Power Fictions Pt.2: Layers & Layers

Quick Review from the last post (although if you haven't already, please read Part 1 of this post before reading any further). Why did I feel like I was being brainwashed when I was in Law School? Because the legal field is awash in Power Fictions. What are Power Fictions? Made-up stories that exert themselves into reality. Lawyers do this all the time. A law, a rule, a regulation is written as a fictional story that has nothing to do really with how the world works. But...if it's ratified, then this fictional story begins to have a real impact on real people in the real world. A contract is a fictional story about an agreement between two people or organizations that does not actually exist. If both sides agree to the fictional story, then it becomes legally binding, and I can use it to sue you if you try to change the plot.

Power Fictions can have profound influence in the world. Think of Nazi Germany and the fiction of the Third Reich that brainwashed an entire nation. And they don't always even have to be bad. Think of Manifest Destiny or the American Dream, which inspired us all to strive for a better life (You can certainly make an argument that these have both had negative consequences, but they're not necessarily bad). Power Fictions are not just embedded within the Legal Field. They are everywhere around us.

Marketers, for example, compose Power Fictions routinely as part of their job. Marketers don’t just tell you facts about their product, so that you can make an informed decision. They generate an elaborate fiction about how the world works in order to influence your decisions. They tell stories about people drinking Coca-Cola and then rollerblading on the boardwalk or something. This marketing technique has absolutely nothing to do with the product they’re selling. They create a fictional story painting their product as some sort of hero, and the association between the imagined fun of rollerblading on the boardwalk and the reality of drinking a Coke becomes a real and almost inescapable connection in your mind.

Politicians compose Power Fictions to compel you to vote for them or for their party. They tell you that the world works like this, and how stupid and ridiculous is that. If you vote for me, I’ll make the world work like this. Won’t that be beautiful? And none of that is true. They create a fictional version of the world that best supports the platform they’re running on, and they create a fictional version of the future that they allegedly hope to create.

Scientists create Power Fictions. I can see you doubting. You think scientists tell the truth, focus on only the facts. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. That’s probably the greatest meta-Power Fiction that scientists tell – that they deal only the facts. That's really a modernist way of looking at it, compartmentalizing fact as the domain of science and reason. Things are blurrier than that. Postmodern Theologian, John Caputo explains, “Reason has its own desires and its own passion. There is subjective passion that drives scientific research.” Here’s an example, science tells us that the rate of gravity is a constant when, in reality, the rate of gravity is typically measured with tiny fluctuations. The scientific community attributes these fluctuations to human error. This isn’t a fact. It’s a fiction. There is no empirical evidence that every fluctuation is caused by human error, it is a fiction created by those who believe or want to hold that the rate of gravity is constant. Even the very concept of something being a constant is fictitious.

Think of radiocarbon dating. It only works as a concept, because the radioactive decay of carbon is considered to be a constant. Half of a carbon sample is predicted to decay in 5,730 years. What empirical evidence could we possibly have for that? Was there some secret family passing down some carbon sample from generation to generation over the last 5 millenia? No. It's not a fact. It’s just a prediction based on the measurements we’ve taken over the last century or so. It’s a story. A fact has a time and place. The function of the constant in science seems to be to make something a "fact" for all time and in all places. That's ridiculous. It makes no sense. You would literally have to redefine what a fact is for that to be possible. But if you look at a constant as a fictional story rather than a fact, then it has so much more roundness and fullness to it.

A constant is actually a math term for a value in an algebraic equation that will never change. In the equation 3x+18=y, the numbers 3 and 18 are the constants. They will never change in this particular equation. So there is a desire, even almost a need within the scientific community, to identify "constants" in the real world, so we can craft equations that have something to say about reality. The constant is the fictional story that makes possible all of the mathematical predictions that science is able to make about the physical world. It's genius, really. And that is how science works. It doesn't just work with facts. Science is much more interesting and creative than that. Science creates elegant solutions to hard, chaotic, and messy problems within reality. It creates structure and gives language to things that we observe in the world. But science doesn't have a stronghold on understanding how the noumenal world (the world itself), actually works. Scientists create fictional stories that allow them to create a model of the way we think the world itself actually works. And these models are powerful and useful. But there is no such thing as a constant in reality. For something in reality to be a constant, it would have to be exactly the same every time we observe or measure it. And there is no way to predict all future measurements of something. And even with the rate of gravity, which we thought was a constant for centuries, has proven in recent years to behave differently between stars and planets than it does between electrons.

I'm not trying bash science at all. Science is an incredible thing in so many ways. I’m just saying that the scientific community creates, propagates, and relies upon fictional stories to create other correlative theories about the world. They deal in fictions not facts like we think they do for some reason. And facts are totally overrated anyway. Stories are much more powerful and inspiring. Facts can be skewed and spun. Facts are weak and uninteresting. Fictions can move people.

Even the scientific method itself is loosely based on the idea of Power Fictions. You start with some questions and you use those questions to gather a small sample of relevant data. Ok. That’s good. But then you use that data to create a theory. This theory is a Power Fiction. First of all, think about how a scientist’s work is funded. The funding will only continue if his testing and research begins to show evidence in the real world that supports this fiction that he made up. So, in order to maintain his funding, the scientist might either “spin” his results to make them appear more promising than they are or he might construct a testing environment that is most conducive to his theory to sort of skew the actual data.

Secondly, theories that gain clout in the scientific community for whatever reason, become the model or the lens through which we see the world. So this fiction rises to esteem, and we write it into textbooks, educate a generation on it as if it is factually above reproach, and we build corollary and adjacent models for seeing the world around this fictional theory...until the day when another (perhaps better, perhaps not) fiction comes along to take its place. This happens all the time. Herman Melville even said, "Every human science is but a passing fable." Think about the rate of gravity we spoke about earlier. Einstein had to rethink Newton's concept of gravity. And now his new model is even being re-evaluated. Think about our model of the atom. Our understanding of subatomic particles is constantly changing. Think about the progressive model of human evolution. We now "know" that the gradual progression from chimpanzee to homo erectus to Neanderthal to homo sapiens was a complete fabrication -- there is evidence that many species of human were alive on Earth simultaneously. Think about our understanding of the brain, which is constantly shifting, with various fictions rising and falling away. All fictions. Every one of them. And that's what makes a scientist brilliant. A good scientist might try to deal with what he thinks are facts. But a great scientist is innovating, leaping, assuming, fictionalizing!

Anyway, I feel like I could go on and on about Power Fictions embedded within science, but I think you get my point. I’m not saying that science is bad or anything like that. I’m not trying to discredit it at all. Science has taken humanity to incredible heights and in many ways, has made life on Earth better than it was before (though not in other ways). I just think we need to keep our eyes open to the Power Fictions that are influencing our lives, and there are many many Power Fictions within the realm of science, which is a discipline that purports to focus on facts. But the fact is that scientists are constantly concocting stories that align with a certain way of seeing the world – not with reality. And science itself is really an enormous and profound Power Fiction when you think about it. It is a symbol, a model, a narrative to help us humans imagine how the world works.

You might be saying that all fiction works this way. All fiction works to shape you and the world around you. Yes, but most fiction, like other art forms, works to shape the world through inspiration, through transforming your awareness of things, and opening your mind to new possibilities. Power Fiction shapes the world through authority, power, manipulation, positioning, etc. Power Fiction exerts its reality upon you. In my mind, good Fiction is like a loving parent with a 24-year-old child. It shares and teaches and gives advice, but ultimately lets you make your own choices. Power Fiction is like a parent with a 24-month-old child. It picks you up and moves you to a different spot. It feeds you and takes food away according to its own needs. It blocks your path to the places it restricts. Now Power Fiction, like parents, could be well-intentioned or not…could have a positive impact on you or not. But the goal is to control you, to exert its own agenda, to create the parameters within which you live by thwarting, overriding, or manipulating your own freedom to choose.

If you keep your eyes open, you can see Power Fictions everywhere. And they affect practically every decision we make. Let’s say you’re building a house. You decide to build a house, because the lovely, young family at church that sits in the back pew every Sunday is building a new house, and you’ve been following the progress on Facebook and Instagram. And it just seems soooooo exciting. And if they can have it, so can you. Ok. So…You need to hire a contractor. You call a few contractors, but you’re not exactly calling people. You’re calling corporations, fictional characters that somebody created. And you get some bids. Those bids are Fictions. They don’t really know how much it’s going to cost. They quote you the fictional amount that they think is most likely to make them the most amount of money. So you choose the contractor that created the fiction that you think will save you the most money. And you sign a contract with this fictional company. This contract is a fictional story about an agreement that doesn’t really exist until you sign it. Ok. Now you want to build your house in a specific location, but your contractor tells you you have to build it 10 feet to the left, because legally, your house has to be so far away from a roadway or your property line. So some lawyer wrote a fictional story 40 years ago that determines where you can build your house today. You want to build a detached 3-car garage for your car, your spouse’s car, and your son’s car, but your Home Owner’s Association steps in. There’s an HOA regulation that says you can’t build a detached garage bigger than so many square feet. So you have to build an attached garage, which completely changes the plans for your house, and the cost of your fictional estimate increases by $25,000. All the lumber in your new house is from Busy Beaver, because your contractor plays a regular golf game every Wednesday with the Store Manager there, and he gave your contractor his stainless propane grill for free. Now, your contractor feels guilty for the free grill and buys all his lumber from Busy Beaver. And the shingles are all from 84 Lumber because of their marketing campaign for that particular line of shingles. And when the worker from the contracting company you hired goes to Lowe’s to buy nails, he buys Blue Hawk nails, because the packaging makes him feel manly, and he wants to look good for the cute girl at the register. Your house is completed 7 weeks late and $33,000 over budget.

These are all fictional stories that are shaping your life. I call those Power Fictions – fictional stories that exert themselves upon reality. Your reason for building the house in the first place is based off of the fictional story your friends are telling on Facebook, and the fiction that you tell yourself about what you desire for yourself and your family. You hire a fictional character to build your house, because he quoted you a fiction that ultimately proved to be 7 weeks and $33,000 off. The plans for your house are determined by a fiction told by a lawyer you never met 40 years ago and a fiction created by the President of your HOA, which you aren’t even officially a part of yet. The materials that make up your house are all chosen because of fictional stories people tell to themselves and to each other.

So anyway…why did I feel brainwashed when I was at Law School? Because the legal field is just absolutely soaked with Power Fictions. It’s how they teach, how they talk, how they write, how they think. They tell Power Fictions to themselves and to each other. And as much as they strive to exert power, power is being exerted on them tenfold, a hundredfold. And whether you like it or not, your life is constituted of layers and layers of fiction, which shape the person you become. Some of these fictions are good and helpful. Some are harmful and detrimental. I want to spend the next few blog posts analyzing some real examples of power fictions and dissecting some essays I’ve recently read, which I think abuse power fiction in order to manipulate the reader. I also think that these essays reveal the ways in which the authors have themselves been bound or duped by power fictions.