Writers: It’s Not Post-Truth — It’s Post-Referee

Storytelling is more than entertainment — it’s a moral act. 

In this episode of The Storyteller’s Mission, Zena Dell Lowe explores the danger of stories replacing standards — and what that means for writers. When trust collapses and authority becomes unaccountable, storytellers are often asked to shape meaning and moral judgment. But assigning verdicts before exploring truth turns story into propaganda, even with the best intentions.

Learn how to:

• Recognize the difference between moral clarity vs. moral coercion
• Avoid letting your story pre-judge or manipulate the audience
• Preserve complexity, nuance, and consequences in fiction
• Trust your audience to wrestle with truth rather than forcing conclusions

Whether you write drama, historical fiction, or speculative worlds, this episode is a must-watch for writers committed to truthful, morally responsible storytelling.

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0:00 – Intro: “I Watched the Video” and Narrative Authority
 1:00 – When Trust Collapses: Moral Responsibility for Writers
 2:00 – Truth, Authority, and Trust: Understanding the Differences
 4:30 – The Post-Referee World: What Happens When Institutions Fail
 6:00 – Storytellers as Witnesses, Not Judges
 7:30 – How Stories Become Propaganda
 8:30 – Narrative Replacing Standards: The Danger Point
 9:30 – Fiction is Never Neutral: Moral Responsibility in Story
 10:48 – How Truthful Stories Show Complexity and Consequences
 12:00 – Closing Thoughts: Moral Force vs. Moral Coercion

Transcript

[00:00:00] I watched the video. I know what happened. That sentence has become one of the most dangerous sentences in modern culture. Not because video is useless, but because it feels complete when it isn't. In a world where trust and experts has collapsed, watching the video footage for ourselves has become our new authority.

[00:00:22] Footage gives us immediacy. It gives us emotional clarity. It gives us the illusion of certainty, [00:00:30] but it doesn't always show intent. And it doesn't always show context or policy precedent or constraints. And yet we use it to declare guilt or innocence. And we assign motive and demand justice often before an investigation has ever begun.

[00:00:47] Why? Because when trust in authority has collapsed, something else rushes in to take its place. And today that something is [00:01:00] narrative.

[00:01:00] Hello and welcome to the Storytellers Mission Podcast with Xena del Lowe. 

[00:01:04] today I wanna talk about what happens when trust collapses and what that means for storytellers in terms of our moral responsibility.

[00:01:13] storytelling bypasses rational defenses. Story goes through empathy. It shapes intuition. It forms our conscience over time.

[00:01:25] So that means storytellers have a lot of [00:01:30] power over the audience. Whenever someone has asymmetric power, moral responsibility increases. It doesn't decrease.

[00:01:39] So yes, you are responsible not to abuse your power.

[00:01:44] Okay, so let's start by going back to identify what actually broke, because right now we're living in a moment where people feel untethered from the truth. But the problem isn't that truth disappeared.

[00:01:57] Truth still exists.[00:02:00] 

[00:02:00] The problem is that somewhere along the line we started confusing truth with authority and authority with trust.

[00:02:09] What do I mean by that?

[00:02:10] Well. Instead of asking the question, is this true? We started asking questions like, well, who said it? And if the right person said something, then we treat it as true often without scrutiny.

[00:02:24] But see, that's not the way truth works. Truth is what is actually [00:02:30] real, regardless of who said it. Authority. Is who has a recognized role or who has the power to speak on something? Trust on the other hand, is the confidence we place in that somebody or that something, and see if we mix these three things up and we say them or use them as if they're the same.

[00:02:53] We're making a category error.

[00:02:56] For example. We might say something like this must be [00:03:00] correct because it came from such and such an expert. Or this is settled because the institution of such and such declared it settled. But again, that's not how truth works.

[00:03:12] Truth does not become true because someone in power says it.

[00:03:17] It's something that's discovered because it already is in existence, 

[00:03:22] Authority, on the other hand, is something that is delegated. It's also contextual. It depends on if that person [00:03:30] is an expert or not. 

[00:03:31] And it's also something that is fallible trust, however. Is relational, very key component of trust. It's also provisional meaning that it must be earned and re-earn. It's not a one-time thing.

[00:03:48] So what actually broke is that institutions begin asking for absolute trust in authority instead of trust in transparent processes that [00:04:00] pursue truth.

[00:04:01] So in other words, instead of saying something like, I trust this authority because they show their work, we were told, you must trust this authority because of who they are, and you are bad if you don't.

[00:04:14] Trust became mandatory, not earned.

[00:04:19] We stopped trusting authorities because they were pursuing truth, and we started trusting them because they claimed authority. It was this reversal [00:04:30] that was the problem.

[00:04:31] We don't live in a post-truth world. We live in a post referee world. In other words, we don't have anyauthorities to appeal to in order to know what's certain or what's true, and that's why it's a sobering thought for storytellers, because storytellers are now being tasked to do more than what we thought. We're being tasked with shaping how people know, not just what they feel.

[00:04:58] In a [00:05:00] healthy system, institutions say things like, here's the data, here's the method. Here's what we know and what we don't know. Here's how we came to this conclusion and we could be wrong.

[00:05:12] Trust flows from visibility and accountability and correction. Open questioning of that thing so you're not actually trusting the person. You are trusting the process that anyone could in principle examine.

[00:05:29] In [00:05:30] broken systems, institutions say things like. The science is settled. Experts agree questioning causes harm. Trust us. Disagreement is misinformation, or disagreement is violence.

[00:05:48] Here. Trust is demanded in advance before evidence is ever examined, so questioning itself becomes seen as dangerous or [00:06:00] immoral or disrespectful or disallowed. 

[00:06:03] Regardless of your political ideology, the experts on your side should still be testable. 

[00:06:09] For example, in a courtroom, you don't trust an expert witness because they have a title. You trust them because they explain their reasoning, they answer cross-examination, their testimony can be challenged. Expert testimony matters, but it's never final.

[00:06:27] It is examined and [00:06:30] cross-examined and compared against the evidence, and ultimately it is weighed by a jury.

[00:06:36] But when experts demand belief without cross-examination, they stop being witnesses and start being judges.

[00:06:44] But the thing is, expert witnesses are never supposed to be judges. They're not supposed to render verdicts.

[00:06:49] So that's where the trust breaks. At the end of the day, people don't actually object to authority. They object to unaccountable authority.

[00:06:59] [00:07:00] storytellers are not supposed to be judges. We're not prosecutors. We're not PR firms. We're not activists by default. We are witnesses.

[00:07:10] What do we witness to? Human nature, moral consequence, power, deception, sacrifice, truth under pressure.

[00:07:21] This is a clean and noble role, but when storytellers become judges instead of witnesses, when we decide the [00:07:30] verdict before we tell the story, we stop revealing reality and start manufacturing consent.

[00:07:36] We need to ask ourselves, do I show how truth is discovered or do I declare the moral conclusion and force the audience to buy it?

[00:07:47] When storytellers demand trust without transparency, they're doing the same thing as the institutions, and that's when their story becomes propaganda. But when storytellers invite [00:08:00] the audience into the process of discernment, story becomes truth telling and truth telling is our primary goal.

[00:08:08] Again, guess what happens when trust disappears?

[00:08:12] authority migrates to influencers and viral clips, crowd consensus, 

[00:08:17] authority doesn't vanish. It decentralizes. And in doing so, it becomes unstable.

[00:08:24] and this is the danger point because you see. [00:08:30] What happens is story starts replacing standards. Standards that we should be applying to know what is true, expertise that we should be applying and when expertise collapses and authority is untrustworthy, storytellers become the new referees.

[00:08:54] Narrative becomes the mechanism by which people decide who's guilty, who's [00:09:00] innocent, who's oppressed, who's evil, what justice requires.

[00:09:05] And here's the problem. Stories don't require standards. They require coherence and emotional resonance.

[00:09:14] This is why outrage spreads faster than facts and why moral certainty arrives before investigation, why people feel justified destroying reputations before the evidence has even been tested.

[00:09:28] When you control a [00:09:30] narrative, you are not just entertaining, you're assigning meaning and meaning when untethered from truth becomes propaganda, even when your intentions are good.

[00:09:42] So just because you write fiction does not mean you are neutral. Fiction is never neutral 

[00:09:49] A story where power has no cost teaches something. a story where truth is irrelevant teach is something.

[00:09:57] So the idea that fiction is morally [00:10:00] neutral is a comforting myth, but it's false. You are not neutral because story itself is a moral act and it organizes reality around values.

[00:10:14] You have a moral responsibility to do everything in your power to avoid telling people what to think.

[00:10:21] Now, don't get me wrong,

[00:10:23] I'm not saying you shouldn't have convictions. The distinction here is between moral [00:10:30] orientation and moral coercion.

[00:10:32] The storyteller's responsibility is not to be value free or to have no point of view. We need those things, and it's also not to pretend that we're morally neutral because we're not. 

[00:10:43] We build arguments and let the audience come up with their own conclusions.

[00:10:48] We don't force it. 

[00:10:49] The storyteller's responsibility is not to dictate conclusions, but to reveal reality honestly, and then trust the audience to judge.

[00:10:59] [00:11:00] Now, how does this show up inside story itself? 

[00:11:03] A truthful story. Allows uncertainty to exist.

[00:11:08] It honors incomplete information. It shows the cost of acting on false narratives. It distinguishes between suspicion and proof. It lets consequences emerge rather than being imposed.

[00:11:24] So ask yourself as a storyteller, does my protagonist wait for truth or do they rush to [00:11:30] moral certainty? Do I allow honest investigation or are my characters only reacting?

[00:11:39] Do I let complexity survive or do I flatten it for effect?

[00:11:44] Those choices are moral choices. 

[00:11:48] Avoiding telling people what to think doesn't mean that you're avoiding moral clarity, by the way. It means you're avoiding moral force, moral coercion, [00:12:00] which is something we're gonna dive into more on our next episode. 

[00:12:04] and also we've got a bunch of exciting topics coming up, so please like, comment, and subscribe we don't want you to miss a single episode.

[00:12:12] ​