George Bush, General Motors, terrorists and the Pope.
by Tracy Valleau


As my years go on, human nature seems more transparent to me. For a while, I pondered why it is that humans have such a need for religion. Most with whom I discussed that topic suggested that it was "fear of death" but I now believe that lying at the very heart of the human experience is something quite the opposite: fear of life.
Life is chaotic. We arrive, "tossed in the pool" so to speak,  and in our first years can learn only by imitation. Then comes cause and effect (I cry, mom arrives.)  But we soon learn that it's not a simple relationship: sometimes when I cry, mom soothes me; other times she scolds me.
One of the first realizations to creep into our budding consciousness is the inconsistency, the chaos, of life. Even at age 60, I still recall my first awareness that mom and dad had different responses to the same situation. Nearly my first cogent thought was "there are no rules here; nobody seems to understand life," and "It's me and them." Budding self-awareness... and later the loneliness that blossomed into teenage angst.
My point here is that life is scary - it's ultimately each of us alone against a reality that cares not a whit whether we individually live or die.
That is, of course, the nature of life: big fish eat little fish; lions eat gazelles; volcanoes explode; earthquakes kill... it is chaos.
Our sentient human brains (since we have little in the way of physical prowess) must figure out how to help us survive within this swirling and dangerous reality.
And we have one really unique ability, unshared by any of the rest of life on earth, as far as I know: we tell stories.
(I am not the first to think of this. Anthropoligists noted it years ago.)
Stories pass along the experience and techniques of others in dealing with the tumult of life. "Try this; it worked for me." And rather than recount the millions of tiny details that went into the original experience, (even if one could remember them all accurately) the detail are whittled down to their essence - the bit that is common to a given challenge.
Thus, the story is made simple and memorable and serves as a tool when that experience is encountered for the first time in the life of the hearer (or later, reader.)
We hear stories from our parents beginning at the earliest age; then stories from brothers and sisters; grandparents; and later schoolmates and friends. They come from the pulpit and from the pages of books. They are nearly 100% of the content of television and movies.
Stories are a wonderful human invention. They have help us individually and collectively survive and prosper.
And because we fail to shed them along with the other affectations of youth, they are insidious and dangerous.
Stories should be something we merely learn from. They should be a part of the growing and maturing process, as they are... but then they should be discarded... something we fail to do.
Different cultures have (or do not have) rituals around the time when stories should be put aside, and one's own skills and observations are called to the fore.
The insidious part of stories is this: that we cling to them too long. That failing is natural enough, of course: they are all we have ever known... they are the only way we have ever learned to deal with this chaotic world.  To let go of the stories is a very scary, almost suicidal, thing.
So fearful of letting go are we that most will, in fact, refuse to do so. The stories are seen as the basis of our survival; the underpinning of our entire reality.
We will often fight to the death to protect (in our own minds) the stories we have assimilated.
The insidious thing is that stories cease to be the parables and guides of our youth. Instead of controlling the stories, the stories begin to control us.
It is a tiny step from using our internal stories to help us choose a course of action, to the point where the stories instead dictate our actions.
And it is actions in this reality, not our thoughts, that affect our survival. Either we actually jump out of the path of the oncoming train or we do not - thinking about jumping has no effect.
In short, in our minds we enter the dangerous place where our stories assume the mantle of "reality" so intimately are they tied with our actions.
Instead of remaining the parables about reality they were in our youth, they have instead become literal descriptions of reality in our mind.
And unfortunately, they are still just stories. They are not "reality."
It is that disjunct that ties together George Bush, General Motors, terrorists and the Pope (not to mention the rest of us.)
General Motors' corporate story is that SUVs are what the American public wants. It's bolstered by the fact that they are cheap to make and thus provide for larger profits.
On the other hand, Honda and Toyota, less vested in that story, more easily saw the reality that gas was going up, and that the purchasing trends were toward smaller, more efficient cars.
While GM insisted on its own story about reality, the Japanese did not. They turned on a dime, and began producing smaller autos. GM's "reality" (failing to understand that it was just a story) pushed them to continue advertising and making huge gas-guzzlers.
Net result: GM is no longer the world's largest auto maker and  has laid off tens of thousands of workers.
Even in the face of incontrovertible facts about auto sales, the corporate story at GM is so strong that to this day, they continue to push SUVs, and cannot understand why things are not working for them.
For GM, the story is profoundly confused with reality.
Now, tell this to anyone with marketing savvy, and you'll find i'ts old hat... sort of. That is they understand that you can influence people by feeding into their internal stories.
In fact starting with a widely assumed story, and manipulating it slowly, a bit at a time, is how societies and cultures are controlled, (just ask Adolf Eichmann or Karl Rove.)
Advertising agencies almost understand this. When I say "almost" I'm thinking specifically of GM again. Their agency has moved to marketing SUVs and trucks (the most profitable products) by appealing to the patriotic story so strong in middle Americans. Their ads croon "this is our country." Well, of course it is, and the same thing could be used to sell hair spray or toothpaste: there is no "reality-base" connection between patriotism and trucks.
Do the ads work? Sure - to some extent. They feed into an existing story and reinforce it. In turn, if you give little thought to it, which is the insidious part of stories in the first place, GM trucks become the patriotic trucks to buy.
If you don't buy one, you're not patriotic. "Not patriotic!" Wow: you're probably not a good American; you could even be an enemy. I may have to kill you... the power of the story is strong.
So, what's the almost?  Look at the ads for the Toyota Tundra truck: they show how much it can haul; how much it can carry; how quickly it can stop. They say "actual demonstration" on the bottom of the screen.
The GM ads work on people who are deeply vested in their own mental stories; the Toyota ads appeal to people who better realize that stories are parables, and that work in the real-world demands real trucks, not patriotic abstractions.
The "almost" in GMs agency is the agency's own story-cum-reality: that they can sell more trucks appealing to stories than Toyota can appealing to real-world needs.
Obviously they, and their story, are wrong.
What about George Bush, terrorists and the Pope?
All of them (I'm using "the Pope" as a generic representation of religion as a whole) are profoundly and deeply vested in their own stories-are-reality.
Why, in the face of overwhelming facts to the contrary, does (or did)  George Bush deny the reality of global warming; cause us to attack another country with little to no provocation; insist that "the splurge" will fix the issues in Iraq; think that the constitution does not apply to him and his administration?
Because he is so vested in his own mental stories as reality, that actual reality has no place.
Ditto for the terrorists, who have created a story that the West is "out to get them" when nothing could be further from the truth. But real suicide bombers kill real innocent people every day based on the strength of that story.
Right-wingers in the US are deeply vested in the story that they are persecuted, a story pushed and enhanced by Rove, Fox News and others with vested interests of their own. So controlled are they by their stories-are-reality that the rank and file are often heard saying that Democrats are "supporting terrorists."
That would mean that more than half the population of the United States are enemies of the State, a patently absurd conclusion, but demonstrative of the power of stories.
And it's the strength of stories; the investment of our lives in them, that have produced two "classes" of people in the US - those that matured to the point of remembering that stories are just that: tools of youth, to be dropped in adulthood, the lessons learned and absorbed, and now ready to deal with daily reality...
... and those who have nevered dropped the stories, but instead cling to them such that now the stories guide their lives, and have become confused with reality.
It's interesting to note the difference between the two groups, as it is to some palpable extent they are divided along party lines, or at least "liberal/conservative" and in fact may constitute a fair definition of the distinction between those two.
The Left's liberal policies offer up a choice of opportunities: you can do this or not do this - the choice is yours. The conservative Right offers no independent choice of options: you must do this our way. In fact, in the vestment in stories, the Right is so fearful of losing their stories that their one and only choice must be made into law; actually illegal to believe differently.
I'd wager that in the US, the power of stories is more pervasive than in most other countries. We are simply never rid of them; movies, television, advertising - tens of thousands of story-reinforcements hit each of us every day. That's true of most first world countries these days... and the need for the simplifying and soothing nature of stories seems to have grown as the speed of technological change, and hence complexity, has increased.
It may be a generational thing in first-world countries, however: those of us who have lived thru the information explosion - the "baby-boomers" are likely most vested. The generation born after the introduction of computers and the internet has come to dealing with vast quantities of information in their own way: grasping bits of information quickly (the so-called 'short attention span&#39 and the "learn by doing" techniques inherited from video games, instead of the slower "read the manual" of my generation.
YouTube and MySpace promote frank and real interaction, at least to some degree.
But in the second world, the power of stories propels the youth to strap on bombs and go wander into a marketplace. Here, there is no significant technological generation (except, ironically, in Iran.)
That, at age 60, is my take on human nature and the likely fate of mankind: there are two types of people on this earth - those who have shed the stories of youth and opened their eyes to a more nuanced reality, hard as it may be to do so, and those whose fear of life has compelled them to cling to the parables of childhood, and have now become automatons in their control.
The fate of mankind depends on which type controls our governments and economy.
Good luck to us all.


(Note: Tues, May 1: Today I was thumbing thru an old copy of Communications Arts magazine (Design Annual, 2006) , and found an article with similar observations by Michael McPherson. Jung would be pleased at the synchronicity. His article predates my writing, but I wish to assure one and all that my ideas expressed here were independently concieved. Mr. McPherson&#39s article is more scholarly than mine; makes no reference to religion, and is significantly different in other ways as well. I can heartily recommend it.
I have no doubt that others have expressed similar observations previously as well... after all: human nature is human nature - observable by one and all. Tracy