Ties That Blind: Unraveling Stories That Keep Us in the Dark by Alan Godwin

In Ties That Blind, psychologist Alan Godwin attempts to answer such questions by looking at the nature of collective deception. There’s a difference between what’s true and a story that’s false but sounds true. The propagation of a false story begins by telling people what they want to hear and then appealing to their coalitional instincts-the natural human desires to congregate with like-minded others. Their attachment needs pull them into a story where truth becomes less valued than the warm embrace of crowd inclusion. Barricaded inside what Dr. Godwin calls a “story-based fortress,” they come to accept a distorted reality which they now call “truth” and label all fortress outsiders as liars or fools. Worse still, they become propagators of the falseness themselves.