Dysfunctional Relationships in Crime Shows: The Damage of Making Up Stories about Others

One of the most damaging ideas in life, I believe, is the belief that "things SHOULD go this way." These days, especially on social media, the "should" fallacy is often connected to entire stories that are not remotely connected to actual day-to-day life ("you MUST have done what I've imagined, so you should or should not do it again").

I learned to be skeptical of these types of stories early in life. In my prepubescent years, I read a book in which a young boy spends all day staring into a fire, making up stories about all the wonderful things that other people will do for him. About the same time, I read C.S. Lewis's rather acerbic analysis that fantasy writers--who are accustomed to invented worlds--are better at recognizing the gap between fiction and real life than writers of contemporary fiction and "true life" school stories who begin to imagine that all those things in the story ought to happen to them. 

I developed a distaste for the kind of commentary and advice, the type of stuff that happens on social media, before social media every came into being--that is, commentary and advice about real people based on a fabricated story rather than commentary and advice based on real evidence: what people actually said, what actually happened.  

Of course, in our world, lots of people get paid to give lots of other people advice based on theories rather than, say, research and fact. But the underlying negative fall-out should never be forgotten.

In a CSI episode "Feeling the Heat," parents kill a child. They are absolutely convinced that the baby is suffering from a genetic disorder. Since their previous child died from that disorder, they decide that they can't go through the same pain again. 

It turns out the child was suffering from ordinary grogginess due to sitting near chemicals. Not good. But not life threatening. 

The parents imposed a story onto what they saw. They didn't wait to collect real evidence. They didn't think critically about the situation. They ran with the supposed "realistic" version and then imposed it on a living being.

At a less murderous level,  Kang in On and Off encourages his boyfriend to leave his job and become an actor. He doesn't want Ahn to leave his job. But he has created a story in his mind of what Ahn needs without actually talking to Ahn and letting Ahn share an important proposal with him. When Ahn's friends trap Kang on a boat and tell him off, he rethinks the story he has created entirely on his own. 

As I state on Votaries about Elementary, true empathy is objective, not emotional. It asks, "What do I not know? What questions do I need to ask?" rather than "What label do I have to hand to construct a story? How do I think other people should be behaving?"