Stories
Who doesn’t like a good story? If we were lucky, our parents read to us when we were young, and we grew up enchanted by the world of imagination and its creatures. This experience demonstrated to us the power of ideas, and the extension of ourselves in the characters we love and hate. Before we assume the burdens of adult roles, we can invent our own stories, fill them with heroes and villains, and embark upon adventures.
Even as grown-ups we crave stories. Newspapers provide not facts, but stories. Friends tell us their stories of their marriages, careers, travels, and battles. Listening to those stories enfolds our imaginative selves into the other person’s life, letting us see the world through their eyes. As such, this empathetic state strengthens the social bonds that draws people together in times of need.
Stories may teach the reader certain truths, but they do so in a respectful and circumspect manner. They do not preach to us but let us draw our own conclusions from the outcome, and reinforce the message not with threats but with deeply felt emotions. They are an older and more powerful form of social discourse and nurture than deities or doctrines.
In our times of tribulation, suffering as we are from inhuman forces deployed for the sake of power and wealth, we can turn to stories not only for comfort, but for contemplation. The characters may work through problems that we ourselves encounter, and emerge either successful or defeated. By following their feelings and decisions, we try out those same scenarios in our own situation, as a simulation removed from our actual circumstances.
When a society encounters sweeping conundrums that defy conventional solutions, people may act irrationally and tilt social norms even further from the stable axis, causing dangerous and more dramatic gyrations that threaten the very structure of society. This is when stories can help restore the center, as they reveal the relationships and mechanisms of power and influence, giving the individual time to think and return to rationality. We can contemplate the ultimate consequences of our collective actions, and perhaps avert disaster when the collective veers off the path of sanity.
If civilization does collapse and humanity destroys itself, it will be ironic that we began by telling stories, and finished the story of humanity with more stories. We can look at it more optimistically if we realize that telling stories helped birth civilization, and may also aid in its rebirth. The stakes could not be higher. Listen well, my children, for I have a story to tell.