Stories Are the New Authority

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Stories shape how we understand truth, authority, morality, and reality itself. In this Season 6 premiere of The Storyteller’s Mission, Zena Dell Lowe explores why storytelling has become one of the most powerful forces shaping modern culture—and why that power carries enormous responsibility for writers and storytellers.

We are living in a cultural moment where trust in institutions and expert knowledge has fractured. As authority collapses, narrative fills the vacuum. Story becomes the new source of meaning, identity, and belief. This episode examines the deeper epistemological crisis underneath modern culture and what it means for storytelling, writing craft, and moral responsibility.

This episode explores:

• How storytelling shapes truth, authority, and belief systems
• Why narrative authority replaces institutional trust
• The relationship between story, culture, and moral imagination
• How writers influence worldview through narrative
• Why storytelling becomes more powerful—and more dangerous—when truth loses its referees
• The ethical responsibility of storytellers in shaping reality

If you’re a writer, filmmaker, screenwriter, or storyteller who believes stories don’t just entertain—but form culture, shape belief, and influence justice—this season will change how you think about your craft.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] 

Civilization depends on something far more fragile than most of us would like to admit. Trust. So what happens when that trust disappears? Hi, I'm Zena and welcome to the Storyteller's Mission. Today we're gonna talk about this.

So lately I've been noodling with this idea that we must be able to rely on expert testimony or witnesses or authority for anything at all to be able to work in society, even if it's something like a history book, 

 We rely on experts in all our affairs, including our legal system.

We need forensic experts and medical experts, gun experts, tax experts, even automobile experts. As we learn from the film. My cousin Vinny, 

 And that reliance isn't naive. It's essential. It's necessary because again, none of us can possibly be experts in [00:01:00] everything, and yet here we are.

We are living in a unique time in society when trust in experts has fractured across nearly every institution that exists. Medicine, media, government, academia. People don't know who to trust anymore. We don't trust the experts. We also don't know how to tell the difference anymore between what's true and what is a narrative or what's propaganda.

And when institutions that were meant to test the truth also lose credibility, then something destabilizing happens culturally, and we don't just lose confidence, we lose our shared way of knowing. Of knowing what's real. And in that kind of moment, guess what? Storytelling becomes even more necessary. It becomes more [00:02:00] powerful and it becomes more dangerous.

Welcome to our brand new season of the Storytellers Mission. If you're new here, this podcast is for people who tell stories because they believe that stories matter. Writers, screenwriters, novelists, filmmakers, meaning makers of all kinds.

 What I'm talking about here is something philosophers call an epistemological crisis. That may sound abstract and believe me, it's hard to say, but it's actually the problem underneath almost every cultural conflict that we're facing right now. Now at its core, is a simple, non-negotiable reality, which is that society cannot function without epistemic delegation.

Yeah, that's a fancy way of saying that. Modern life requires us to outsource knowledge, knowing where we [00:03:00] get our knowledge, how we know what we know. There is no alternative. Because none of us can run our own clinical trials or conduct forensic reconstructions, audit tax codes, verify historical archives, engineer bridges, test vaccines, recreate ballistic trajectories.

 Which means that the crisis that we're currently in isn't because people suddenly decided experts don't matter.

The real crisis is deeper than that

at the crisis. It isn't. I don't trust experts. It's really that authority has divorced itself from truth seeking. Let me break this down. Let me explain what I mean, because this is where things broke Historically, expertise was subordinate to things like evidence, transparency, [00:04:00] falsifiability, institutional humility.

In other words, experts were trusted because they could be challenged. We could test them and see if they were wrong. But what changed? What has changed in recent years is that we've had a shift from trust the science to trust us to, if you question us, you are immoral. But that crosses a line that's not science anymore.

That's authoritarianism. Real expertise welcomes scrutiny. Corrupt authority demands deference. And when institutions began suppressing, dissent or punishing, credentialed disagreement or declaring debates settled by fiat and blurring the lines between research and advocacy, they shattered the very trust that they needed in order to function.

And at that point, people didn't become [00:05:00] anti-expert. They became anti bs. We didn't want to be indoctrinated. We didn't want to be told what to think anymore. And this feels uniquely destabilizing right now in our society because it traps us between two impossibilities,

Impossibility. Number one is that we cannot all be experts, but impossibility number two is that we have good reason to suspect that many expert institutions are compromised financially, politically, ideologically. Bureaucratically, and that creates a genuine epistemic crises because we need authorities, but we no longer trust the structures that are supposed to produce them.

So when that happens, there's a void and [00:06:00] chaos rushes in to fill the vacuum. Everything that we are seeing right now is a result of that 

 Now, this leads me to a major reason for this episode, which is why it matters both for justice and for story, because here's the uncomfortable truth.

If no expert testimony can be trusted at all, justice becomes impossible. It just becomes impossible. We'll never actually get there because now it's impossible to have some sort of objective view of reality. It all becomes about perceptions. It all becomes about interpretations. There is no possibility of objectivity.

And guess what? Trials don't run on feelings. They run on evidence, procedure standards, and burdens of proof. If we reject those outright, we're not left with [00:07:00] accountability. We're left with mob mentality, a mob logic where might makes right, and this is where storytelling enters the picture in a powerful and dangerous way because you see when truth loses its referees.

Narrative becomes the substitute narrative story becomes what people look to, to find truth stories, step in to explain reality, to assign guilt, to declare heroes versus villains right versus wrong morality. And that means that storytellers are no longer just entertainers. 

We are shaping how people know epistemology, we become the arbiters of truth. So what [00:08:00] is the solution? What, given the reality of what we're living through in culture right now, how now shall we live? Now, in past seasons, we've spent a lot of time talking about craft structure, character, dialogue, worldview, how to make the story work on the page or on the screen, and we're gonna continue talking about those things because craft matters.

But this year we're gonna go deeper because we believe that stories don't just entertain us. They teach culture how to understand reality. They shape our collective moral imagination. Okay. They are the things that tell us who the heroes are, who the villains are, what justice looks like, whether truth even exists at all.

What is the meaning of life, which means that storytelling isn't just a craft issue anymore, it's a responsibility. So this [00:09:00] season we're going to explore what our responsibility is. It's not about a political ideology or a narrative.

It's about why telling the truth without turning your story into propaganda, maybe one of the most challenging and yet most important callings a storyteller can embrace in a broken world. So. If you're here because you wanna be a better writer, then that's great. You're in the right place. And if you're here because you sense that stories carry weight and that weight requires wisdom and responsibility, then you're exactly where you're supposed to be.

What are we supposed to do with this? And unfortunately, there is no neat solution to this crisis because we cannot all of a sudden just tell people to trust the authorities anymore.

We also can't make those authorities be trustworthy, [00:10:00] which means there's only one posture left that might be sane. and that is to reframe some principles that help us at least personally evaluate whatever it is that we're using to analyze the truth, to come up with the truth.

Alright, so principles that are worth holding onto and to apply to your own worldview when you're trying to see and test what is true, what's being presented. Yeah.

The first one is that expertise must be considered to be provisional, not absolute. What do I mean by that? I mean that we should be willing to trust the expert testimony unless or until the evidence contradicts them.

They are not beyond challenge. Right. but we have [00:11:00] to assume an attitude of trust instead of outright suspicion or else we are entering into the dialogue with bias 

That is going to actually skew our judgment. It, there's tension here. It's not a clean solution because again, we know that they can't be trusted, and yet we have to assume a posture of trust unless or until the evidence contradicts them. I think that's fair. It's not naive. It's fair and necessary to reach a true conclusion.

And we have to remember that these institutions or experts are not beyond challenge We also have to remember number two, credentials are not moral authority. Training gives us competence, not virtue. And a lot of times what is happening today is that people are expecting moral [00:12:00] purity from these people in positions of authority.

We are expecting them to be perfectly virtuous people and that's not a a fair expectation as long as we expect that we're going to be disappointed, and then we're just going to outright dismiss. Whatever competence comes with their training. So we have to separate those two things and we have to recognize that their credentials are not about moral authority.

It is only about their competence in a particular area of expertise. 

Number three, transparency matters more than conclusions. For example, I can show my work beats. Just trust me. In other words, institutions need to earn your trust. Our trust continuously. Trust is not a lifetime appointment, and it's not something we give once and then we're done with it. No, [00:13:00] they constantly have to make themselves trustworthy by being open.

To critique by being open to being examined. Humility is the tell the expert who says, here's what we know, and here's what we don't know, is almost always more trustworthy than the person who's declaring certainty outright. So if you are believing an entity that is not open to being scrutinized. Then I think that should make them suspect

they should be open to cross-examination.

And this leads me to the next one, which might be the hardest one, the hardest principle, which is that we must resist replacing corrupt authority with chaos or our own version of truth. [00:14:00] Distrust does not justify abandoning standards, and that's what happens when we start thinking that we ourselves are forensic experts.

We simply aren't. We have to leave room that we might not be seeing everything. We might not be knowing everything. We might not be having a full perspective. Anything else is just intellectual dishonesty. Right, and I'm not saying that you check your reason at the door. No. We should be examining to the best of our ability, but at the end of the day, we have to take a posture of humility, recognizing that we simply don't have a full scope, we may never have the full scope, 

And therefore we must look to people who do have those positions, right? The, the people that do have more access to the information, we simply must do it.

What I am really circling here [00:15:00] isn't a political issue. It's a moral one. The question is, how do we pursue truth in a fallen world? Where power corrupts institutions, and I'm not being cynical. This isn't cynicism, it's wisdom, this tension truth versus authority, expertise versus corruption, discernment versus chaos, humility versus certitude.

The truth is it's absolutely story gold. Okay, next time we're gonna go deeper into what happens when authority breaks down completely, and what that means for justice and what that means for culture and what that means for stories as well. In the meantime, if you found this episode helpful, would you please take a moment to like, subscribe, comment, and even share this episode with someone who might like it or truly benefit from it, and that [00:16:00] truly helps us.

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