Stories are what make us human. To recover our humanity, we must reimagine who we are.
“The poet is the unacknowledged legislator of the world.” –Percy Blysse Shelley
“Storytelling is our superpower. We are the only species with the ability to use language—not just to describe things we can see, taste, and touch, but also to invent stories about things that don’t exist.” — Yuval Noah Harari
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” — Richard Powers, The Overstory
I have long been fascinated by how stories inform us. My Master’s Thesis (1985) was “Tyranny vs. Freedom in Shelley.” My dissertation was “Loss, Mourning, and Reparation in Modernist Fiction.” Both argued that it is only through our ability to tell our stories in new ways that we are able to move forward.
We have our grand stories, our religions and ideologies. We have the teams we follow. Every day, we are fed an endless stream of stories. Some “go viral” and for a time, it becomes a collective, shared story, where our emotions are put in sync with each other’s. This attunement can occur at any group size. But one story is displaced by the next and the next. Whatever is posted on social media quickly gets flushed down the memory hole in favor of new, fresh, money making content. So you write your posts out and hope you write well enough to earn your audience.
But it goes beyond just writing well. The production values on the photos and videos need to be professional grade, because in an attention economy, bad sound / video can kill your message immediately. Choose instead to stand out. Your message deserves it.
Good stories change history. When I say “good” though I am also including the stories of the fraudster, the zealot, the dictator. They only need to be compelling. They could be collective fantasies of violence and revenge. Our they could be stories of redemption, of progress, liberation, and repair. Sometimes both. But we all carry these stories within us, our cultural and historical stories, our familial stories, what we tell ourselves about who we are individually and collectively.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
Stories give us the “Why?” They confer meaning. The story can say answer the question, “Why can’t I keep ahead of my bills?” or why we must invade this country or that. As per Harari, it is our unique ability to organize ourselves around collective effort with a story that is compelling enough. With the right story, or vision for the future, transformations are possible.
In 2014, I helped produce and shape a film, “ River Between Us,” about the urgent need to restore The Klamath River in California / Oregon. It carried the message, “To Heal A River, You Must First Heal A People.” Now ten years on, the river is at the center of the largest restoration project in U.S. history.
The film allowed everyone to tell their stories — the tribes, the ranchers, the farmers, local officials — so that it all blended into one story — about saving the Klamath. It was a first effort from my friend Jason Atkinson, shot on a shoestring, as he was in the midst of a fifteen year effort to see this all through somehow.
In 2012, I Co-Founded Save The Great South Bay, and was it’s Executive Director until 2019. We led with content: Strong stories, photography and video. The organization grew into a local movement, or rather one in every South Shore community. Every community had it’s own lore and sacred spaces, all had their myth origins, and were even indifferent to or even hostile to other communities. I came to understand just how tribal people are in fact, and that every tribe has its stories, it’s totems and mascots.
I even wrote about this for Forbes Digital On Leadership. In 2017, I profiled the work of Rare.org with Teaching a Village to Fish (Sustainably). Rare operates in dozens of countries. They focus on the basic fact that we are all tribal and sentimental, and that if you wanted to change community behaviors, you had to speak to that. They created mascots for each village, built stories around them, and instilled a spirit of local pride.
Think of how we crave stories, how they give meaning to the world. Scientists have discovered via brain imaging that when one reads a story, the brain processes it as though it were actually happening. We see ourselves as the protagonist. Reading, inasmuch as it puts us that the center of the narrative, has us inhabit these characters, feel their feelings and learn their lessons. This is far more immersive and rich than any AI or virtual reality platform.
Increasingly, what passes for entertainment is plotless and pointless, dopamine hits if you will. Increasingly, the quiet repose of a good book feels quaint. In a world drifting towards autocracy, the anodyne souless pablum produced by AI driven narratives expresses contempt for our agency, our right — and need — to author our own lives.
Authoritarians seek to repress all other narratives. There is only one religion, one race, one country. No one has the right to speak, however well educated and experienced. There must be no other narrative other than that of The Great Leader. A theatre of cruelty silences opposition, ends all reason. When cruelty is the point, there can be no stories.
How does one break through this wall or repression? What stories, half-forgotten, must be recalled for us to be called back? It could be the story of our common dream — that we would forge a nation out of an idea. As Whitman, our national poet would have it, all who call themselves Americans are members of that tribe. Let us remember and retell the stories that have informed us, and through that rediscover our empathy, and empathy that reconnects us to each other and to Nature.