A Storied Future

Author's Note: We, especially the "show your evidence" crew, need to understand something fundamental: the evidence doesn't matter without a good story.

I’m going to ask you for the next few minutes to suspend your political ideology. I’m going to ask you to take what I say next on face value, assuming you know nothing about the reality of it. I’m going to ask you to pretend you are uninformed. Are you mentally there yet?

Good.

Which of these lines grips your attention?

Immigrants are stealing your jobs.

Or…

Immigrants generate approximately a trillion dollars to the GDP.

Again, you don’t know anything about which of these is true, but you hear it being said. Which would your mind draw you toward?

I’d argue for the first. Why? Because it does things the other doesn’t do. First, it positions the reader as the main character in the story. Isn’t that how we all see the world? I am the protagonist, and everyone else is a secondary character. So by reading the first line, we see that you, as the reader, are being wronged. We also see who the antagonist is, or at least the class of people who are antagonists: immigrants. And finally, we have a vivid action/transgression: stealing jobs.

It doesn’t matter if it’s not true. A person can immediately connect, and it’s an entire story rolled up into a single sentence. Anyone can imagine that. Nearly every American has competed for a job at one point in their lives, and lost one. And nearly every American has felt that they were qualified for that job, and therefore that the job should have rightfully been theirs. The idea of having a job stolen from us, isn’t a lot of work to comprehend.

Now let me ask a question: what does generating a trillion dollars for the GDP look like? What does that mean to me? I can’t connect to it. I can’t eat GDP. GDP isn’t a job. Gross domestic product, take my word for it, most Americans don’t even truly understand. In other words, who cares?

I know, and I’d wager many of you reading this know, that a higher GDP means higher jobs and more opportunities. But it’s a lousy story. And our entire society, let’s be perfectly honest here, is built on stories. A better sentence would be this:

Thank an immigrant for your job.

This is an opening sentence that resonates slightly better. It still centers the reader, but the problem with this one is that there’s no antagonist. It’s not telling a story. It’s boring, and boring isn’t great for building society. We need to do better than this. So let’s try again, but think it through first. We need three things: a protagonist, an antagonist, and an action. The protagonist is a given and should always be the reader. The antagonist and action are unclear here. The topic is to remain jobs, as that’s what we’re talking about, for consistency. But what about the antagonist or the action? How about this?

Corporations are shipping your jobs overseas.

That tells a story. That resonates. Antagonist is corporations (oh, those evil corporations), shipping is the verb, operating against the jobs that you, as a reader, might have. You’re not getting those jobs because they’re going overseas. Succinct. Tells a story, and resonates.

But if we wanted to do a positive story about immigrants, how would we do that? Try this.

Jobs created by immigrants pay you more.

Here, the antagonist is implied: more. Here, the “more” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because the imagination can fill in the rest. So the antagonist is somewhat indirect. “More than corporations would typically pay you?” Maybe. But really, it’s: "more than some other evil person who wants you to die.”

Okay, I went a little far with that one. But the knowledge is conveyed that immigrants create jobs, and not in a hand-wavy GDP way. Again, does it matter if it’s true? Maybe. Maybe not. But it tells a story, and that’s what counts. The fact that immigrants create jobs makes it loud and clear, and then we can argue about whether said jobs pay more or less, but either way that argument goes, it’s undeniable that immigrants create jobs.

We all need to think about this, I feel. Those statistics are nice, but if we can’t tell a good story with them, they might as well not exist at all.