2.3 Create resonance
In 1894, French artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason. He was sentence to life imprisonment for allegedly sharing French military secrets to Germany through the embassy in Paris, and was incarcerated on an island in French Guiana where he spent nearly five years. In 1896, evidence came to light – primarily through an investigation instigated by Georges Picquart, head of counter-espionage, which identified the real culprit as a French Army major named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. When high-ranking military officials suppressed the new evidence a military court unanimously acquitted Esterhazy after a trial lasting only two days. The Army then laid additional charges against Dreyfus, based on forged documents. Subsequently, Émile Zola's open letter J'Accuse…!, stoked a growing movement of support for Dreyfus, putting pressure on the government to reopen the case.
In 1899, Dreyfus returned to France to stand trial again, which resulted in a further conviction and a 10-year sentence. Seven years later in 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. The Dreyfus Affair, as it later became known, bitterly divided France through the period it ran. From 1894 to 1906, French culture split between pro-republican Dreyfusards and pro-Army ‘anti-Dreyfusards’, and this division spilled over into politics, the media and popular opinion.
Proving once again that there really is little new under the sun and echoing the continued fixation with ‘fake news’ media coverage was a key element of the affair. France’s largest sports paper, Le Vélo, mixed sports coverage with political comment and its editor, a Drefusard, published opinion critical of the government’s handling of the affair. This led to disagreements with the paper’s main advertisers (some of whom would later themselves be wrapped up in the affair), and in 1900 they funded the launch of the new sports paper L’Auto (originally L’Auto-Vélo until it was forced to drop the second part of its name 1903) to rival Le Vélo.
L’Auto was not the success it’s backers had initially hoped for. Sluggish sales of around 25,000 normal circulation failed to live up to the 80,000 copies that Le Vélo achieved. In November 1902 a crisis meeting was held to address the problem. The paper’s editor, Henri Desgrange, was a prominent cyclist, and when he’d arrived at the paper he had poached a young journalist from Le Vélo called Géo Lefèvre to be the Chief Cycling Journalist. As the crisis meeting progressed and turnaround ideas were reviewed and discarded, Lefèvre was eventually allowed to speak. He suggested a new type of cycle race that the paper could organise and cover to drive circulation. His idea was to take the already popular long-distance cycle race, and run it over distance a far greater than any other, covering most of mainland France.
The race was scheduled for June 1903, but as the date approached a disappointing number of registrants meant the date was postponed by a month. Prize money was increased and the race was re-appointed to run from the 1st – 19th July in six mammoth stages. Competitors raced over 1500 miles (2400 kilometers) and after over 94 hours of racing the winner was eventually crowned. The race was the inaugural Tour de France.
Through the race, L’Auto’s circulation more than doubled from 25,000 to 65,000. So successful was the race that it was re-run again in 1904. Le Vélo, meanwhile, found its circulation in steep decline. The year after the first Tour De France, the paper went out of business. All the while L’Auto continued to ascend, and the Tour De France would itself continue to rise to global prominence. By 1908, L’Auto had a circulation of 250,000. By 1923, despite the Tour de France being suspended for the years of the First World War, it was 500,000. And during the 1933 Tour it reached a peak of 854,000.
The Tour De France is a deceptively simple idea, but one so grand in scope that it cannot fail to capture attention. A cycle race across and around an entire country. The origins in the Dreyfus affair may have faded into the distant past for many, but the core idea of the Tour remains. That simple idea resonates. Even people who know little of competitive cycling know of the Tour de France. They know it is the pinnacle of competitive cycling. They know it is gruelling. They know of the yellow jersey. They know it is in France. It is iconic. When you hear the words ‘Tour de France’ you feel its story. Excitement, exhaustion, energy, exertion. It has achieved a state of ubiquity such that it is just one of those things people are assumed to know about. You could describe any other cycling event in comparative terms; ‘it’s like the Tour de France but smaller and on unicycles’ – and you still have an idea what it would be like. The Tour De France is an idea that resonates, and though a century may have passed the paper that founded it (now called L’Equipe) continues to this day.
Resonant ideas resonate because they tap into core programming of the human brain. The centres of decision making are black box machines that through learning and experience take inputs, rapidly apply an emotional and logical algorithm and arrive at a conclusion. Unlike human-developed AIs, these black boxes all evolved with the same survival pressures and the same long- and short-term memory connections. These memory connections are the data that the black boxes read and write to every time a decision is made. Resonant ideas tap into these connections because they connect with the same survival imperatives that formed the human brain’s structure.
From the earliest days of homo sapiens stories have been used to share ideas and document history. For thousands of years before humans developed Instagram and cloud storage stories were the primary method for sharing and communicating information. Oral history was history. Stories were told and retold, and with the retelling details were lost and ideas were embellished sometimes intentionally but with equal frequency by accident. Stories became embedded within the collective and human consciousness become shaped by the structure of stories such that they became the natural form by which ideas are recollected. Because of this, ideas that resonate almost always exist in the form of a story. They not only burn core ideas into the mind of an audience but they also encourage audiences to fill in context gaps. Stories that drone on and on are barely recalled for their detail, but the core plot elements stick hard and fast.
Aesop’s fables. Jason and the argonauts. Noah’s Ark. Santa Claus. Back to the Future. Lord of the Rings. Atlantis. Stories – when they are simple, tangible, unexpected, and emotional – have the power to resonate near indefinitely. Like memes, they may persist and evolve through repetition, mutation and responding to the environment around them but they resonate for a long time and are not easily forgotten. Narratives cause the ideas that sit underneath them to be retained for far longer than the basic facts that may comprise them. They bridge the knowledge gap by being self-contained. Consider a couple of well-known examples and the detail that can be recalled with a few simple words.
The sword in the stone. Five words that recollect the simple, unexpected story of Arthur pulling the enchanted sword Excalibur from its immovable place in a stone. And then we recall that only the true King can remove the sword. Guinevere. Lancelot. The Lady of the Lake. The Knights of the Round Table. Merlin. Tintagel. Avalon. More simply, it elicits thoughts of the shape of the sword. It is unknown whether or not it was a roman-style sword, a short-sword or a long sword, whether it and a giant gem in the handle or a simple rope-wound grip. The shape, style, colour, length, and heft will all be imagined in the mind of the recollecter. Importantly, while interesting, this information is not relevant to the retelling of the story. The narrative resonates with concrete details and emotional underpinnings. It is not remembered for the construction of the sword or the geological form of the stone but the people and their journeys.
The tortoise and the hare. Arrogant hare ridicules slow moving tortoise. Tired or the teasing, Tortoise challenges Hare to a race to see who is fastest. Hare rushes ahead, gets lazy and rests. Tortoise slowly marches on, catches up, eventually overtakes and wins. Simple, tangible unexpected, emotional. But how does a tortoises and a hare agree to race each other? In your mind, how do they speak? They don’t have vocal chords. And if they do, speak, are they speaking English or some other language. None of these details matter, but the story of hare-ish hubris and tortoise-y persistence remains.
Lord of the Rings. Great films stick with you long after you watched them because the story is far stronger than the action or acting. The Return of the King won shares the record for highest Academy Award totals and holds the record for the highest clean sweep at the Oscars. It is 201 minutes of visual spectacle but the only detail you can really remember is that the one ring has to be thrown into Mount Doom. There’s a giant spider and flying wraiths and a waterfall of skulls and weird marbles with fire in, but unless you’ve watched it recently I bet you couldn’t put them in the right order. Christopher Nolan’s Inception is similar: the film is filled with concrete details about how inception works – in fact if you watch the film with this in mind you’ll find most of the dialogue is trying to explain its ideas – and an emotional backstory of a father trying to get back to his children. To explain the plot and eye-popping set pieces would take longer than the film’s running time, but the idea behind it explains itself.
Five tenets underpin all great stories. They connect core truths and bridge the context gap. They are: