2.3 Tragic stories

Unfortunately history is awash with tragic stories, which focus on injustice. They tend to identify a guilty party and carry a moral lesson – e.g. about the folly of trust, an inherent wickedness of a certain worldview, or the dangers of giving away too much power to leaders.

Tragic stories generate feelings of compassion for the victims, and as such can also be common when groups are pursuing justice. In being invited to feel sorrow or compassion, we are being prompted to act in ways that will help prevent similar tragedies from occurring again. Tragic stories can generate feelings of anger, which can be a powerful motivator – trade union organisers often try to stoke and channel anger because this emotion carries with it energy for action.

Tragic stories can also tap into fear. The effect of fear is to warn people off taking a certain course of action – such as stories of people with promising futures having their lives ruined by drug addiction. These stories provide clear parameters for groups. However, fear can also generate caution and conservative behaviour that makes meaningful change difficult. A big challenge for the racial justice movement globally has always been persuading people to cross over barriers of fear, convincing enough people to take a stand in the face of potentially significant consequences.

The tragic story has a variant in the tragi-comedy. These are stories with a bleak, comic twist. Beginning in traumatic events, tragi-comic stories shift the emphasis from the humiliation of victims to the guilt of the perpetrator. The powerful and guilty are made to appear diminished as a result of the suffering of the victim. We do need to be very careful here, however, not to glorify victimhood or promote the idea that it is acceptable for some to suffer for the greater good of the many.

The presence of too many tragic stories in a movement can be disempowering. When people flick through social media, a common feeling they experience is a mix of dread and energy drain. This is because their senses are overwhelmed by stories of human suffering, of people in positions of privilege doing great harm to others – and overcoming these tragedies can feel like too steep a task. We also need to be aware that movements on the far right have adopted a strange mix of tragedy and the epic in their communications. This is a strategy of ‘inverse victimhood’ (Smolović Jones, 2022), whereby powerful and privileged people try to generate a sense of pity and injustice about their position in society. Manufacturing a feeling of being persecuted allows them to introduce harmful and even hateful ideas.