# 1 > Even when a message is persuasive or popular, we should think twice about buying in.
Politicians, sociologists, and marketing executives all know this fact: We're taught to live by scripts__stories we are fed that seek to prescribe the truth about our lives. For example, a global telecommunications company has engineered an entire advertising campaign around the prevailing myth that "bigger is always better." And certain versions of the American Dream provide a prevalent narrative: To be content, we must secure a house, car, and lucrative job . . . and then secure a larger house, a shinier car, and an even more lucrative job.
Another common script insists we must exert great eneergy, under threat of calamity, to hold on to our life.
# 2 > This storyline conveys that It's necessary to secue our own happiness and vigilantly protect our well-being against anyone we view as a treat. We fear those of a different enthicity, political persuasion, or socioeconomic status, eyeing them with suspicion instead of moving toward them in love. How much of the violence in our midst erupts because we operate out of fear and the script of self-preservation?
READ Exodus 1:9__10, 17
This false script been with us for millennia, and it made an appearance in Exodus 1 when Egypt's Pharaoh incited his prople with threats of insecurity and catastrophe.
# 3 > "Behold the people of the sons of Israel are more and mightier than we," he said, stoking the fires. "Come, let us deal wisely with them, or else they will multiply and in the event of war, they will also join themselves to those who hate us, and fight against us and depart from the land" ( EXODUS 1:9__10 ). Disaster looms, Pharaoh insisted. Our way of life is in danger. We've got to strike first and protect what is ours. While there may have been some truth to his anxiety about Egypt's slave labor growing too powerful for the overseers to control, it seems he was exaggerating the danger. The script he was following says everyone's a threat and the primary objective is to clutch our power or resources. He obviously realized nothing garners support for an empire-building agenda like a little dose of mass hysteria.
