How “useful fictions” helped me understand storytelling, society and anxiety.
Our deepening understanding of the world helps us survive but fiction helps us thrive.
Welcome to RiD! I am taking a break from my usual language AI weekly update and insights newsletter this week, to drop an essay on why stories and language play such a crucial role in our daily lives.
Why do we have a fundamental desire for narrative and storytelling? This has become a topic of both deep personal as well as professional interest to me. Professionally, it has immense relevance my company but also my personal side project i.e. this newsletter. This newsletter is usually about large language AI and models, which at a basic level are just story generating machines.
But on the company / start up side, our domain of interest and problem we are trying to solve relates to how we can find, consume and converse around the best news, analysis and commentary? Is this a social media / networking problem, a publishing problem or something else?
I previously wrote a whole other piece on the state of the news media here and how we are approaching that opportunity.
Regardless of what you think of the current quality, and mediums through which we consume news and analysis, fundamentally our daily news cycle is just a series of stories we are telling ourselves and each other. They are approximations of truth at best and outright manipulation at worst. And while it's crucial we all do our best to align information with “reality” and agree on common facts, fundamentally we all have a basic need to “understand” or have answers, facts be damned. In fact, we're pretty hardwired to not like loose ends at all and stories play a fundamental role in meeting that need. As does news. One way or another, we’ll find our “answers”.
Apologies for all the “scare quotes” but words like reality, understanding and answers, are often very subjective and I make no claim on having cornered the market on any of them.
So what drives this need? Why do we feel so uncomfortable when we don’t have something to hang our hat on? What I have personally discovered to be a very useful way of approaching this question is through the lens of a specific types of stories, those being “useful fictions”.
A seed of interest
I previously bumped into this term some time ago while listening to Yuval Hurari on a podcast, which at the time left me intrigued and with a sense of “this seems interesting” but I’ll come back to it later.
This open intrigue drifted in my mental memory bank for some time, however as my start up began to take shape, I kept coming back to this question of news versus narrative which got me thinking again about “useful fictions”. In doing so I dove deeper on Harari’s use of the term and discovered a perfect complement to his top down view of useful fictions, by way of Michael Austin.
Yuval sees useful fictions as a kind of organizing tool for large-scale cooperation (or at least focuses on this aspect). Austin approaches the idea however from a bottom up perspective. As in, why do humans invest so much in fiction in general? Why is “non-truth” so important to us? (See a great talk summarizing his view here. How has this only been viewed a few hundred times?!?). Both perspectives however have immense implications for society, how we consume news and engage in public discourse.
Personal fictions
Let's start with Austin’s bottom up perspective. Austin begins by getting specific about the definition of each word. “Useful” in the general sense means something that helps us achieve some end goal. For the purposes of his discussion, that end goal is survival and procreation. It's useful precisely if evolution selects for this behavior. That is, useful means adaptive.
“Fiction”, again borrowing from Austin, can be defined as either something as an untruth or as conceptual abstraction.
Putting these together we have useful fictions defined as “adaptive untruths” and / or as “adaptive conceptual abstractions”. So why are untruths and abstractions so important and useful to us?
Or put another way, fundamentally we know that for a species that depends on understanding the truth about the world to survive, we certainly spend an inordinate amount of resources - time, money and energy - on telling ourselves untrue stories. Why is this?
Austin starts by offering up the obvious answer. Because it gives us joy or pleasure. But this just asks us to restate the question. Why do we get pleasure from fiction? Or more simply, why do we even like basic narration? Not elaborate stories just narration - this happened, then this, then this etcetera. The answer here, put forward by Austin, based on his own and others' research, is that this is how we have evolved to think based on our experience in the physical world. An experience that is very much oriented around space and time. A very sequential experience. This pleasure in relation to even basic narration, is adaptive for two very important reasons:
It encourages us, accurately or not, to start to predict the future.
It encourages us to start to manipulate variables. What would happen if X changed?
The important thing here is that we developed a cognitive capacity for “causation sequencing” i.e. the ability to complete a picture in our minds without all the evidence, based on past experience and present circumstances. In fact we’ve developed a NEED to complete the picture in our minds. What drives the need?
It is here that Austin introduces another adaptive feature of human beings and a centerpiece of his thesis. Emotional adaptation. Specifically, his thesis focuses on the adaptation of anxiety, as a driver of our need for narrative completion. He flags this as our most adaptive [survival oriented] emotion. He makes this claim on the basis that natural selection does not select for happiness. It selects for survival. And anxiety helps keep us alive.
Side note: We tend to think of our behavior in the context of our modern world, but homo sapiens evolved for tens or hundreds of thousands of years as nomadic hunter gatherers before the agricultural revolution roughly 10,000 years ago, which ushered in towns, cities and society. Industrialization has only been on-going for a couple hundred years. The digital revolution, what, ~40 years? So as much as we might like to think of ourselves as very modern creatures, our various cognitive and other fundamental systems were built and tuned for a very different environment.
And so here we are, anxious nomads, with a growing capacity for contemplation & emotion but whose primary goal is just, frankly, passing on our genes. Adaptively we needed to balance contemplation & enquiry with abundant caution. We couldn't rely on pure adrenaline. We needed a cognitive equivalent to go with the physiological one. And so in this predatory anxious ladened environment, where we have evolved to think linearly and project out into the future, with a primary goal of survival, our minds have adapted to do 3 things very well - speculate, exaggerate and excite.
Our minds evolved to be good at these things precisely because we needed the ability to focus our otherwise very useful brains, when necessary, on survival. Using Austin’s example, when we heard that rustle in the bushes, we needed to prioritize the narrative of “large, man eating tiger ready to shred your flesh and eat you for dinner”, over “what could that possibly be? Let’s investigate”.
While none of our development was/is sequential, we can simplify this conceptually as:
adaptive behavior selection >> causal thinking & emotional development >> speculation + exaggeration & excitement >> us being fiction creation machines
And Austin extrapolates from here…which is about where Yuval picks up the story.
Social fictions
Yuval is more focused on the second type of fiction - conceptual abstractions. Here exaggeration, excitement and speculation all play a key role however these types of fictions also require us to be so enmeshed in them that over time we don't really stop to think or reflect on their truth. These fictions function better as agreed “facts”.
These are the types of fictions we need to break through Dunbar’s number, so we can build social cohesion and cooperation at scale.
As we stumbled into the agricultural revolution, and began to settle down and build homes, barns, clothes etcetera, to begin trading and transacting, we were faced with an increasing barrage of very complex problems to solve. Social, political, logistical, economic and so forth. We needed stories, fictions, not to entertain ourselves but to align purpose, create order, focus energy and bring concepts such as “value” into existence. These are the fictions of myths, kings, enemies and money. The grand narratives that structure our societies and our sense of ourselves in them.
As time has gone on and society has evolved, these fictions (along with our fictional classics and entertainment) have had to evolve also, into increasingly complex stories and tales that we tell ourselves. And we have told ourselves these tales to the point where we often don’t question whether these are fictions or fact, or whether they are serving something we need anymore.
The greatest periods of progress and regression in world history most often stem from someone or some group, stepping apart and challenging our deeply held beliefs and stories and asking us all to reorient ourselves to new stories. Stories of religion, class, race, national identity and so forth.
Where does this leave us?
Bringing these two strands together, it seems the ability we developed to grope & grab ever so slightly into the future, as a means of essentially assuming the worst in times of possible peril, has been co-opted to enable us to process and manage ever increasing levels of complexity, through stories. Be it personal or societal, our ability to tell ourselves stories or “untruths”, has been foundational to our ability to survive and thrive. It soothes us, gives us purpose and enables us, if we want, to put our reach just beyond our grasp.
But with the fracturing of belief systems, accelerating change and displacement along with an explosion in complexity, this desire for “narrative completion”, that is, getting to the “why” of things, seems ever more elusive. In this vacuum of contingency and uncertainty however, our need for “understanding” remains and it will be satiated one way or another. We’ll get our “answers”.
In this environment, our daily news stories seem more important today than ever before, if only we can find a way to agree on what the story actually is.
Or…