Storytelling as a weapon.
“Weaponized narrative seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms.”
Fake news. Conspiracy theories. Professional trolls from other countries. Erratic leaders with weaponized twitter accounts.
The methods are as old as propaganda and disinformation, but those weapons have new speed and ferocity and power in the information age. They are the modern tools of soft authoritarianism.
Yet I have faith that storytelling is also the answer – only the kind that engenders compassion, allows us to hold tension between opposing interests peacefully, and reinforces the values of humanity that bind us together.
From John Scalzi, professional storyteller: “Martin Luther King Jr. said… “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” … This is not an argument toward complacency; indeed I think it’s an argument against defeatism and fatalism in the face of setbacks and stalemates… Remember the arc is not inevitable. It needs you. You are more important than you know, if you don’t give in to despair, to complacency, or to apathy. Add to the moral weight that bends the arc toward justice. You can’t do it alone, but without you the work becomes that much harder.”
Professional storytellers, it’s time to get to work. But every one of us is a storyteller in the information we choose to share, the narratives that we allow to shape our lives, the stories that remain inside our heads and the ones we tell each other about the world.
Chose your narratives well, my friends.
And keep bending the arc toward justice.