It Doesn’t Matter If It Was Staged
Facts, Futility, and the Storytelling Brain
Story #1: It has been a dark and fearful season in exile, but one hero has the guts to fight back against the forces of evil. This noble warrior now addresses his adoring followers before what may be his last battle ever. While the guards are enthralled by the warrior’s speech, an enemy spy sneaks past them and climbs the tall tower overlooking the gathering. Shots ring out, and the warrior falls to his knees. Vengeful supporters slay the spy. A breathless moment passes. Thankfully, our hero is only wounded. He stands bloody but defiant, wrapped in the flag, his giant gonads flapping in the wind. He raises a fist to the sky in triumph.
Story #2: There has been peace in the land for years, but now a powerful villain has risen again. He addresses his followers, a gamy barbarian horde, to announce his plans to invade and usurp power. A lone, scruffy outcast with nothing to lose uses trickery to get past the villain’s scowling guards, and climbs to the top of a tall tower overlooking the seething, monstrous mass. He has one shot, and one shot only, at stopping the forces of evil before it’s too late. He misses. The villain’s cackling followers overtake him and mash him into a sticky pink goo.
If you’re reading this, the wet meatball between your ears has likely already selected one of the two stories above, or something like it, to explain the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. In the book The Science of Storytelling, author Will Storr explains:
We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale[.] Story is what brain does. . . . Any ‘facts’ it comes across tend to be subordinate to that story.
For the last few days, my timeline has been full of posts by otherwise rational people who, unsatisfied by the straightforward story that could be contrived from the bleak, chaotic events of July 13th, are stretching their gray matter even further by saying that the whole thing was staged. The Secret Service placed the shooter, Trump cut his own ear, the whole crowd was in on it, why is everyone smiling in that picture? who would pause to put on shoes? and so on.
Stop.
I’m not saying you’re wrong (though if you cut this thing open with Occam’s razor, what spills out? Nothing more mysterious than a deranged kid with indecipherable political beliefs shooting at a candidate who’s been begging for political violence for nearly a decade). I’m saying it doesn’t matter.
To test my hypothesis, ask yourself: if you had conclusive, diamond-hard evidence that the Trump assassination attempt was staged, who would you convince, and of what? Would you convince the Trump acolyte, for whom ‘facts’ screech like a harpy in a woodchipper, that the hero of their story is actually a villain? Would you sway an “undecided” voter, someone who hasn’t developed an opinion on Trump over the last nine years, and who (I assume) lives in a cave and only talks to bats?
Now let’s say you subscribe to something like story #2 above. Would the villain in your story change if you found out the incident was not staged? For that matter, would you feel differently about J. Edgar Hoover if you found out the Kennedy assassination was an inside job? Would your summer travel plans change if you found out the Earth really was flat? If you knew the real Avril Lavigne truly had been dead for 20 years, would you relisten to her entire catalog with a more discerning ear?
I bet not. And if not, you’re wasting valuable time conducting a forensic analysis of a mostly unremarkable shooting, trying to connect it to a larger story about good and evil. That time could be spent collecting canned goods, building an underground bunker, moving to Canada, completing today’s Wordle, or on some other more useful task.
Archetypal stories that are as straightforward as Star Wars or The Hunger Games appeal to the big glob of wires in your skull because those stories present a world where roles are well-defined and everything is neat and tidy, if sometimes tragic. But too much of this sorting and indexing creates a quicksand of madness from which you may never escape, even when everyone else has moved on to the next horror.
That horror, by the way, is likely to be right in front of your face — not hidden behind the scenes in some inscrutable puzzle box. Speaking of which, the Republican National Convention is now underway. When the GOP proudly announces their plan to nuke the moon and harvest its cheese, or name the Atlantic Ocean after Melania, or whatever desperately insane scheme that’s next, will you still be trying to make sense out of the last senseless event?