Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” is a great book. It offers insights into some deep ideas about how the world does (or should) work that have influenced a wide variety of people including George Lucas and Ray Dalio and was included in Time magazine’s list of the top 100 books.
Barry Ritholz did a short, but insightful, post here where he reminds us that the timeless appeal of the narrative that Campbell explores can also mislead us.
Our narrative bias for compelling stories can prevent us from seeing the forest for trees. Dramatic tales with clearly delineated Good & Evil are more memorable and emotionally resonant than dry data and tedious facts. Try as you might, finding a singular cause of some terrible economic outcome is an exercise in futility. Instead, you will find a long history of political, economic, psychological, and (occasionally) irrational drivers that eventually led to some disaster.
We look for the spark that ignites the room full of hydrogen, instead of 1,000 other factors that created the conditions precedent. You can find example after example of disasters widely thought of as “single event causes;” upon closer examination, they are revealed as the result of far more complex circumstances and countless interactions
https://ritholtz.com/2021/09/misunderstanding-narratives-the-heros-journey/
This for me is an insight that rings very true but is often forgotten to feed our appetite for reducing complex stories to simple morality plays. I like the stories as much as the next person but the downside is that the simple appealing story distracts us from understanding the route causes of why things like the GFC happened and leave us exposed to the risk that they just keep repeating in different forms.
Tony – From the Outside
From the outside 