Literature and Stories Make the Public Stupid
Culture treats reading literature as a civic and intellectual virtue. We are told from childhood that novels, plays, and stories deepen the mind, teach empathy, and make the public more thoughtful and more rational. I want to argue that they do the exact opposite. Instead of making the public more thinking, more rational, and deeper, literature achieves the reverse: it makes the public stupid, and it does so not when it fails, but when it succeeds on its own terms.
Reality Is Complicated, and All Stories Are Simple
Start with the gap between the world and any narrative about it.
Reality is complicated, and human culture is the most complicated part of it. Every real historical event, every social arrangement, and every human action is the product of dozens of interacting causes, feedbacks, constraints, and accidents, none of which is sufficient on its own and most of which pull in different directions at once.
People do not like that. People like simple stories. And because people like simple stories, the market, by definition, supplies them with simple stories. It gives them stories in which a character acts from a single clear motivation, in which wars have one cause, in which good and evil are binary and legible on the face of the participants. That is what people love, and so that is what gets written, filmed, and sold.
It is tempting to stop there and blame commercial taste — to say that pulp fiction simplifies while great literature captures the complexity of life. That defence misses the real problem. The issue is not that bad stories are oversimplified; it is that all stories are oversimplified. Reality is always more complicated than narrative, especially in human affairs, and a text that preserved the actual causal structure of human behaviour would cease to be a story at all.
The Raskolnikov Test
To see why even the highest literature is trapped in this simplification, imagine taking a canonically "deep" psychological novel — Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment — and rewriting it to match how human causation actually works.
Suppose someone wrote a book in which Raskolnikov's motivation to kill his landlady was split into seventeen distinct motivations, together comprising 100% of why he acted. One factor accounts for 2%. Another accounts for 11%. Rent pressure is 19%, half-digested ideological vanity is 14%, fever and sleep deprivation are 8%, resentment toward his mother and sister is 9%, a humiliation three weeks earlier is 6%, low blood sugar that afternoon is 4%, ambient cultural prejudice is 3%, and so on down the list of seventeen interacting weights, none of them decisive on its own.
Who would read this? No one.
It would be unreadable, and it would be unreadable in exact proportion to its fidelity to reality. Even Dostoevsky — our benchmark for psychological depth in fiction — has to throw away most of the causal table and organise the act around a few dramatic forces a reader can hold in his head and feel in his chest. The price of making human behaviour readable as a story is falsifying how many things caused it and how small each of them was.
One Story Teaches You Nothing About Society — The Jordan Peterson Error
Even if a story were not causally simplified, there is a second and worse failure when people try to extract social wisdom from it. Telling a compelling story about one individual teaches you nothing about society.
What does one story about one person actually tell you? First, you do not know whether that individual is representative of anyone else, or which slice of the population they might represent, or how large that slice is. Second, in literature, you do not even know if that specific story is true — in fact, you know it was invented by an author to produce an effect. As I have argued when explaining why art teaches the wrong way to think, a story at best illustrates that a conceivable case could exist; it carries zero information about distributions, frequencies, or social mechanisms.
Worse, treating a compelling story as evidence actively leads people to the wrong conclusions about society. Case in point: Jordan Peterson. Peterson routinely takes Crime and Punishment — one 19th-century Russian novelist's invented story about one fictional student who murders his landlady and suffers guilt — and treats it as a demonstration of universal laws about atheism, morality, totalitarianism, and how human societies work. Because Raskolnikov rationalises a murder and then falls apart, Peterson concludes that without religious foundations people and societies collapse into nihilistic violence.
This is a stupid way of thinking. Dostoevsky did not discover what happens when a person abandons religion; Dostoevsky made Raskolnikov up to match Dostoevsky's own religious and political prejudices, and arranged the plot so that the character would suffer the exact fate the author's thesis required. Treating an author's rigged thought experiment about a single imaginary man as data about society is the logical equivalent of citing a fairy tale as zoological evidence. Yet millions of people find it profound, because the story is vivid and their minds have been trained by literature to accept a vivid singular narrative in place of evidence.
Training the Mind to Reject Real Explanations
Now ask what happens to a public that spends its waking leisure inside that habit.
I have written before that truth is never short while falsehoods and stories spread because they are. When every novel you read, every film you watch, and every drama you absorb shows you a world in which actions have one dominant motive, wars have one cause, and a single protagonist's arc reveals a truth about humanity, you do not leave that habit behind when you close the book. You bring it to politics, to economics, and to collective decision-making.
A steady diet of stories makes people less thinking. When someone offers a real explanation of a social problem — seventeen factors, none above twenty per cent, measured across a population with wide error bars and no single villain — a narrative-trained public rejects it on sight. It does not feel like an explanation, because stories have taught them what an explanation is supposed to feel like: singular, motivated, personal, and morally tidy. Literature does not deepen the public mind; it shallows it until real complexity becomes intolerable.
Fighting Our Own DNA
The prescription that follows is uncomfortable only because we are so addicted to the habit: we should try to wean the public off stories.
I do not pretend this is easy. It goes straight against our DNA. We like stories. We love stories. We love cinema. We love music with simple love stories woven into three-minute songs. We love all of that, and the market floods us with it every hour of the day because evolution wired us to reward it.
But that love is the exact opposite of intellect. Intellect is the willingness to ask whether a case is representative, to demand the distribution instead of the anecdote, and to hold seventeen weighted, unglamorous causes in view when every instinct in your brain is begging for one protagonist, one motive, and a chorus.
This connects directly to a theme that runs through this blog, whether the question is overriding instinct by consent, questioning what hierarchies select for, or pulling the social lever against our heritable defaults: the most important thing human beings can do is fight their own genetic disposition. Our genes built us for a small, tribal world where quick binary judgements and shared campfire tales kept a band together. They did not build us to understand macroeconomics, epidemiology, or the causes of war in a society of millions.
In every domain where humanity has actually advanced — saving for old age, counting probabilities instead of anecdotes, testing hypotheses against data rather than citing Dostoevsky as proof — the advance consisted in building habits that push back against what comes naturally to our DNA. Our craving for stories is one more genetic disposition that served us once and makes us stupid now. Indulging it is effortless; intellect begins where we start resisting it.