On the Road to Humankind With Leon Festinger - The New York Times - 1 views
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another special capacity of the dominant left brain. We called this device the “interpreter” and have come to realize it is the storyteller, the system that builds our narrative and gives our many actions that pour out of us, frequently outside of our conscious control, a centrality, a story — our personal story.
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It is so powerful an addition to humankind that it masks the reality: We are, in fact, a confederation of relatively independent agents, each struggling to be part of our narrative that is our story. It turns out the left brain has another capacity potentially more important than language itself. The interpreter is the thing that sticks all of those parts together.
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My threaded interpretation, however, could be different from yours. For stories (beliefs) to be useful as a technology to control groups of people, it is necessary to standardize our interpretations , something we know has occurred almost from the beginning of recorded human history.
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