McMusing: What is a Narrative Fallacy?
The human need to understand often results in creating narratives about things we cannot explain.
I am not big on labeling phenomena to explain why people do what they do. Yet, it is often useful to find a category for what I have come to understand. Narrative Fallacy would fit in that category. It can be explained as the way humans make up stories—narratives—about things that occur. Sometimes it involves hindsight, sometimes it is just creative imagination.
Not long ago Scott and I began realizing how often we create narratives. We would either observe or experience something and immediately create an entire backstory about it, complete with cause and motivations. Once we caught ourselves doing this, we began to say, "I just made that up." Sometimes we would enjoy creating wilder and wilder false narratives just for the fun of it.
The problem arises when we build narratives about good or bad things that happen to us and attribute them to what we did to cause it (sometimes that is true, but not always). Or we blame or give credit to God. Often we believe that if we follow those same steps in exactly the same way, the exact same result will happen. Believing this is true works for some things, some of the time but life is simply not that predictable. And when we attribute the good or bad thing to God we are headed to a very rigid spiritual life.
The truth is that life is random. Yes, hard work brings success, but not always. Building a narrative around that fact sounds like any of the following:
When I do xxx God will prosper and protect me.
This good or bad thing happened because I did xxx.
If everyone would do xxx like I did, they too would be blessed.
The reason this happened to that person is because they did or did not do xxx.
Do you see the progression toward judgment? Job's friends were well-versed in that path. It happens because we build false narratives around things that happen, believe that everything is a cause-effect event (forgetting the idea of correlation), and ignore any evidence to the contrary (such as Job's friends had never actually witnessed any spiritual or moral failure that would have caused the calamity--so it must be hidden sin).
Even though everything in us wants life to be logical, it isn't. For instance, super cautious people got COVID while others who threw all caution to the wind didn't. Did you feel yourself start trying to build a narrative around that? The more strongly you believe in cause and effect applying to everything, the greater the urge to construct false narratives.
I work hard to keep myself from doing this with my trauma work. Not everything maladaptive is the result of trauma--a lot of it is, but it is not a cause-and-effect surety. On a global scale, I can view the effects of trauma--absolutely. But I cannot make up a story based on individual's actions. This means that I need to curb my false narratives and actually form a relationship that properly informs me as to the story.
I run into this often with my own story. When I say that I experienced childhood sexual abuse human beings will naturally build a narrative about my story. I often share the story, not because I need to, but because there are things that are assumed that are not true. They may be true for others, but that is not my story. Building narratives is what we do and it is absolutely normal--and necessary for survival. But one of the most healing things we can do is to recognize this tendency long enough to get to know who someone really is and not the story we created about them.
The following is a beautiful story of how Jesus saw others. It is harder for us because we cannot see before we see, or know the internal character. We are not Jesus. To be like Jesus, we need to do the work to come to know other people as they actually are.
When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, he said of him, “Here truly is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”
“How do you know me?” Nathanael asked.
Jesus answered, “I saw you while you were still under the fig tree before Philip called you.”
No, we are not Jesus, but we can learn to be more like him when engaging with others. I am sure Nathaniel wasn't a perfect person. Jesus focused on his strongest attribute. Amazing.
Wow yes! Is it ever easy to do this when we don't know a person or take time to listen and get to know them. I am deep-nosed into some discipleship planning and when I think of the ways I have been taught on how to disciple someone in growing their relationship with Jesus, so much of the time was taught to start at a different ground zero, assuming a narrative that may or may not be true. How many people whose path of growth could've been more if we would have backed up and gotten to know the whole person instead of proceeding forward through "our" set of experiences we thought they needed to have to grow. Be still and get to know...