I've been in the tech industry for about 15, 16 years now and while there's a lot of superlatives
that one would clearly use about technology companies and digital companies, our record
I think in communications is a little bit more mixed and there's plenty of embarrassing
campaigns that have been out there over the time that I'm sure we're all aware of.
So our next speaker has spent the last couple of days helping people with a two-day version
of his much more famous four-day seminar learning about the craft of telling and writing stories
and we've asked him to give the final address of the day and I'm really very proud to welcome
Robert to our stage.
So Robert, if you would join us that would be great, thanks very much.
Thank you very much.
Those two previous talks were wonderful.
I do appreciate Bird Song and I read once an article by an ornithologist about Bird
Song and he explained it a very different way.
He said that when a bird is nesting the male bird goes into song virtually 24 hours a day
in order to let all the other birds in the area know that he is healthy, that he is young
and he will defend his nest and if his bird song falters they will then move into his
territory and peck him to fucking death.
And so I'm going to look at the other side of the coin.
I teach a lecture about story and we've talked for the last couple of days about the art
of story, the craft of story, the elements of story and the relationship but it was for
the most part looking at story as fiction of course and many of you are of course scientists
and you are business people and both and so I thought I would just take a few minutes today
and look at story in relationship to life and in relationship to what we call facts and
look at story as we use it in our own lives and to hopefully live better and the starting
point of understanding the place of story and life and the relationship between story
and fact is to first of all realize that there's no such thing as an innocent story.
There's no such thing really as story is just entertainment, no matter children's stories,
Hollywood action films, etc, none of this is innocent because every story contains an
idea that is wrapped inside of an emotion and it takes ideas and it embeds ideas into
people irrationally and the story itself may be sound and logical but it is delivered,
the meaning of it is delivered inside of an emotional experience and a feeling experience
and that is why Plato wanted all the storytellers thrown out of Athens.
He said these poets are dangerous people, they deal in ideas but they do not deal in
ideas in a rational, logical, philosophical way, instead they wrap their ideas in the
beautiful emotions of poetry but these are ideas nonetheless and they have tremendous
effect on people without them realizing that in fact they are being affected by these ideas
and so I want all of these people exiled from Athens and stuffy people like Plato are always
of course afraid of emotion because ideas can be manipulated.
As we know every day we turn on the TV or listen to any politician open their mouths
and we know for a while how ideas can be manipulated but when people get angry, when
people get upset, when people get emotional then things change and so storytelling as
an art form is a very powerful form, it is in my sense of things the most powerful way
to put ideas into the world and so it cannot be done irresponsibly and whether a storyteller
works from fact in a biographical way or documentary way, from memory or from imagination the storyteller
is for better or worse a life poet and as such as I said it comes with a great responsibility
the storyteller's task then is not just to express what life, what is but to make it
meaningful and emotional simultaneously and to give us a meaningful emotional sense of
what it is to be a human being or to be alive in this existence and this is a no small task
because life itself of course is the problem ever since the first pre-homo sapien thought
the thought, the first human thought, the thought I am and came to realize that they
exist and suddenly created the famous mind body split, life then has become the great
problem for all of us because we can no longer live off of our genetic imperatives but we
somehow have to make sense out of this because the next thought after the first human thought
I am came the next obvious thought and some day I will not be and the realization that
in time death will take us all, the realization that we are now living in what will be our
future corpse is both terrifying and of course dreadful and living, simply living day to
day does not teach us how to live, human beings are in fact not made to live, human beings
were simply made to survive and in order to survive the mind then does whatever it needs
in order to keep itself alive and the mind then is capable of rationalizing any evil
into a good and all we need to do once again is turn on the TV and we see all the horrendous
evil in the world and come to realize if you give it any thought at all that each and every
person in the world who is doing what we think is evil they think is good and they probably
think it is not just a moral good they probably believe that they are doing a spiritual good
that they are doing God's work and once we come to realize that then you realize that
every one of us is capable of such and that there is no fundamental difference between
cutting someone off in traffic and cutting them off by the head, the structure is the
same, there is the desire to do harm, there is the action of doing harm and then there
is the pleasure in the harm that we do as we give somebody the finger in our rear view
mirror and smile because we just gave him a little bit of suffering that is evil and
we all do it in the tiniest of ways but under whatever circumstances we realize we are all
capable of doing it in massive ways because we are just human and we have to survive and
so merely living within our human nature does not answer Aristotle's great question how
should a human being lead their life and in order to get an answer to that question what
is worth living for what is foolish to pursue and once we understand what is worth living
for how do we then lead our lives in that direction humanity has invented four wisdoms
philosophy, science, theology and art four grand ways to apprehend reality and try to
give ourselves the answer to that great question how should a human being lead their life but
today philosophy who reads Kantor Spinoza that doesn't have an exam to pass?
Religion has become an evangelical joke as we see the horrors that are done in the name
of religion and always have been done in the name of religion and science I know many of
you of course are sciences but there was a time back in the 19th century when the world
thought that science would finally explain everything that science would answer Aristotle's
question indeed and for decades people look forward to the day when science would finally
give us all the answers but now we know of course as our last speaker was just pointing
out that with every invention every new gizmo and gimmick that science creates it simply
layers the world with yet another level of toxicity and oral toxicity is one of the worst
and so what is left where do people go to get the answer to that grand question God help
them they go to the movies looking for models of life trying to understand as I said it
is never innocent people don't go there just for diversion it's never just for entertainment
I mean that's the excuse what they really want is to experience a meaningful model of
what it is to be a human being to reinforce perhaps there already believe a stead beliefs
in that good will triumph over evil or whatever and that they're losing faith in and so they
go to the storyteller to have that reinforced but the point is that they go to the storyteller
in order to get the answer to that great question in order to experience a model of what it
is to be a human being so that they can then somehow shape their own existence out of that
understanding because the chaos of chaos of our days of course simply does not give us
what we need a great critic Kenneth Burke said in the 1920s I'm sure he said stories
are equipment for living life does not equip us to live stories do they give us understanding
of how human beings lives are thrown out of balance how they struggle to restore the balance
of life and the consequences of their choices and actions and indeed story whether fictional
or factual whether realistic or fantasy gives life its form story mirrors life story in
fact mirrors the mind there's been a great enterprise certainly by science of all kinds
social sciences but also neurology and others trying to understand how the human mind works
and the one grand idea that they understanding that they have achieved in the last decade
is that the first and foremost story organizes I'm sorry the mind organizes life as a story
this is how we put things together and understand things when we think back when we remember
our life and try to make sense out of our life how do we remember it as a series of
facts as a deductive inductive argument of course not we take it and we create a little
story for ourselves a little inciting incident in which things went out of balance for ourselves
the struggle we went through to restore the balance how and why eventually the balance
was restored or not but we put the past together into a little story in order to understand
ourselves and our own existence story is a model of expectation of anticipation of planning
for the future when you think toward the future toward what you hope will happen or you dread
might happen how do you try to prepare yourself for life you imagined a little story for yourself
a coherent story with a beginning a middle and end a hypothetical story that somehow
then prepares you for life that is just what we do each and every day in order to organize
our own life but in order to live as fully and deeply as we can we need great artists
we need great storytellers to take that natural human capacity to organize life into story
and tell stories that are brilliantly profound whether they are comic or tragic or tragic
comic to give us a deep insight into life and society has depended upon the storyteller
for 4,000 years or much more than that 4,000 years of written stories since the Gogomish
and who knows how many tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before that
of oral storytelling but the problem is this the storytelling has to be of quality every
generation has to tell the same fundamental stories over and over in their own vernacular
in their own way but the storytelling must be true it must be honest it must be beautiful
and powerful somehow because when storytelling becomes false when storytelling becomes weak
in a culture life becomes corrupt and decadent and by corrupt I do not mean that that word
in the political sense of we become criminal I don't mean it in the religious sense that
we become immoral I don't even mean it in the original Latin sense that we become simply
rotten or all three of those things are certainly possible I mean that life becomes inauthentic
it becomes shallow narrow insensitive intellectually and emotionally impoverished a decadent life
is a mono life a flattened constricted emptied out life due to ignorance addictions fanaticism
cruelty greed any of the dark forces that suck humanity out of human beings and so we
need honest insightful storytellers to shine a bright light into the dim corners of human
nature and society and express the truth and it is not enough merely to express the truth
in the sense of exposing what it is to human be a human being but the storyteller must
tell the story so compellingly and so well that in fact they prove it to the audience
that the audience is persuaded indeed of that truth against all the other competitors for
truth and it's not enough just to write a book tell a story in a novel produce a play
or film or television show and have people turn it off with a sense of not having wasted
their time I mean that's an achievement right there but rather that they turn it off nodding
thinking yes that's the truth that's how just how ridiculous human beings are that's how
magnificent human beings are that's what it is to be a human being and and this is regardless
of genre of course and regardless of of the the medium it simply must be convincing as
Aristotle said a convincing impossibility is to be preferred to an unconvincing possibility
and this is true even of course especially perhaps when you're working from fact stories
based upon fact documentaries and instructional videos of all kinds stories based upon fact
the actuality must be convincing it simply because it is based upon fact does not make
it true and it does not make it convincing there are of course three great methods and
we've seen just this afternoon those methods at work there are three great methods of persuasion
as rhetoric the PowerPoint presentation of point point point point fact fact statistic
statistic demonstration demonstration etc therefore and that can be very persuasive of course
as I was enormously persuasive I don't think I'm going to do the paper folding thing but
but I am certainly going to be much more aware of sound and respectful not just of music
but of silence because I'm guilty of playing music in the background while I'm working
to which now that you pointed out really sounds stupid and so rhetoric is a powerful means
of persuasion but so is appeals to emotion and we saw the good bit of that there's two
ways to appeal to emotion one is coercion this is an appeal of course to the negative
emotions in people through various tactics of intimidation threats and bigotry and envy
and anger and fear and that's in a nutshell the political commercial this is what politicians
do in order to gain your vote is they find various means to intimidate us of course and
that too can be very persuasive the other is seduction which is an appeal to the positive
emotions in people through tactics of pleasure giving in association with whatever product
or idea they're trying to convince us of and they can show us wonderful pictures or sounds
of course of nature the sea the mountains landscapes and animals and whatnot that are
all pleasure for us then fact that there's ten various pleasure possibilities and persuasion
you can make associations with community appeals to family and to belonging to a group in the
parent-child relationship the physical pleasures of course of laughter just having fun good
food good wine good times social power appealing to people through their desire to achieve
wealth and prestige victory of all sorts we just heard paparazzi I win right and so we
love sports for that reason it gives us a chance to experience a sense of victory there's
the aesthetic pleasures of art and the great the great pleasure of knowledge and good health
and of course the spiritual and the most persuasive pleasure of all sex and all of those then
can be used in various forms to try to persuade people by either intimidating them or giving
them seducing them with pleasure the third way to convince people persuade people is
to tell them a story because story incorporates all of that story incorporates information
but dramatizes the information it doesn't give it and in a logical way doesn't give
it inductively or deductively in that sense but it does give it a causal logic at the
same time as as I said it wraps it the storytelling inside of the beautiful emotions of just aesthetic
pleasure the emotions of the vicarious emotions of the storytelling itself a positive or negative
the aesthetic experience of emotion is a deep pleasure ask any kid who goes to horror films
okay and they literally have the skit the piss scared out of them and they love it okay
and so that takes a negative emotion and turns it into something very satisfying compare
for example three nature documentaries an inconvenient truth which is rhetoric winged
migration which is pure visual pleasure if you know that film just birds lying forever
versus it was beautiful versus another bunch of birds March of the penguins and I would
argue that more people were persuaded to do something for penguins after March of the
penguins then then an inconvenient truth and or winged migration because it told a story
about little parent penguins and their little baby penguins and the terrible struggle to
survive in the Antarctic story persuades because unlike the other forms story admits the negative
the only way to tell a story is to throw life out of balance rouse in a character the protagonist
the desire to restore the balance of life and then they go into heady conflict with the forces
from their own inner lives their own mind body and emotions forces from their personal
lives friends family lovers society institutions in society individuals in those institutions
and the physical world itself and the story then is told dynamically by moving the character
to the negative and exposing indeed all the negative forces in life as as this character
may confront them then turns back to the positive as the character finds some means to struggle
through those negative forces in pursuit of the balance of life whatever object of desire
we call it that the character feels we restore the balance of life but then it goes back
to the negative as the forces of antagonism multiplying concentrate and focus and on it goes
positive negative positive negative and as a result someone experiencing a story where the
storyteller has moved them in that dynamic comes out persuaded because they realize that when
people use rhetoric they hide every fact that contradicts what they have to say when people
use statistics they manipulate them when people use all of the various devices even the emotional
devices like sex and advertising and whatnot they don't bother to show you venereal disease
they don't admit the negative and as a result if somebody sitting there listening to that kind
of effort to persuade is thinking every contradictory thought and you may or may not persuade them
if you're good you may but if not they have their own authorities their own statistics
their own way of seeing things but story takes people emotionally into another person's
life and turns them back and forth between the positive and negative and persuades them
of the truth even if the if the audience doesn't like that truth and indeed the most important
truths in life are inevitably bitter truths and so I give my lectures around the world
in order to help people tell stories more effectively in order to express themselves as artists
or in many cases persuade of course the world realizing that story may be equipment for
living as indeed it is but that doesn't mean that all stories are good and the great danger
of course is the people will use the power of story for harm and that there's ugly stories
there's lies there's propaganda and that very effective storytelling can tell a lie just
as readily as it tells the truth and you can wrap lies in emotions just as much as you
can wrap truth in emotion and that that Plato wasn't altogether wrong the storytellers are
indeed dangerous people and so all I ever do is when I'm done with a lecture I simply
say tell your stories tell them from the heart tell them as beautifully as you know how and
then once you finish the story and you look down at it and you ask for its meaning the
story tells you its meaning the story expresses how and why life changes and when you understand
the meaning of your work the next question I would ask you to ask yourself is and do
I believe that is this an honest expression of what it is to be a human being do I believe
in the meaning of my own creation and if the answer is yes then do everything possible to
get that into the world but if the answer is no you don't actually believe the meaning
of what you've done then please do us all a favor this is why God gave us the delete
key thank you all.
