The Multiple Stories of NXIVM

There was a moment a few years ago when I couldn’t help but cringe a little every time I heard the word story, so wantonly was it being bandied about. This was during the Trump administration, when lots of people still sweetly believed that culture could counter raw political power, that protest art could engender a sense of shame among the shameless, even that satire might have the capacity to save the republic. It was no longer enough for novels or TV shows or musicals to be engaging, transporting, even transcendent. They also had to have a kind of radical, inherently noble energy. Things seemed to come to a head in early 2019, when Apple announced its new streaming service with a spiel so solemn and devout that it was as though Jesus Christ himself had signed on as a creator. (Or as, I suppose, a Creator.) Stories, a fleet of onstage executives said oh-so-earnestly, can “change the world,” connecting us to one another and new ideas.

Here’s the thing: None of this was wrong. But we—and —presumed that the winning stories of the era would naturally have some kind of moral valence, or at least intentions no more nefarious than making money. In truth, though, that just hasn’t beenshow us new ideas and worlds. One of the dominant storytelling genres of our time is conspiracy, which claims to clarify chaotic reality through a kind of multiplayer shared experience. is a choose-your-own-adventure tale. “The story of a ‘stolen election,’” the literary theorist Peter Brooks writes in his new book, , “led to the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol a few months later.” The “good” stories, you could argue, might have succeeded in enhancing our conception of the world. But for a dizzying number of people, the “bad” stories have subsumed reality altogether.