When some people think of President George W. Bush, they see a tough executive leading the fight against terrorism at home and abroad, a sincere born-again Christian supporting traditional values in a society that has lost its moral bearings and a crusader for freedom and democracy throughout the world. Others view the president as a hapless figurehead for shrewd political operatives and extractive capitalists, a cynical exploiter of bigoted, social attitudes for political gain and the head of an administration whose arrogance is only exceeded by its incompetence.

Since I include myself in the latter group, I was stunned by the outcome of the presidential election in 2004. I was sad and angry about the outcome of the election, but I was also frankly mystified by the fact that so many of my fellow Americans, including many people whose values I otherwise respect, seemed to view the world through a very different lens. We were all exposed to the same information, but clearly we were processing it very differently. We inhabit the same physical universe, with a similar biology and life expectancy and compared with everything else in our world, we humans seem to have a lot in common. Yet we spend an enormous amount of our time and energy in disputes about how the world works, how we should live, what we should believe and how to get others to agree with our point of view. On the face of it, it seems that these differing opinions could be resolved by an appeal to “facts” and the presentation of a compelling argument. But our divisions go beyond “disagreement.” We often can’t even get to the point where we share enough assumptions to have a decent argument. No amount of evidence, however relevant or damning, will transform a believer into a nonbeliever—or even into an agnostic. To truly change my mind about these fundamental issues is more than just getting me to confess to my poor prior judgment. It is to change my whole story about who I am and what gives meaning and value to my life.

By “change my whole story” I’m not just using a metaphor. There are many obstacles to communication, but I believe our human propensity to conceive the world through stories is a key to understanding our resistance to new ideas and perspectives. The dictionary definition of a story as “an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment” is too narrow for my purposes. I’m proposing that stories are nothing less than a core mode of consciousness, a way of orienting ourselves in the world and establishing and transmitting our values and ideals. By structuring our experience in the dimension of time, stories are one of the fundamental ways we humans cope with our knowledge of mortality. Our minds are adept at selecting events from our common experience and embedding them in a simple form that can be communicated and recalled. Stories are the fundamental way we learn about who we are and how we got here. These stories are told over and over, shared in groups and even in ritual settings to ground ourselves, to reinforce our social identity and to give stability and meaning to our lives.

Mark Twain, whose name is almost synonymous with great storytelling, said, “I like the truth sometimes, but I don’t care enough for it to hanker after it.” We all share in the tacit knowledge that many of our best and most important stories won’t bear close scrutiny; the expression “telling stories” can be synonymous with “telling lies.” There is, of course, a difference in intention between fiction and non-fiction, between story and history, but this is only a matter of degree. The recent scandals about the reliability of several best-selling “memoirs” mask the blur at this boundary. Even with the best intentions, telling the truth in the form of a story is not as easy as it sounds. The very act of telling a story reveals a way of seeing the world, a way of orienting our attitudes. Telling involves thousands of choices about what to say and how to say it, and there is no way to assure that every decision is unclouded by bias, nor could there be. Even when a story makes an honest claim on the truth, it embodies the attitudes of the storyteller, the motives that bring the story into being, facts included and excluded. Tellers use stories for different purposes: to illuminate, to entertain, to lead and to mislead.

In many ways reality is no bargain, and most people consume stories to distract them from the grim events that assault them every day. But stories can also give form and meaning to events, and the best stories, which we call literature, give even our most wrenching experiences a deeper meaning. Shakespeare’s King Lear and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment may be works of fiction, but they illuminate real emotions and ambitions and terrors. I might learn more about the Napoleonic invasion of Russia from reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace than through any work of academic history. The focus of my interest here, however, is not stories that are explicitly presented as fiction, but rather the way we structure our experience as if it were a story. We may not conceive of our most important stories as stories, but rather just as “the way things are”—and that is where we get into trouble. In spite of the fundamental role stories have in orienting us to our world, stories have an equivocal relationship with the truth. A story can degenerate into malicious gossip or intentional fabrication; it can unite one group against another or against an individual; and most destructively, it can be the foundation for fundamentalism, the deliberate refusal to understand or tolerate another point of view. Making a rational argument in the face of a powerful and cohesive story, however misleading or false, is a demanding and often impossible task. The truth of a story is irrelevant to its impact. History is filled with accounts of atrocities—from the Crusades to 9/11—motivated by the adherence to a particular account of the world in the form of a story. Stories have victors, but they also have victims.

The problem with stories is not that they can be used to mislead or to mask the facts, though they can certainly do that very effectively. The problem with stories is that just because they are stories they filter the facts. If a particular story accommodates new facts, they are immediately subsumed. If those facts don’t fit, they are turned away at the door and may never reach consciousness. To the degree that we live our lives through stories, our minds are subject to the formal constraints these forms impose. We know the heroes and the villains, we know who is the aggressor and who is the victim, and we know what can be expected of “those kinds of people.” We are no longer telling stories; the stories are telling us.