugs, alcohol, and dilapidated trailers. I resolved to try to do more. I decided to turn the feelings of shame, embarrassment, and inferiority into fuel to raise my station in life instead of using them as an excuse to fail.

It wasn’t easy. I had started near the bottom and had dug an even deeper hole for myself. I was able to bring my grades up some in what little time I had left in high school but graduated near the bottom of my class. I got into college at IU Southeast, a commuter campus, based on my SAT score. IUS was the only university that would accept me, and it was on the condition of academic probation. On my first day, I nearly quit. It was all foreign to me. I couldn’t find my first class and was late. By the time I arrived at the correct room, class had started. Embarrassed, I couldn’t force myself to go in. This was proof, I thought, that I was not college material. I went outside to a courtyard and sat on a bench. My mind competed with itself between the bitter thoughts of inferiority and a desire to make a better life. Thankfully, striving to succeed won out. I was early for my next class.

I graduated from college with a highest distinction commendation and made it to law school. I graduated from law school near the top of my class. After law school, I opened a successful law practice. Later, I was elected as one of the youngest prosecutors in the state. I am now a judge. Along the way I married a wonderful woman, who is now a member of Congress. We have three successful children who, I believe, do not feel the shame I once felt.

It has been quite a journey. I realize now I had considerable control over my own life. I had the ability all along to improve my status. No one was holding me down. In fact, many people helped me along the way once I got my act together. We all start at different places, and some of us have farther to go than others, but each of us has a choice in and a responsibility for our own futures. Striving is better than bitterness. The only meaningful life is one spent striving to be better.         

Persuaded? If you are it is because I told a story. But why is story so powerful?

In the book, The Status Game, author Will Storr argues that like all living organisms, humans are driven to survive and reproduce. As a tribal species, our personal survival has depended on being accepted into a community. Once accepted into the community, we are driven to rise within it—to increase our status.

Status is deadly important. In his book, 12 Rules for Life, psychologist, Dr. Jordan Peterson, describes the perils of low status. The first chapter discusses status hierarchies among lobsters. Lobsters are some of the oldest creatures on earth. They organize in hierarchies. The higher status lobsters, at the top of the hierarchy, are the ones most able to fight for and win the best territory. This gives them access to the best food, shelter and mates. Clinical studies have shown that the lobsters that lose the fight not only suffer from the lack of prime resources, they also experience a decrease in serotonin levels in their brains. They get depressed.

Dr. Peterson spends time on lobsters because of the similarities to humans. Humans also organize in hierarchies. Humans also compete for status. When a human loses a status battle, he experiences a decrease in serotonin levels in the brain. He loses out on opportunities, and he feels bad about it. And for good reason. Socio-economic status is correlated with all-cause mortality, meaning, the lower your status, the more likely you are to die from anything and everything. It is vital, existential even, to avoid low status. Increased status has historically meant, and continues to mean, better access to better mates, more and better food, and greater safety for ourselves and our offspring. The higher our status, the better able we are to survive and reproduce.   

The desire for higher status is an innate drive, just like the drives for food and sex. The drive for status, like the drive for food and sex, is never satisfied. You can never eat so much that you will never be hungry again. You can never achieve a high enough status that you will stop seeking still higher status. This is not because you are greedy. It is because you want to continually increase your ability to survive and reproduce.

Because status is just as important to survival and reproduction as food and sex, we have developed tools to help us understand and gain status. Perhaps the most powerful of those tools is story. 

Stories do two primary things. First, we learn how the world works from the stories of others. We learn what the multiple hierarchies are, how they operate, and most importantly, how to climb them. Secondly, good stories offer inspiration. They inspire us to climb the hierarchy. Climbing the hierarchy is hard. We need the inspiration.

Because stories are so important to our survival and reproduction, we, as humans, have developed a fundamental relationship to storytelling. We are hardwired for stories. Our brains receive information from stories better than any other medium. In fact, if the incoming information is not in a story, our brains will turn it into a story to process it. We crave stories.

And not just any stories. We share, across all of us, a blueprint for stories. Swiss Psychiatrist, Carl Jung, proposed the idea of the collective unconscious, meaning, basically, that there exists a pattern of thought common in all human beings. Jung identified several of what he called archetypes that are common themes and symbols within the collective unconscious. Some examples of archetypes are the hero, the warrior, or the outlaw. Writer Joseph Campbell developed a similar idea. In his book Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell discusses the archetypal hero’s journey. Pretty much every movie you have ever seen is the hero’s journey. The story I told about myself at the top of this article is in the form of the hero’s journey. The protagonist starts off one way, then encounters a crisis or series of crises he overcomes, and is transformed to something greater in the process.

Good stories use this template because it works. It works because it is a collective unconscious archetype common to all humans. All humans have it because we have evolved to use it as a tool to achieve higher status. We want to achieve higher status so we can better survive and reproduce. If we are successful, our children will be born with the same template, and they’ll start the cycle over again.

Story is fundamental. Story is a powerful tool. If you want to persuade someone, you must tell a story.