What's the Most Important Thing in the World?

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Yen: I think we've been guilty of lampooning the other side or, like, you know, making fun of them. But all these cuanon people, and the guy who goes into comet ping pong, and even the tree of life shooter, they're acting out of an impulse that has some sort of nobility to it. And so i feel like the sympathy we should have for people who fall into these beliefs is something like this. Almost everything that we have inside of our heads, we we didn't come up with it ourselves. We got it from somebody else. Theyr uthe hve they've adopted bad stories.

Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.

In The Story Paradox, Gottschall explores how a broad consortium of psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary quants are using the scientific method to study how stories affect our brains.

In this conversation based on his new book, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset has become our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. It is a call to stop asking, “How we can change the world through stories?” and start asking, “How can we save the world from stories?”