The following is my transcript of a part of Angus Fletcher’s speech for the Revisionist History⇢ podcast:
M: — Why is it that telling you a story about how your life is transformed by some random arbitrary thing — why does it zero in on that part of your brain?
A.F.: — …thing that’s important is that human life did no start out being moral, morality is something that was invented and morality is the idea that good things lead to good things. And logic is invented, and logic is the idea that good people have good things happen to them. If you just go back to a state of nature what people are interested in is not the morality — but medicine. People were interested in how do I solve problems, how do I reduce pain, how do I increase pleasure. And morality’s answer to those questions are: “oh, if you are a good person then you’ll be happy”, but of course that is not how things work in the real world, biologically that’s not the case.
And so early on when we were free of morality, when we were free essentially of the patriarchs telling us the Ten Commandments and the rest of it — nature could triumph and nature’s answer to how do you make a human brain feel better is to remind a human brain of the biological fact that good could come from bad, that luck exists at least from the perspective of a human brain (cause human brain you know, can quantify the reasons why everything happens) and just hang on there, hold on.
And you’re much more likely to succeed in life if you’re an optimist and so the more that our brain is optimist the more we thrive, the more people around us thrive, and so optimism is just a kind of an evolutionary benefit. And so you can kind of see why these stories won out in the absence of morality, which is an artificial system imposed largely by the Enlightenment.
And he reality is that storytelling should be an experiment, it should be messy, it should allow for mistakes, and audiences are actually very forgiving of mistakes and what you might think of as being bad stories, because really what the audiences are most interested in is the story that takes them somewhere new, is the story that takes a chance, is the story that is brave, and audiences will follow that kind of story anywhere.