“If others can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream”
William Guest

This post is the third and final part of a series starting with The Problem of the Present (Part I) and The Stories of the Past (Part II)

Revolutions

Revolution, no matter how big or small, is the moment of converting the accepted story from one to another. Perhaps the most famous revolution, the French revolution in the late eighteenth century, is a good example of this.

 “In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called ‘the people’ were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafés.”

For the revolution to take place though, it is not enough to be unhappy with the current story. As Harari says, “In order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.”

The next story must be ready. It is impossible to go from an established story to none; rather the next story must be evocative enough to inspire people towards action. “Without a new story, a story that is positive and propositional rather than reactive and oppositional, nothing changes. With such a story, everything changes.”

So, a constant telling of stories, is necessary for revolutions. There must be always be an exploration of new stories, to test whether the next revolution should happen.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” - anon

The Potential of the Future

Stories are fundamentally human and shape our very existence, but we are in a stagnant period where not enough are being explored. Luckily, the power they have over us means they are also our means of escaping this very situation; we just need to invent new ones. This all then leads to the inevitable question: how should we evaluate these stories?

Dystopia Utopia

Segal explains that “almost by definition, few impulses or activities have been more mocked and dismissed in contemporary times than those labelled ‘utopian’.” This however does a disservice to the intention of utopian fiction. Few would claim that utopian fiction is written from a genuine belief of attainment, but rather as a direction to strive towards.

The British political theorist David Leopold has grappled with this, analysing all Marxist arguments against future planning, before dismissing them; even though utopian visions cannot be wholly accurate, and their realisation might prove problematic, such aspirations still serve many functions. 

Graeber points out that historically social change has never happened according to a blueprint, but he also states that does not mean plans are worthless. Using the example of Michael Albert who has conceived a moneyless modern economy, he stresses the importance, “not because I think that exact model could ever be instituted, in exactly the form in which he describes it, but because it makes it impossible to say that such a thing is inconceivable.” In this sense utopian dreaming also becomes self-perpetuating, and if done enough potentially can overcome the stigma Segal mentions.

It is a process of nudging ourselves, and each other, towards an ever greater, and yet more grounded, “influence optimism” The preferred future becomes a prophecy, self-fulfilling through constantly being in our periphery, the potential drawing us towards it. These ideas inspire us by making change more tangible and evocative to us, driving us towards action which results in fighting for these worlds.

It is for these facts that Gordon attempts ‘to encourage those of us who see ourselves as politically engaged radical intellectuals or social-change activists to be a little less frightened of and more enthusiastic about our most scandalous utopian desires and actions.’

All these points also count for dystopias – just this time in reverse. Through fully conceiving what a dystopia may look like, we try our hardest to avoid any path that may lead towards it. Perhaps the dystopia of 1984 never became a reality because the fiction of 1984 was written.

Infinite Stories

Kahn and Weiner describe the process of future projecting; “what is central... to the present future studies is not an effort to ‘predict’ the future, as if this were some far-flung rug of time unrolling to some distant point, but the effort to sketch ‘alternative futures’ -- in other words, the likely results of different choices, so that the polity can understand costs and consequences of different desires.”

If this is to be taken at face value, then the ideal scenario would be infinite stories about the future. While telling infinite stories is by its very definition impossible, does this even represent the ideal?

The logic here is the same as stating that if infinite monkeys type on infinite typewriters, one is guaranteed to write the complete works of Shakespeare. It does not even matter if this happens by pure chance, as there is no framework that can necessarily be applied to all situations to arrive at the most helpful story. In this way the more stories are told, the more likely society is to trend towards telling the important ones, which can then be acted upon.

Most of what would result would almost by definition by unhelpful. In ontology this is often described as ‘Meinongs Jungle’, the jungle where all the possible objects exist, all the things that can be talked about (even ones such as unicorns and square circles). “The only trouble with that notorious thicket, Meinong's jungle, is that it has not been zoned, plotted and divided into manageable lots, better known as possible worlds.”

This zoning, plotting and dividing of lots then, would be an attempt to explore logically, and proceed according to the framework that can not apply to all situations, so it would rather have to be seen as a form of curation; choosing the important ones out of the infinite iterations. 

As already mentioned, when there are a lot of stories, infinite stories, society naturally favours some and attempts to steer towards the more utopian visions. In that sense, there are a lot of stories that can immediately be discounted; the ones needed most are towards the utopian end of the spectrum (to know what to strive for), and the dystopian end (to know what to avoid). There may be lessons to be drawn from stories towards the middle of the spectrum, and they give a good reference point, but they are much less likely to inspire action.

Kahn and Wiener were also talking about trying to predict the future, rather than help shape it. The distinction is subtle. While Candy states that future studies can help a society know what they want to work towards, it is slightly different from inspiring them to do so, from creating action. Also, stories do not necessarily need to take every possible aspect into account; we have no problem believing in different, or even contradicting, stories in different scenarios when needed (and even their associated identities).

The Hivemind

Perhaps the most important aspect of this is that everyone should be telling stories; all professions, genders, ages and classes. Arendt believed that the individual’s participation was vital. It keeps representative politics accountable, and stops it from distancing itself from the people, especially segments with competing interests. “The rediscovery of action and the reemergence of a secular, public realm of life may well be the most precious inheritance the modern age has bequeathed upon us who are about to enter an entirely new world.”

Hegel relatedly argued that humans are socio-politico-cultural beings, and that societies gain a rationality through their development in history. Individuals only become fully human, only become rational, free individuals, through participating in the ethical life of society. Monbiot, speaking about this participatory culture, advocates “that the process of creating change is open to anyone, not just those who are employed in particular industries. That was a weakness of guild socialism and other labour-based political movements: they excluded people who did not belong to selected workforces, often shutting women, retired people, the self-employed and many others out of active politics. They sometimes created the impression that some people have a legitimate political role, while others are automatically disqualified.”

This is avoided through storytelling; the only thing required is imagination and creativity. Anyone with a voice can talk about and facilitate change, the pinnacle of Arendt’s action.

One of the things this does is take the power of stories out of the control of the few. For revolutions of any size to happen anywhere in society, what is needed is a new story. If you are being told this story, rather than being part of the shaping of it, by definition most of the agency has been taken away from you.

This is a topic that was discussed by the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer and Adorno claimed that the culture created by industry takes over the thinking of the individual, by not allowing space for the individual’s imagination.

"All films have become similar in their basic form. They are shaped to reflect facts of reality as closely as possible. Even fantasy films, which claim to not reflect such reality, don't really live up to what they claim to be. No matter how unusual they strive to be, the endings are usually easy to predict because of the existence of prior films which followed the same schemas."

This hijacking of the societal conversation can be overcome by everyone engaging in storytelling. A democratised platform would then result, in which naturally stories that inspire many would travel far. This would also reduce the alienation resulting from passivity:

“Entertainment can also alienate us from each other. Where once we sat around the fire and talked and sang as we watched the flickering lights, today the lights and voices have been enclosed in a series of boxes. Television, while it tended to shut down conversation, at least was something that we watched, in the early days, together. Now we often watch it alone. We spend hours every day watching other people doing what we might otherwise be doing: dancing, singing, playing sport, even cooking.”

If this exploration of the potential future, this exploration of stories, can become more common and strategically deployed across communities, the individual may feel more empowered and the future may be steered again by the inhabitants of a given community or society, rather than the resignation to complacency. As Candy describes it, “this may be the ultimate ‘political’ moment in ‘doing futures’: one’s self-reconstruction as a person with imagination, with options, with agency.”

Criteria

The individual criteria to assess the validity and relevance of the stories told can by definition not be surmised here. Every society, age, situation will be different, and have different requirements. There are perhaps some criteria that will nonetheless set a good baseline from which to judge any stories and returning to the values of the enlightenment is a good starting point. Progress, liberty and tolerance are all values that are almost certain to be needed in the future. In this way we can turn the values ratchet in the right direction for future generations. It has been argued that this is what religion achieves and may be the reason it has been able to last thousands of years.

“If our purpose is to create a kinder world, we should embed within the political story we tell the intrinsic values that promote this aim: empathy, understanding, connectedness with other people, self-acceptance, independent thought and action.”

Once again, we can turn to Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance theory to help assess the results of these stories. If you were born now, not knowing into which circumstances, would you endorse the story that is being told? The thought experiment (when applied perfectly) removes any bias due to current circumstance. This hopefully leads to a more objective assessment, and a gravitation towards stories which bring the greatest good to the greatest people.

However, paradoxically, the incredible thing about stories are that they expose what is important. Through ongoing storytelling in the way advocated so far, the stories themselves can help discover the very criteria that society should measure these stories against.

Sharing

The most effective way to test these criteria, is the evaluation of them by exchange. The stories get tested against the values of others, rather than just the author. This exposes any flaws or inconsistencies that go against the values held by society at the time. It is almost like making all the brains in the community work together to solve the problems of the future in an engaging, collective way.

In this way, new stories develop from exchange as well. Picking up the story of one person, which may be lacking clarity in some areas, only to add your own bias and imagination to these before passing it on again, like a game of Chinese Whispers that self-optimises to include the desires (or fears) of everyone it has passed through.

But also, beyond testing the stories to certain criteria, and consciously adapting stories through iteration, the exchange of stories has one more effect, which is impossible to synthesise: revealing the subconscious. Turkle states that, “Most important, we all really need to listen to each other, including to the boring bits. Because it's when we stumble or hesitate or lose our words that we reveal ourselves to each other.”

Turkle makes another observation about conversation, which is that “we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves. So, a flight from conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection.” In this way, exchanging stories not only helps to develop the society we live in as a whole, but even on an individual level.

Potency

It is when a story successfully fulfils all these elements that it becomes truly important. If the story is able to inspire us, guide us in a direction, be tested against a society’s values, reach a critical mass through appealing to a broad section of the audience, and finally gets iterated through exchange until enough people can claim ownership and the story no longer has an author, then it becomes something different: potential.

“Everyone is racing to close a gap: the space between what can be imagined and what can be done. As that margin narrows, when thought and action come close enough to brush against one another, you get a static charge.” This is what Berardi calls potency: “the energy that transforms the possibilities into actualities.”

It is this inflection point we must reach, again and again, to reclaim our future. To change the world we must tell stories, that give us identities, and tell of hope and transformation. If we can achieve this on a large scale, we will come up with all the answers to the questions that technology will throw into the world and be able to act to solve them. We can reduce alienation, break out of a cycle of stagnation and hypernormalisation. All we need are stories that learn from the past, tell us about our present, but, most importantly, guide us towards a future.