We live in a time when, in many parts of the world, people purposely spread falsehoods about each other.
Every day, people spew untruths about different ethnic or social groups. About folks with different opinions. About those who recommend different courses of action, either as individuals or as a society.
The Skills of Division
Sadly, the skills for fomenting division and misunderstanding have become better and better developed.
A recent example is the forcible occupation of the United States congressional offices—by a group who was convinced (by some of the country's highest-ranking politicians) to believe that the recently reported election results were fraudulent.
Opposing points of view, of course, are necessary in a democracy. But deception and fabrication weaken the social fabric.
Enter the True Story
How can deception be countered?
The only tool capable of displacing the oft-repeated falsehood is the true story. Such a story needs to be completely true, of course, and not exaggerated in any way.
These stories work best, too, by assuming that the listeners to the story mean well—and by being told with relaxed assurance, rather than with raised voices and accusing language.
Such stories work best when their tellers respect both the intelligence and the good intentions of the listener. (If the listener has bad intentions, let the listener’s shrillness and critical demeanor reveal that! Any third parties will likely catch on quickly!)
Those who mean to deceive, of course, will continue to repeat falsehoods. But, in the face of calm, sincere, honest telling, they will have a much harder time convincing others that their claims are true.
How can honest stories prevail?
It’s all too tempting to counter falsehoods with accusations, to respond to shrillness with more shrillness. Unfortunately, resorting to such techniques puts the whole exchange back into a format of accusation and counter-accusation.
But true dialog requires another approach. It can be a difficult approach to learn, but can also be difficult to resist!
What is the solid ground? It’s simply this: personal experience stories can not be argued with.
Human Nature is On Our Side
After all, it’s human nature to put ourselves in the place of the teller, to experience in our minds what the teller reports experiencing.
In the absence of hostility, stridency and escalation, in fact, we humans tend to empathize with the experiences of others. That creates sympathy and connection. It’s built into our brains!
In effect, honest, personal stories make claims about the teller’s experience, not about the rest of the world.
But we’ve been trained wrong!
Sadly, we’ve mostly been educated to undercut this basic tool of human relations. We've been taught to "make points," to develop counter-arguments, and to catch out our opponents in apparent contradictions or false conclusions.
This creates hostility, not empathy.
If your goal is connection rather than conflict, though, you need to become very good at sharing your experiences, while respecting the experiences of others.
You need to become a builder of empathy, not an accurate reciter. “Reciting" actually removes the oral language subtleties that make personal testimony compelling.
Who Will Help Us Share Our Experiences—Not Our Accusations?
What we need, more than skills of persuasion, is help to share our experiences through sincere stories.
In short, we need skilled storytelling coaches. Not folks who tell us to create 3-part structures with surprising endings, but helpers who can draw out our honest experience and help us offer it in a spirit of respectful sharing.
Anything short of this allows us to degenerate back into accusation and disrespect.
In other words, if we want to be able to connect, to respect each other, to sidestep the cycles of accusation and defensiveness, then we need storytelling coaches—excellent storytelling coaches who can bring out our true humanity and help us reveal it to others.