Gavin Francis, writing in the London Review of Books:
It’s through stories that we shape meaning, and we need to get better at explaining how pernicious and destructive the wrong stories can be.
The remark comes at the end of his review of a book about cases of mass hysteria or illness, The Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories of Mystery Illness, by Suzanne O’Sullivan.
But it resonates far beyond that context.
Unfortunately, most of us opt for binary thinking and simple stories that relieve us of the burden of critical thinking and the discomfort of ambiguity. The results are, as Gavin Francis says, pernicious and destructive.