Storytelling describes the social and cultural activity of telling stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories, narratives or worldview, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Storytelling can also be used as an insidious weapon for mind-control and to create chaos and violence.
Storytelling has always contained scary fiction but recently it has taken on a darker aspect. In seeking power, demagogues in particular have always skillfully used storytelling to create fear. As we examine the many stories being told around the global community today we find that truth has become a casualty and distinguishing reality from fiction a challenge. Peter Pomerantsev in his book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality reveals the challenge we must all deal with.
“To get people to vote the way you want, Pavlovsky [a former Kremlin spin doctor] says, ‘you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them.’ Pomerantsev visits the site of one such fairy tale by following activist Lyudmila Savchuk into the belly of the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg. There, an army of online trolls sow confusion and disinformation by posting pro-Russia articles and comments on websites worldwide.” (1)
Click on the link below for a continuing analysis of ghost stories and how to transcend the fear they produce.
Insight # 134: “Race is not a biological reality at all: It is nothing more than a social, cultural and political invention.”
Link:
- “Ghosts” in this blog and also in the print version, The Human Community (2016) by Roy Charles Henry, page 77.
References:
- Reich, Rebecca. “Not Necessarily the News.” The New York Times Book Review, August 18, 2019, page 12.
- Chandler, David L. “‘Race’ Biologically unreal.” The Denver Post, May 15, 1997.
