LISTENING TO EACH OTHER’S STORIES

This adorable video takes a solid stab at the phenomenon of the human brain that allows us to frame the world and selectively ignore unimportant information.
In simplest terms, our brain spends an enormous amount of energy pre-selecting what to pay attention to given the torrent of sensory data flooding it every moment. For example, we don’t need conscious attention of our heart and lungs to stay alive. This scales up to social environments where we subconsciously filter whole peoples into background noise we can safely ignore.

This appears to be driven by attention: those we focus on are the objects of our limited attention span, and those we feel we can ignore get consigned to caricature, gross simplifications of personalities.

This is an example of the human brain using stories as an operational framework. The narrative is: “I am important, I want to accomplish X, Y, and Z. Person 2 is trying to stop me. Person 3 is trying to help me. Everyone else are background characters not relevant to my story.” The vast majority of these narratives revolve around our social lives.

When our narratives are in conflict with other (seemingly) unrelated narratives, it is our tendency to fit these others into our narrative and assign them a role. When in contention or competition, that role is typically the role of antagonist. Our brain is trying to keep our narrative coherent, as it is constantly trying to make the highly complex world a simpler place to navigate based on the goals on which our attention has focused.

The tragedy is that our brains default to drawing others into its own narrative, rather than listening to the other’s narrative. When take the effort to listen to another’s narrative, there is a high chance that we will use transposition to see ourselves as the hero character in their story. We will tend to see ourselves as them, trying to solve their story.
That is the simplest experience of empathy. It is the birth of comedy: subverting our tragic narrative with all its struggles of the single-pointed hero (ourselves), by adding another ally character–this person whose story shares common interests to our own narrative. They stop being background grave diggers and don’t necessarily turn into villains.

This is the joy of living in community, and it is accessible by listening to each other’s stories.

A brilliant satirical dark comedic take on this is the Bring Out Your Dead scene of Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Here the narrative is the old and infirm man is a burden on the son, who attempts to get the bureaucrat to take his still-living father.
The father is desperately affirming he is not ready for the grave:

FATHER: I’m not dead!
BUREAUCRAT: ‘Ere. He says he’s not dead!
SON: Yes, he is.
FATHER: I’m not!
BUREAUCRAT: He isn’t?
SON: Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.
FATHER: I’m getting better!
SON: No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment.
BUREAUCRAT: Oh, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.
FATHER: I don’t want to go on the cart!
SON: Oh, don’t be such a baby.
BUREAUCRAT: I can’t take him.
FATHER: I feel fine!
FATHER: I think I’ll go for a walk.
SON: You’re not fooling anyone, you know.
FATHER: [singing] I feel happy. I feel happy *WHACK!*

The dark overtones of elder abuse not withstanding, this scene depicts how two members of a community can share their stories, agree to ally with one another, and disenfranchise a third party who’s story they are ignoring or suppressing. The maligned party isn’t allowed to express their role as anything more than grave-fodder.
Hence, it is imperative you tell your own story!