Imagine the news breaks: “unemployment has risen by three per cent”. Three per cent. A dry figure, hard to argue with. But watch what happens to it next.
One person reads it as a catastrophe: the system is collapsing, brace for the worst. Another reads it as a temporary correction: the market is breathing, everything is within the normal range. A third sees in it a verdict on someone’s policy: this is where the wrong decisions have led. The same fact — and three entirely different realities, in which three different people now live.
The fact has not changed. What changed is the story it was wrapped in. And it is the story, not the figure, that determines what you will feel and how you will act.
We are used to thinking that facts govern us. In reality we are governed by storytellers — by those who decide which frame to put the fact into. And most of the time we do not even notice the moment when someone else’s frame becomes our own way of seeing.
So whenever I meet an “objective” piece of news, I have trained myself to ask two questions. Whose story is this? And — who benefits from it?
Try it on the next headline you see. You will be surprised how often someone’s intent is hiding behind a fact.
And what story were you told today — and took for a fact?