Let me tell you a story…

That’s how I started a recent speech at the SNP Annual Conference. Not because I had thought long and hard about the subject and had written a carefully crafted speech but precisely the opposite. It was the sixth or seventh time I had spoken that weekend and I just hadn’t had time to prepare anything and I needed to say something that would engage my audience and try to get them thinking about the problem that we were there to address in context.

Storytelling has increasingly been something that I am conscious of as an important part of being human but over the last few years I have begun to realise just how critical a part it is, not just of communication, but as a fundamental feature of my own mind and how I relate to the world.

I am immensely blessed to be married to an incredible, smart, funny, insatiably curious woman. Whilst I have been studying Politics as a mature student at the Open University she has been busy studying English Literature and Linguistics at the same time. She has just started a Masters in English Literature because there are always new horizons to explore.

This has hugely benefited me because I have learned a tremendous amount about a subject I otherwise would never have deigned to even investigate through a sort of academic osmosis. The male gaze, the Scottish Uncanny, the timeless appeal of the Heart of Darkness, all subjects I would never have encountered, that have enriched my life and my understanding of human nature.

Story, like cooking, running, song, dance, and sex, is a fundamental part of the human experience so basic, so primeval, that most of us are not even aware of the gravity it exerts over our lives and our minds.

Cooking, for example, has existed and been a core part of human experience since before our minds were any more complex than those of Chimpanzees. It was the invention of cooking that allowed us to diversify our diet and acquire the excess calories and time we needed to evolve a mind capable of something as astonishing as language or free will. It is not an accident that we find the flavours of the fire so powerful. The smoky flavours, the caramels, the crispy bits around the edges of bacon, they are all evocative of the new flavours our minds were being exposed to as we began to evolve into what we are today. The powerful impact that cooking and eating ‘good’ food has on our subconscious is a result of that interdependency. The ‘good’ flavours are very often the ones virtually no other species has ever experienced, that are associated with using fire to transform stuff that was previously inedible into stuff that our species could survive and thrive on. Cooked food is something that is embedded in bits of our brain that have existed for longer than almost any other part of what sets us apart from other primates. And that is why it is such an important part of our lives and always will be. All that science fiction rot about sucking protein paste out of a toothpaste tube in some antiseptic deep space future is never going to happen unless we genetically alter our own minds out of all recognition. It’s who we are, who we always will be, an ape that cooks.

What cooking unlocked, a thinking, conscious mind capable of planning, innovating, communicating, and teaching is something that has storytelling written right through it, like a stick of rock.

Those first primitive minds, once they had begun to evolve language as a way to communicate, evolved storytelling as the essential medium of that communication. Like the communications protocols that shape our digital communications networks today.

Before we had writing we had oral traditions, songs, and tales as old as time that hung their essential message and the information and lessons they transmitted on a scaffolding of storytelling tropes that are as prevalent today as they were forty thousand years ago. Indeed they persist because they form a fundamental part of how our emerging intellect evolved to understand the world and to share that understanding with others. They are burned into the structure of our brains by the very DNA that creates our intellect.

I am at heart a physicist. As a kid I was fascinated by the theories of Einstein and by the mysterious realm of quantum mechanics. I’ve known since I was knee high to a grasshopper that, while there is a degree of measurable objective truth in the universe, there are limits to it, that there is a sort of essential level of fuzziness, rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty, to quote the great Douglas Adams.

But, even though the various multi-verse theories have a certain attraction to them, there is a comfort in knowing that at a macroscopic level all of those uncertainties collapse into one objective reality that we all share.

Unfortunately, as I have gotten older, I have been forced to conclude that, at the subjective level of conscious thought, the universe fractures again into an infinite hall of mirrors, a collage of billions of overlapping narratives that are all subtly incompatible interpretations of that objective reality.

Because every conscious human mind interprets the world through the lens of narrative storytelling and in particular generally casts itself as the hero of the story. Whoever you are, however humble, the stories you tell yourself in your own head to make sense of the world are stories where you are the protagonist and however hard you try you are spinning those narratives to present yourself in the best light, not just to everyone else, but crucially to yourself.

And this truth is the source of all conflict in the world. To the extent that my story is compatible with yours we can get on and work together and with each other towards the greater good, or at least towards our own triumphant ascension. But when our stories diverge, when the way I spin the world to keep my story in the spotlight is narratively incompatible with your similar narrative, then there is a problem. What I do then is rewrite your character as one of the Others. You become someone that is wrong or deluded to a greater or lesser extent depending on the degree of incompatibility between our two stories. That can vary all the way from disliking or avoiding someone who introduces minor, uncomfortable incongruences into our own narrative, to actively seeking to harm someone whose story is entirely incompatible with our very notion of ourselves as the hero of the tale.

Early in Dale Carnegie’s infamous ‘How to win friends and influence people’ he points out an important truth. There are no guilty men in Sing Sing he says. Every man that had committed a crime, however heinous, that resulted in his being detained in that infamous prison felt justified in his actions, felt like he had done the right thing and that it was unjust that the world had conspired to punish him in this way. Because in truth, almost by definition, nobody ever does anything they do not think they are justified in doing, indeed much of the time people only do things that they feel like they have no choice but to do. How could I possibly have done anything else but what I have?

Even when objective reality is incompatible with our own heroic narrative we can simply choose to reinterpret the ‘facts’ to rationalise and justify ourselves. Often in small ways but the further our story diverges from objective reality the more liable we are to choose to reinterpret the world in a manner that simply breaks with that reality. We like to tell ourselves that madness and delusion are the result of some sort of defect, a defect that we do not possess, but the truth is that much of it is the result of a perfectly healthy mind living a story that is in conflict with the truth and objective reality. When reality conflicts with our sense of self it is often reality that we are willing to abandon first.

We are all unreliable narrators telling a ‘choose your own ending’ story where we are the heroes and everyone else is at best a sidekick.

Evidence, logic, and objective facts are irrelevant if they are in conflict with that narrative.

But why have I chosen to tell this story and lead you down this rabbit hole?

42.

Because as a social animal it is flat out impossible to achieve anything of significance without the cooperation and assistance of other human beings. The real secret to getting anyone to do anything that you want them to do is understanding that to them, you are not the hero, you are the sidekick.

Now I know you don’t want to be a sidekick. The truth is that you are the real hero not them but the fact is that nobody wants to be the sidekick and you are never going to convince anyone to choose to be yours. The most epic superpower known to man is the ability to voluntarily transform into a sidekick.

The best storyteller in the world is the one that doesn’t try to tell their own story but that helps others tell theirs. By facilitating the stories of like-minded others that have the same objectives as our own we can conduct a symphony without ever having to play a single note.

True leadership lies in coaching other leaders to fulfil their potential and in the process achieve your own by choosing to centre their stories rather than yours.

tbc…