Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [98]
A Narrative Helps Make Sense of Chaos
But to represent Beck’s programs as simply a series of conspiracy theories is to sell him short. Beck is a storyteller. If he were to analyze a pie-throwing video for his audience, he wouldn’t just frame it as a political protest. He would first provide a history of tyrannical pie throwing by Adolf Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, and Che Guevara. Next he would play a clip of Van Jones promoting Native American “green pies.” Finally, he would show a video of Obama eating cream pie and warn, “I’m not saying that our president throws pies, but this is a man who has eaten cream pie his entire life. When will the country wake up and start asking, Why does he eat so much pie?”
For instance, on one program, Beck puzzled over the gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. As usual, he employed a conspiracy frame to explain the failure to plug the leak, concluding that BP and the U.S. government were deliberately allowing the oil to flow so that they could use the “emergency” as an excuse to pass a “cap-and-trade” environmental bill.6 But that’s not even close to the end of the story. For the environmental bill is itself just a pretense for an even more devious agenda. “In the cap-and-trade legislation that is being proposed,” Beck warned on another program, “the president has new emergency powers . . . and it allows the president to take over industries.”7 Once that happened, Beck revealed, “wicked” and “treasonous” progressives would finally complete the terrible tyrannical scheme that Woodrow Wilson planned and FDR set in motion. “This is the only power that FDR really wanted,” Beck explained. “Once they have cap and trade and God forbid they have healthcare it’s done.”8
Beck’s rich stories bring the conspiracy frame to life. His narratives capture his listeners’ attention and stir their imagination to make the explanations more compelling. Some psychologists theorize that the narrative is a basic organizing principle of the human mind. That is, we naturally try to make sense of the world by organizing our experiences into stories.9 This hypothesis has led to substantial research into the art of narrative persuasion, a technique for persuading people through storytelling. The concept has been applied to diverse fields ranging from legal argumentation to corporate sales pitches. One study found that hate groups used narrative persuasion as a kind of “sugar coating” to recruit new members, since “narratives elicit fewer counter arguments and less resistance to persuasion.”10
In addition to its propaganda role, storytelling may play an even more important function in persecution politics. If the narrative is indeed a basic organizing principle of the human mind, then the central character of the mind’s stories is the self. That is to say, each of us is the protagonist in his or her own life story, striving against adversity to achieve a happily-ever-after. Of course, some people take greater artistic license than others, which produces self-deception. Some psychologists argue that paranoid individuals have, like Don Quixote, been so seduced by fantasies of their lives that they become victims of delusion. 11 For example, psychologist Michael Bader explained the paranoia of Tea Party activists in terms of such narratives, writing:
The paranoid strategy is to generate a narrative that finally “explains it all.” A narrative . . . helps make sense