In this episode of The Power of Narratives, host Virginie Glaenzer interviews journalist Jonathan Cook about the intertwined nature of emotion, personal narratives, and societal storytelling. Cook introduces the concept of emotional granularity— the ability to label a wide range of emotions— citing Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, and explains how limited emotional vocabularies, especially among men who are taught that anger is the primary acceptable feeling, lead to maladaptive coping such as blame‑seeking and aggression. He argues that personal stories are inevitable; attempts to live without narratives are themselves a story that ultimately fails because humans interpret reality through emotion and story. Cook critiques the reliance on fact‑based counter‑narratives in American politics, using the example of the left’s endless cataloguing of Donald Trump’s falsehoods, and contends that new, hero‑free stories are needed. He highlights the George Floyd protests as a catalyst for recognizing the necessity of diverse storytellers, emphasizing that Black lives and stories matter and that a richer universe of narratives is essential for collective well‑being.
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There's something really important in what you just talked about. I'll say this as a man, but I do think that every single human being struggles with emotion because emotion is slippery and Every emotion is more than its dictionary definition, you know, and they confuse us because I think they actually go beyond language, although language tells us things about them. Um, I do believe that men are taught that there are a few acceptable emotions, and the most acceptable of them all is anger. Um, but the problem is that when you only have a few words for your emotions, they all go back to the same places. You only have a few tools for dealing with reality because you only have a few stories about what's happening in reality. And so with men, it becomes, I'm feeling a discomfort, a thing of wrongness, there's something not right, and therefore there must be something out there in the world that is to blame for that. And it's making me hurt. And I feel like I want to go destroy it right now because that's the only way I'm going to make it better. Uh, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has come up with a really important concept when it comes to emotion, and that is emotional granularity. And you can think of this as like the pixels on a screen, on a computer screen. And the more pixels you have on that screen, the more you're going to see an accurate picture of reality. Emotional granularity is the ability to name many different emotions. And some people can name, oh, say 150 off the top of their heads if you give them enough time. Some people can name only 3. And what's been found through through wonderful psychological research is that those people who have low emotional granularity are more likely to engage in addictive behavior. And that's emotionally addictive as well as, you know, in terms of substances. But those people who have more emotions that they can name, a higher number, they're going to be more flexible. They can deal with adversity because they can recognize what's happening. What's happening to them in detail. And know that not everything is anger. Sometimes underneath anger is fear and pain and loss and all different kinds of that. And each one has its own appropriate self-care, an appropriate response to that. That isn't just what Odysseus does, which is to get out his sword or his bow and arrow and kill it. And then get in the boat and go away. We need to have a masculinity, but also a humanity that is capable of having many different emotional stories. The more that we have, the better off we are.
So I'm hearing that the stories are both liberating and constraining. Now let me ask you this: when we construct a story based on our emotions, there's a high likelihood to be wrong, either because we don't have the right definition of emotion, or because the story that we're constraining, constructing is going to make us feel stuck. So is it possible to go through life without a personal narrative? Jonathan, do you want to jump in?
I sure do, because I think that the idea that we can live without stories, although it's very popular in departments of English in our university. I think that itself is a story. It's a story of transcending all of the, oh, pre-modern everything, and now we're all new when we don't have to pay attention to human reality and we can just be strange and confused. And I think in people's lives as they're actually lived, you can go through, and it's important to go through, periods of shadow and uncertainty and unknown. However, unless you are born wealthy, you cannot stay there. You can stay there for a while, and that is important. You have to respect that emotion. But, um, I think story is inevitable and emotion is inevitable for the same reason, because it's addictive in the same way that water is addictive to fish. And we can only interpret our reality according to emotion and story. In America, we have seen on the left the reaction to Donald Trump in a rational sense being kind of a trap, where every day we list 25 different ways that he's lied and he's not used the right facts. And we say, if only he would you know, have the right facts, everything would be okay. If only his supporters would understand that the facts are not what he says they are, that everything would be different and he would lose power and order would be restored. But that has failed over and over again. We have to have story because there's no way to move forward because it's talking about what matters. So what we need are new stories without heroes like Donald Trump or Odysseus. And we need new storytellers. And George Floyd, the protests here have been one way for us to wake up to that, that we can't have people who look like me and sound like me telling all the stories all the time. You can listen to me sometimes, and that's okay. Them too, because Black lives matter. Black stories matter. All kinds of stories matter, and we need a universe of many different kinds of stories.
