Yesterday’s NYT had an opinion piece on aliens – you know, the extraterrestrials who are rumored to exist, evidence of whom is alleged to have been carefully hidden by US State agencies. It is actually a thoughtful piece that offers a Gedanken experiment as to what would happen if we would indeed find some alien flight object crashed onto Oregon soil. What would the consequences be for the world, how would we react, as individuals, as a nation, as part of humanity at large? Would it unite or divide us?

A particular aspect that struck me was the discussion of not a land- but a narrative grab, a competition for interpretation that would have enormous consequences in allocating resources (let’s arm ourselves even beyond our teeth vs. let’s fund science to explore space and find these visitors,) or influence reactions (this is ours! No-one allowed to look at it! vs. let’s share among nations, since all of humanity is at stake.)

We don’t have to look to the extraterrestrial universe – the reality of narrative grabs is all around us and astoundingly dangerous. Whether we are talking about the Big Lie about a stolen election, or the conspiracies peddled by anti-vaxxers, or the testimony given during trials of police shootings, or the current tragedy unfolding in the Middle East – narratives are developed and disseminated to peddle influence, justify actions, distort the real picture, gain attention and adherents, shape tales of heroes, villains and victims.

This is particularly true if a conflict has hardened. It is also true if the narrative can no longer be controlled by those who were used to control it. If people can videotape events, if police have their own camcorders recording, the narrative from the reports can be offset by the visually documented history. To control the damage to those who used to call the shots, it becomes imperative to stop disseminating these sources. Whether it is police recordings that no-one is allowed to see, or iPhone videos that are blocked by undefined censorship rules on social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, FaceBook or whatever, the narrative is shaped by those who have the power of the domain. (One of the few things the Right and the Left agree on, by the way, each claiming to be silenced in egregious ways in different instances.)

There is a different psychological aspect of narrative grab, though, that we are also exposed and victim to, namely the way language shapes the way a situation is framed, and the way interpretation disambiguates a potentially ambiguous photograph in ways consistent with a particular narrative agenda. The overused “my terrorist is your freedom fighting martyr” example aside, there are other ways of shaping opinion.

Portland is a Warzone comes to mind, a description of protests that shaped the national conversation last summer, when really that was only when you saw select images and paroles on the Internet. Not that the city did not suffer from destructive action, or that those actions had consequences for more peaceful protests, but overall life was as undisturbed in most parts of the city as it had been. Which would be hard to believe if you consumed photographs of fiery walls, smoke filled streets, phalanxes of the feds and rioters, snapshots ripped out of the larger context. Note my wording: rioters, not protesters; phalanx as a military term; smoke filled streets hinting at fires out of control. Choice of words structure the narrative.

Another example is yesterday’s generalized accusation by Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life and Anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, that Muslim youths are responsible for the current antisemitic acts in the country and need to be flushed out by police. German-Jewish reaction has been one of disbelief: the pervasive German anti-Semitism, more and more unabashedly out in the open, has been exchanged for a narrative that puts blame on another stigmatized minority, immigrants.

Given that we can probably agree on the fact that narratives are created, controlled and used for particular purposes, I believe we have the obligation to collect narratives from all sides, to learn about differing perspectives before we make up our mind about fact and/or fiction. This might be harder when sources are scant and monopolized, but it is possible. It is also more difficult when a particular narrative has dominated discourse for ages, prohibiting glimpses of the accounts of the other side.

I try to read widely nonetheless, not just the sources I trust and find comfortably echoing my own political inclinations. I welcome suggestions for reading sources I might not even know about that provide food for thought. It is work, agreed, and undermines all those nifty heuristics our minds use to make life easier, confirmation bias, anchoring and representative bias among them (I wrote about these cognitive short-cuts in reasoning and decision making in detail some time back here and here.) It is also our only chance to break patterns that are obstacles to finding solutions for dire problems, even life-threatening ones, be they pandemics, war or colonialism.

And just maybe, aliens.

Photographs today are open to differing narratives. Are those cute little insects helpers in the garden (aphid patrol) or pests that will go on to eat everything? Or both? Or different ones at different times? Unambiguous answers only.

Music today is about the Queen of narratives: Sheherazade. All she grabbed was time to live….