In Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, the eponymous witches attend a play that parodies Macbeth, complete with evil witches. They witches are affronted by the play’s depiction, but Granny Weatherwax sees the true danger of the play:

This was real. This was more real even than reality. This was history. It might not be true, but that had nothing to do with it.

Granny had never had much time for words. They were so insubstantial. Now she wished that she had found the time. Words were indeed insubstantial. They were as soft as water, but they were also as powerful as water and now they were rushing over the audience, eroding the levees of veracity, and carrying away the past.

That’s us down there, she thought. Everyone knows who we really are, but the things down there are what they’ll remember–three gibbering old baggages in pointy hats. All we’ve ever done, all we’ve ever been, won’t exist anymore….

Whoever wrote this Theater knew about the uses of magic. Even I believe what’s happening, and I know there’s no truth in it.

This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.

We’ve lost. There is nothing we can do against this without becoming exactly what we aren’t.

As Granny noted, it doesn’t matter how they person really is. When a more compelling fiction takes hold, it supersedes whatever the reality is. In this funny but dangerous kind of way, in so many human contexts fiction and narrative carries much more weight than narrative.

Of course, reality is reality. You can’t get around hard facts of the universe. It doesn’t matter whether you think the stars are balls of gas burning billion of miles away, or just fireflies that got stuck in that big bluish black thing. It doesn’t matter if you think planets move according to Newton’s laws of motion, general relativity, or via divine power. Whatever narrative or explanation you tell yourself won’t change the true nature of stars, or how planets move.

With that said, narratives hold massive sway over human understanding. Human knowledge is limited and subject to a variety of biases. Even if we had a perfect knowledge of everything going on in the universe, we wouldn’t have the capacity to make sense of it all or draw correct conclusions. Our way around that is to simplify, and often we simplify by telling stories. These stories can be incredibly powerful, and helpful, but it’s important to remember they aren’t strictly the truth.

Take any historical narrative you’ve heard. Americans barely scraped by to miraculously defeat the British in the Revolutionary war. 300 Spartans held off millions of Persians at Thermopylae. Martin Luther posted his 95 theses, and then the Reformation started Christopher Columbus was one of the few who believed the Earth was round. Napoleon was short. These narratives have varying degrees of truth to them, but always miss or elide important details. And this is necessary–we would not be able to distill a complete, comprehensive view of something historical in a pithy narrative. There’d be so many details, caveats, weird happenings that don’t make sense.

Take any description of someone you’ve heard. She is hard working, he is trustworthy, they are flaky, I am persistent. All these probably capture some facet of someone, but they can never encapsulate the entire human. Stories we tell ourselves are especially potent. We assign ourselves identities that we try to live up to, and when we fall short or act contrary to those narratives it can be painful. But we are not the stories we tell ourselves, either What hidden capabilities or shortcomings lie dormant in ourselves, waiting for the right context or situation to become known.

Even something slightly more grounded like economic interactions are ruled by narratives. Money–and really any financial asset–is just a story we tell ourselves about how these papers allow us to exchange tangible goods. Property rights are a narrative that we all agree on saying that Alice owns something and everyone else needs to respect that. Our overarching business cycles, while often having a catalyst in real events, are amplified and perpetuated by the aggregated beliefs of everyone participating.

This is just to point out that narrative is necessary, and indeed can be a productive technology. But it also can be dangerous, weaponized, and deliberately obfuscatory. Take the case with Granny in Wyrd Sisters. The play deliberately portrays the witches as evil, even though this isn’t the truth. It doesn’t capture the many aspects of the witches–in fact, it’s a description and portrayal not based in reality, but political scheming.

In real life, fictionalized portrayals of real things can distort reality. The descriptions we assign to others can distort reality. The descriptions we assign to ourselves, even more so. So be aware and critical of the narratives you are given, and take care when you craft your own.