lyndsey stonebridge: the proper response to a political culture of lying
07 Sep 2017there is a deep problem in present day america and it’s getting worse. the final part of the lyndsey stonebridge on being episode completely nails it. an extended excerpt is included below and this post is me really just talking through how i heard the conversation.
something i’ve learned from story-based strategy is that meaning is the currency of power, not truth. 45 continuously lies to people. he did it just the other day in texas where he held a rally in preparation for his 2020 presidential run. (note: it’s 2017. i don’t know if a president has ever begun campaigning for the next election less than a year into his current term. in fact, i think he started doing this back in june. i also know that 45 has done so many abnormal things and there is such chaos happening around the world that people aren’t even talking about that fact. maybe this media game is what they call… a smokescreen? maybe overreach there…).
and i’ve seen several media pieces that continually prove that he’s lying. and yet, as arendt says, facts are never enough. there will never be enough facts to change someone’s mind. what’s needed is story, testimony.
but still, a huge part of the political response to 45’s lying and mistruths have been fact-finding. it’s not that facts don’t matter; it’s that facts don’t change minds.
(another sidenote: 45’s audiences have been trained to do things (by him and his ilk over years) that mainstream media is not to be trusted. so, his political complex has essentiall convinced his follows that all the folks screaming about him lying are not to be trusted. therefore, that is no longer an effective strategy (if it ever was).
so what changes minds? or… more poignantly, what conveys truth?
“And you can scream facts at people until you’re blue in the face, and a lot of colleagues and universities and journalists have been doing exactly that very hard, working tirelessly. And it’s not making any difference. And I think what she’s talking about there is the ability through thinking and communal discourse, to make truth meaningful in the world, it has to happen between people…
It’s why history and the sense of a myth were all important to her because it’s what makes truth meaningful to people together in a community. If you want a culture that’s going to take on fake news, and the political lie, I say as someone who teaches literature and history, what you need is a culture of the arts and humanity. What you need is more storytelling. What you need is more discourse. What you need is more imagination. What you need is more creation in that way, and more of a sense of what it is that ties us to those words and ties us to those stories.
this is the huge, critical point here: what we need is storytelling and testimony. we need more culture and imagination.
this, of course, doesn’t mean that the truth can just be fabricated. it just means that fact-based reality, without testimony and story, isn’t an effective change tool.
paraphrase: “the appropriate response to a culture of political lying is a strong culture of arts and imagination and storytelling.”
in other words, this is a huge part of why i’m even in communications and storytelling work. hopefully that’s a good call.
extended excerpt
MS. TIPPETT: We’re going to have to wind down here, but I’ve got so much else I want to talk about. But I want to talk briefly and this flows on that I think of the idea of lying.
MS. STONEBRIDGE: Yeah.
MS. TIPPETT: Which was a — one of those elements of totalitarianism, very much a subject alive in American politics now that — but something I’m very intrigued getting a little bit deeper into this in reading her — and I’ve thought a lot about — we had already had a — like a lot of things right now, it’s just out on the surface, what was already kind of fermenting. We already had a crisis of truth, or not being able to speak about truth in a complex way. And we’ve been relying on facts, and facts were never enough.
And she makes these — like, here’s her essay “Lying in Politics.” She says that “factual truths,” here’s that. “Factual truths are never compellingly true. The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life. It is always in danger of being perforated by single lies, or torn to shreds. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy domain of human affairs. From this it follows that no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt.” Take us inside that and what that means for us now.
MS. STONEBRIDGE: I think, yeah, I think she’s — she — for Arendt, I think why the idea of thinking and speaking as a form of action are important to her is that what she’s saying there is — you can throw enough facts, you can throw all the facts you like at people, and they will not stick. We had this, in the UK, and I know you have, too, that it’s — “OK, against the false news we’ll have fact-finding, and we’ll tell you.
And we’ll have a team of researchers, and you just have to look on our website, and we’ll tell you which of those are lies.” And you can scream facts at people until you’re blue in the face, and a lot of colleagues and universities and journalists have been doing exactly that very hard, working tirelessly. And it’s not making any difference. And I think what she’s talking about there is the ability through thinking and communal discourse, to make truth meaningful in the world, it has to happen between people.
MS. TIPPETT: Right.
MS. STONEBRIDGE: Which is not saying we just make up our own reality. She’s not saying that. It means that this is why…
MS. TIPPETT: When she says testimony, it needs…
MS. STONEBRIDGE: Testimony.
MS. TIPPETT: It needs experience. It needs human experience around it. Yeah.
MS. STONEBRIDGE: Yeah. And so I think she — that was why testimony was important to her. It’s why history and the sense of a myth were all important to her because it’s what makes truth meaningful to people together in a community. If you want a culture that’s going to take on fake news, and the political lie, I say as someone who teaches literature and history, what you need is a culture of the arts and humanity. What you need is more storytelling. What you need is more discourse. What you need is more imagination. What you need is more creation in that way, and more of a sense of what it is that ties us to those words and ties us to those stories.
MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. We need three dimensional — we need stories and facts and conversations between people and all of that working together.
words / writing / post-processing
377w / 13min /