Numerous books aimed at social justice issues and the matter of raising awareness/money for these issues have pointed out that people give more money when they are presented with the stories of a single person as opposed to statistics about a general problem. For example, you are more likely to donate to the cause of eliminating Bonded Labor if I tell you the individual story of a particular client than if I tell you that there are at least 15 million bonded laborers, sometimes referred to as “modern slaves,” in South Asia alone.
One of the reasons I began to love reading fiction again is that I came to appreciate the power of good story telling. The power of bringing a person into another world, a world where the reader could sympathize with an otherwise unsympathetic person, or truly feel the pain and sorrow of a person you will probably never meet. As I have come to appreciate this narrative power I realized how similar story telling is to human rights law at a minimum, and probably much more.
Before we came to India I believed that the power of argument alone could move a person to action: if I could demonstrate the truth of my arguments through logic and legal reasoning a person would be compelled to act. This may be true with Judges and other lawyers, but is rarely the case with non-lawyers. A non-lawyer is much more interested in how a particular situation fits within their own story: their profession, job description, family life, time commitments, etc. If a lawyer can place a particular issue within the narrative structure of another person (which can include their business model, likelihood for promotion, etc.), they are more likely to be persuasive, even if their arguments are not as strong as possible. One of the most important lessons I learned within this broad category is that most non-lawyers only want one page of information, usually in bullet points, telling them exactly what they need to do. While I liked to believe that a beautiful 15-page argument was more powerful than a brief overview, this is rarely the case.
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