The Hero's Journey

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conspiracy theories sound the call to adventure to every individual believer. You are sucked into the story, ike a vr event like i choose your own adventure story and you become the hero of the story. The narrative also gives peoplesome people, something that they really, really need. They get an enormous amount of meaning from it. And what i've noticed in recent years is that people really resist when you try to take their villains away,.You are leaving them bereft of so much meaning. It's very hard to give this up. There's so much community involved in it. This isn't just about conspiracors - we can all be heroes ourselves if we put our minds to

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?”