To beat fascism, tell better stories
On false narratives and the stories we need to tell
Part two of a short series on whom we vilify and why.
In my last post on villainy, I argued that conspiracies about aliens or demons miss the fact that regular life is quite strange and horrible enough to account for everything. We don’t need conspiracies to explain what capitalism makes us do. In fact, it’s disempowering to attribute the way the world is to forces completely beyond our control.
In this post I address conspiracies closer to home. Maybe mental illness and neurodivergence aren’t due to demonic possession, but surely we’d be better off selecting it out of existence through eugenics? Maybe the elites who run our country aren’t reptiles, but they’re Jews, which is almost as bad!
This layer of conspiracy is less fantastical, and therefore easier to believe. These theories target specific groups of people for entirely human reasons. They’re often responding to real grievances, and they always have a convenient scapegoat on whom to pin the blame. They’re also taught from a very young age. None of us are born prejudiced, but boy do we pick it up fast.
How do we respond to this? In a sense, we have whole fields and bodies of research, like feminism, critical race theory, and queer studies, designed to counter bias and bigotry. The whole Marxist tradition is one long explanation of why capitalism is destructive to human society. The problem is that people who anchor their prejudice in conspiracies are loathe to listen to any of it.
There are plenty of folks, however, who are on the fence or in the manosphere, and plenty of young people who are just waking up to political issues. These are the people we can reach by confronting the conspiracies undergirding so many of our biases. I think a lot of us also have a helpful trajectory in our own lives to draw on.
The thing to emphasize is that prejudices are to a large degree built on misleading abstractions instead of real people. They may be closer to reality than alien or supernatural horrors, but they still fall short of describing what’s really happening.
The best antidote to alternate reality is exposure to real people in the real world. Insisting on pulling magical thinking down to Earth, countering false narratives about groups of people or individuals, we humanize and personalize issues. Topics of debate, nebulous concerns over nefarious groups, become conversations about people with names and faces and families. Watching the ongoing genocide in Palestine on our smartphones did that work for many of us: we now see the truth on the ground before the propaganda machine even has a chance to twist it into something else.
And yet that’s not quite enough. Once we break down false narratives about fake abstractions, we’re left with a narrative gap. We have to tell stories about things to make sense of them. That’s where those long histories of resistance that developed into bodies of research and fields of study come into play. They all reframe the discussion by pointing to systems of oppression.
It’s an invitation to think big again: from the supernatural, to the stereotyped, to the real person in front of you — then back out from the individual to the social, and eventually the systems level.
If you really want to stick it to the man, first realize that there is no “man” in charge. At the top of all our powerful structures are the abstractions of money and profit. At their base are phantasmal images of people who aren’t real; stereotypes constructed from our fears and failures.
Conspiracies about groups of people based on their identity are effective because we can’t help but think in narrative terms. We can’t help but make abstractions and generalize. This doesn’t have to be a liability. If we break down false narratives underlying bias, bigotry, and prejudice as the baseless conspiracies they are, people are more able to see each other directly. But then we need to build back a different narrative, one based on real history and experience, so that we arm ourselves with a worldview more resilient to disinformation. None of us are immune to propaganda, but we can certainly vaccinate ourselves against it, so to speak.
This way of thinking may be challenging. It might seem boring compared to more comfortable conspiracies. Still, it’s always worth it to choose the boring truth over the interesting lie. Worth it for the sake of those targeted by lies, of course, but also worth it because it makes you a better thinker, a better informed person.
Nothing is more dangerous to the powers that be than a well-educated public that understands why things are the way they are.
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