https://mobile.twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1202293593337139201
Book I’m reading claims we developed language in order to gossip, the purpose of gossip being to control members of the tribe by increasing or decreasing their status. If your status dropped low enough that you were ostracized, it could mean death. All that will happen to Trump is he’ll end up spending all his time at his shithole resorts mumbling about what a funny thing he said about Trudeau that one time.
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What book? I’m pretty big on this theory. Not like that’s the only reason, but it’s a big part of it. It’s also grooming - chimps picking bugs off of each other.
I had to be a fast talker as a kid, as I grew up in a hood… It helped alot to be able to drown out the noise and just talk over folks who seen you as a target, which brings us right to the Rap battles being a better source of reducing violence than actual pro active work from the police.
It’s this approach that helped our schemes reduce the gangs by being able to have a shouting match to get out the anger, then debate the problems and then move to prevention and solutions.
Unfortunately Facebook does not have a adult moderator and now the kids use it to start stuff. 
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The Science of Storytelling, by Will Storr. Chimp society is mentioned in this connection. For me, it’s the most eye-opening book I’ve read in a long time. If I could fucking focus, I’d probably have finished it in a couple of days. Everyone here should read it, imo. I’ll write a post for the book thread when I’m done.
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You should read this if you haven’t:
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It’s what our city is famous for… Goto any place here and someone will tell you a funny tale. 
I’m sure that’s true! Here is part of an exchange I had with ChrisV almost 2 years ago. It stuck with me and now this book has helped fill out some of these ideas.
Devil: I recall hearing another talk where it was claimed that all we are, as individuals, are our stories. So like we can’t even remember childhood events before a certain point because we hadn’t yet started to construct our story. Story forms like a framework for personality and experience so that we wouldn’t really have a sense of continuity of our lives or selves without it- we’d be more like what we imagine animals to be.
ChrisV: Yeah. The self is a story we tell, that’s all it is really. Cognitive behaviour therapy is an effort to change the story. Meditation is, in large part, an effort to step outside the story and release the hold it has over us.
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cruelty LSD needs to be thrown in the mix here.
It’s also very interesting how other people are stories for us and how easy it is to fuck up or how amazing it is that we maintain such consistency. You sure better perfectly know your own story in a very unconscious and reflexive way if you’re going to maintain the kind of consistency you need lest you have people gossiping about you.
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Someone definitely needs to dose Donald with some LSD ASAP.
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In an alternate universe where Steny Hoyer did what Devin Nunes did, Devin Nunes’ quote here is something like, “I think the despicable actions of Mr. Hoyer raise serious questions in terms of whether we should only expel him from Congress and charge him with federal crimes, or should just throw him in a black site jail without a trial. I want to see what my Dear Leader thinks before I opine on what else, if anything, ought to be done.”
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I don’t have anything to add right now except to say I’m enjoying this discussion with you and @Devil. I love researching the mechanisms of storytelling.
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Storytelling is modeling. We have a model of reality that includes submodels of the world and everything in it, down to the meanings of individual words, but most importantly including ourselves and other people.
We need to control the world and others to get what we need so our brains have developed to do this modeling, to create and tell stories. Ofc not all of our models are good or accurate or useful. There’s constant conflict between the story in our head and the world and the stories in other people’s heads.
Most of the time we can twist facts to convince ourselves our story is the right one but sometimes the conflict is too big, and something breaks. That’s when the interesting stories happen. The book uses numerous examples from literature, but you can see it going on every day. Like when George Conway stops being a slappy and eventually starts going after his own wife on twitter. That’s an interesting fucking story.
Frans de Waal’s writing is referenced a number of times in the Science of Storytelling, fwiw.
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You might enjoy Storr’s book. I think he’d say that what his book adds is a neuroscience perspective.
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I will check this out! Thank you for the suggestion. I’m glad you guys leaned into this topic.
Have you read any Walter Fisher? He passed away last year at the ripe age of 88. Still too young, but then we all are. He pioneered something called the Narrative Paradigm, which says narratives are the means by which we make sense of complex information. It’s a kind of algorithm that enables us to process vast chunks of information that would otherwise overwhelm us.
I was reading recently that this mode of perception is a huge difference between neuro-typical and neuro-divergent people, such as those with autism. And, at least according to noted autist and autism speaker Temple Grandin, for neuro-typical humans vs dogs. Dogs have episodic rather than serialized memory, so while they remember episodes, it’s the difference in Friends vs Lost.
So when you see your dog lying on the floor, looking off into the distance, it’s not just lying there with a blank slate. That puppy is thinking about stuff. Dog stuff. It might even be remembering a specific memory of you or what it ate for breakfast. But it lacks the prefrontal development that would let it also construct a complex, overarching narrative (though that’s not to say dogs aren’t likely perceiving some sort of serialized sense of self).
To me, that’s an oddity even if it’s a reality. Neuro-typical people easily miss all sorts of things, because they aren’t needed for (or perhaps contradict lol) their narrative. But more than that, too much detail interferes in our ability to construct a stable narrative.
People with autism (and dogs) tend to be hyper-specific such that even to the degree they’re able to generalize for self-centered narratives, the generality will be hyper-specific. They find it hard or impossible not to notice every little detail, especially if something is different. I once walked one of my dogs in the snow, and I didn’t even notice this tiny clump of dirty snow, because to me, I’d already processed that snow as all snow, but for this dog, THAT IS NEW INFORMATION.