The world loves a story and the storyteller. The more fantastic the story, the more people lap it up. So what is it that makes people believe in fantastic stories, and even more so, in the storyteller? The “gift of the gab”? Some people are born with this gift, so how it is used matters a lot. Unfortunately, this gift is more often than not misused, which spawns scams and con jobs, and even more unfortunately, people fall for them—hook, line and sinker—repeatedly. This has happened throughout history, and it will continue to happen because some are born to spin yarns and most are born to get spun in these yarns.
In his 2017 book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire; A 500-Year History, acclaimed journalist and author Kurt Andersen, speaking to The Daily Beast Podcast, claims that America has a weakness “for being conned.” He points to the religious history of the U.S. and its role in shaping the country’s national character, highlighting the foundational belief: “I can believe what I want because it’s the truth and it feels right,” adding, “All that stuff, which is not uniquely American, but it is definitively American,” Andersen explained. “America has always been the world leader in that kind of weak-mindedness and slippery sense of the difference between reality and fiction.”
This could explain why, in the past few decades, religion has taken centre stage in political discourse across countries that have remained deeply entrenched in religious roots and affinities, including India. It is difficult to deny that this “kind of weak-mindedness and slippery sense of the difference between reality and fiction” is also very real here. Consider how our perceptions of reality—including history, politics, science—almost everything under the sun—are mainly shaped through the prism of scriptures.
Another explanation could be that people are inherently gullible and vulnerable to deception. Or do they enjoy being duped? Andersen also discusses in his book the infamous con artist and showman P. T. Barnum, whom podcaster Joanna Coles describes as succeeding at “having people in on the con,” referencing an instance where people lined up to see a woman he claimed was 161 years old. Barnum is famous for co-founding the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and for promoting numerous hoaxes before later entering politics.
“I mean, his first freak show was a 161-year-old woman,” Coles said. “Obviously not true. Who was the nurse to George Washington. Obviously not true. And yet people lined up to see this thing, which they knew wasn’t true. And that’s the sort of sophisticated nature of P. T. Barnum: having the audience in on the con and yet still paying to see her.”
“He didn’t hide it,” Andersen agreed. “He didn’t pretend it was true. He said, ‘How do you know it’s not?’ That was basically his response to people. If you can’t prove it’s not, and people enjoy it, then that’s entertainment.”
Barnum’s understanding, as Andersen explains in his book, was that attention is what matters, not the truth—an approach that would later be adopted by Donald Trump and those who elevated him to national prominence. “It’s just such an American story,” Andersen said of Trump’s ascendancy. “This combination of religiosity, I guess sincere, and this kind of hucksterism. And that’s part of the story of America and how Trump came to be, even though he is irreligious and a nonbeliever, I think, pretty clearly.”
“But his most devoted supporters are evangelical Christians, because once you get a country in which there is so much belief in anything one wants to believe, and disbelief in things that are true, anything goes.”
“That wasn’t always the case,” Andersen notes. “It always tended to be the case in America a little bit, but then it got out of control in the last 60 years and, along with the internet, gave us Donald Trump.”
From Andersen’s perspective, as expressed in the podcast, much the same can be said about India too—which brings us to the different kinds of storytellers. To be clear, this is not about storytelling by grandparents related to folklore and legends that are meant to shape our moral compass and help us navigate the twists and turns of life, but about those whose storytelling is rooted in economic gain and in controlling hearts and minds to grab power.
The first kind banks on the most fantastic stories that grip the imagination of people and give them some reprieve from life’s daily grind—the motive is purely financial. This category also includes the selling of too-good-to-be-true financial windfalls on investments of varying amounts—for instance, pyramid schemes—and we have seen how so many people continue to fall for these scams. These scamsters are such glib talkers and smooth operators that people will themselves into a trance because they so desperately want to believe them.
The other kind of storytellers creates enemies, banking on people’s racial, religious and other biases and prejudices, and also creates doomsday scenarios, preying on fears and nightmares. So much hate and fear are generated that people become blinded to reality and imagine a world or country where the removal of “enemies” could make life better for them and enable them to control their destiny. It appears that somehow we have come to internalise the flawed belief that good storytelling requires an enemy—someone or something to hate—thus unleashing hatred to disable and destroy the enemy, thereby inverting the very concept of good versus evil.
When such a situation is deliberately created, minds become clouded—and this is precisely the motive, the agenda, of this kind of storyteller. It then becomes very easy to manipulate clouded minds, bringing them closer to achieving their goals of power, control and dominance.
This has happened throughout history across geographies. The enemy is always kept alive, and people are prevented from discerning reality from fiction. Yet we know that nobody is entirely good or entirely bad, and still we willingly focus on someone’s faults—and this is happening across the board. Storytelling is central to all cultures. That such a vibrant cultural tradition and heritage should be abused and misused for reprehensible ends calls for a rethink, given that storytelling essentially keeps alive a community’s moral compass and passes down its values—precisely because human hearts and minds are so vulnerable to manipulation.
Monalisa Changkija is a Dimapur-based veteran journalist, poet, and former Editor of Nagaland Page.