The Hero Maker

For years, journalist Will Storr has been writing about people with strange beliefs: demon hunters, UFO spotters, homeopaths and a couple who swore they’ve met the Yeti in some woods outside Ipswich. One afternoon, he was sitting at a Creationist lecture in the far north of Australia when he asked himself a question that he couldn’t even begin to answer. Why don’t facts work? The people that he had met, in his ten years of reporting, were often not stupid. Many were demonstrably intelligent. So why didn’t superior information fail to replace the inferior. Why did logic fail?

The answer was to lead him on a journey which is recounted in his new book: The Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (Picador, 2013). Along with a spectacular cast of characters – including climate skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton and controversial historian David Irving – and some of the planet’s most celebrated experts in brains and thinking, Storr finds his answer in what he calls ‘The Hero Maker’ : the collection of neural illusions by which we understand the world to be a narrative struggle which are at the centre of. We populate this narrative with heroes and with villains, and we flatter ourselves that we are the most important character in it. We are not agents of reason, but storytellers.

Will Storr is an award winning journalist and a novelist. For more information, please see: www.willstorr.com