This post is a continuation of The Problem of the Present

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
Phillip Pullman

What Makes Us Human?

The biggest advantage we humans have evolutionarily is our compassion. There is no other animal that feels the same amount of compassion we feel for one another, and not only do we empathise and try to help one another, but we encode these ideas in moral norms. Our brains are adapted to be able to understand other human’s emotions and viewpoints, and it already shows at fourteen months, when children begin to help each other reach objects another cannot. At age two, children start sharing treasured items, and by three they start reacting against others violating social norms.

Fundamentally social creatures, we need each other more than material goods, perhaps even food and water. Evolutionarily, leaving the group meant much lower survival chances, so emotional pain developed to drive us back. In language, we use the same words for physical and emotional pain. Social contact is known to reduce physical pain, such as when we hug children after they hurt themselves. Conversely, a reduction in social contact is intended to cause emotional pain as a stand-in for physical pain, such as with solitary confinement.

It is as a result of this compassion that we are also the best mammal (with the possible exception of the naked mole rat) at cooperating. We evolved and have undoubtedly come to dominate the planet, although there are many bigger and stronger animals. As Harari explains, “One versus one, or even ten versus ten, chimpanzees might be better than us. But, if you pit a thousand humans against a thousand chimpanzees, the humans will win easily, for the simple reason that a thousand chimpanzees cannot cooperate at all.”

This cooperation is possible, because humans have the imagination to create fictional stories. “We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys [sic] and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values.”

“Just imagine Wembley Stadium with 100,000 chimpanzees. Complete madness.”

Everything as a Story

These stories are unique to humans, and central to everything we do. 

Our brains have evolved to think in stories, and this is how we perceive the world around us. As Marshall states, “stories perform a fundamental cognitive function: they are the means by which the Emotional Brain makes sense of the information collected by the Rational Brain. People may hold information in the form of data and figures, but their beliefs about it are held entirely in the form of stories.” And as Kant already said, our minds help us structure our experience of reality; thus the rules of reality (as we know it) are intrinsic to the mind; the reality as we know it is shaped by stories.

Clifford Geertz describes humans as the “unfinished animals”, with which he meant that our human nature is not totally intrinsic to us, rather being shaped by external forces around us; it is “more created than it is discovered.” The stories we tell and collectively believe have a much bigger impact on creating society than the other animalistic instincts within ourselves. 

As the science fiction writer Ursula K Le Guin puts it, “The story–from Rumpelstiltskin to War and Peace–is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

The money we use to pay for real physical objects has no inherent value, but the story that all of society believes inscribes it with such. There is no such thing as a ‘nation’ in the natural world, borders do not alter the course of a tornado or cause birds to question their migration patterns.

Language constantly confronts us with words borrowed from the world of stories. We read newspaper stories, when people recount an interesting event we comment on how that is a ‘great story’, in other places we hear about the ‘narrative’ being insufficient to convince stakeholders: in journalism, in politics, in architecture competitions. In this sense, language exposes how reliant we are on stories, when in actuality we go through most of life unaware of how much our society is shaped by them.

The Power of Stories

These stories are powerful then, given how inherent they are to our understanding of the world. As soon as we are confronted by a problem, we immediately search for the consistent and comprehensible story, paying little attention to how reliable the facts are. Because these stories play to our most fundamentally basal human instincts, they can take on incredible power. 

Stories have the ability to change the values we hold. The values we share are no laws of nature (the enlightenment idea of ‘human rights’ is just another story), and we are not born with them. They are created by “our social environment, by the cues and responses we receive from other people, and by the stories we tell ourselves and each other.” They are also shaped by the political environment we live in.

“Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.”

There is a strongly self-reinforcing aspect to this, where the values of the society we live in become normalised. This means the next generation can then build from this new baseline and go further in this direction. This is the process of policy feedback, also known as the Values Ratchet.

This can cause societal backsliding: “If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant trends and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to emerge.”

However, the same process can also work in the positive direction, and if “people live in a country in which no one is allowed to fall out of the boat, in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end.”

Politics always attempts to shape these stories in a way that they will in turn shape us (making no judgement on motives, or even awareness of this happening). Thatcher for example said, "Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”

Our love for stories can even make us support protagonists that stand against the values we have. Lord of the Rings and the Narnia series for example put us on the side of autocracy, destruction of industry and even “divine right over secular power.” Instead, we choose to ignore the clash with our own values, as the desire for a good story is more important.

Viewed from the perspective it is easy to understand how people often make decisions that go against their own interest. We are never the cold, fact-based machines that modern economics tries to convince us we are. Rather we look for our social identities on the election ballot, and the stories that go with them. “Perhaps we could see these tendencies as complementing our fondness for narratives: we interpret the world through our attachments, rather than through reasoned observation. We attach ourselves to stories and to social groups, and take the positions that seem to align with these attachments.”

Monbiot describes the narrative we see again and again in politics: “Disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. The hero – who might be one person or a group of people – revolts against this disorder, fights the nefarious forces, overcomes them despite great odds and restores order.”

“The most grotesque doctrines can look like common sense when embedded in a compelling narrative, as Lenin, Hitler, Georges Sorel, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Ayn Rand discovered.” In more recent times, the Remain campaign in the EU Referendum and Hillary Clinton, it could be argued, lost their respective elections due to not having a compelling narrative. Many voted against their own interests, because the story of one side was more coherent.

Conspiracy theories are similarly a result of this desire to have everything explained by a simple story. In this sense conspiracy theories are similar to populist politics; a simple overarching theory to explain something that in reality is beyond comprehension.

It would seem logical that the solution to this could be facts, that more information is able to change our minds and convince us of new directions. Monbiot disputes this, saying “A string of facts, however well attested, has no power to correct or dislodge a powerful story. The only response it is likely to provoke is indignation: people often angrily deny facts that clash with the narrative ‘truth’ established in their minds.” 

 “Drawing on experimental work, Marshall shows that, even when people have been told something is fictitious, they will cling to it if it makes a good story and they have heard it often enough. Attempts to refute such stories tend only to reinforce them, as the disproof constitutes another iteration of the narrative. When we argue, ‘It’s not true that a shadowy clique of American politicians orchestrated the attack on the World Trade Centre’, those who believe the false account hear that ‘a shadowy clique of American politicians orchestrated the attack on the World Trade Centre’. The phrase ‘It’s not true that’ carries less weight than the familiar narrative to which it is attached.”

However, when a story becomes too dominant and unquestionable, the result is a narrative that placates through not allowing other stories to be imagined. One of the strongest fictions in the stagnant era we are living within is the political-economic system the world is currently governed by. We are living in an era where we forget that neoliberalism is just a story, a story of which we appear to “accept the proposition that this utopian faith describes a neutral force – a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution.” ‘The Economy’, that drives daily life and determines people’s path through life before they are even born is a story that did not even exist 300 years ago. 

Monbiot explains that one of the reasons for “neoliberalism’s remarkable longevity is the absence of countervailing stories. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, John Maynard Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it, supported by a powerful narrative of restoration and redemption. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 1970s, there was an alternative ready: neoliberalism. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008, the political parties appeared to vindicate Margaret Thatcher’s maxim: there was, indeed, no alternative.”

We seem to have come to a point of stasis, hypernormalisation leading to an ‘inevitable’ world of neoliberalism; “The white middle class is unable to understand and control the hyper-complexity of financial automatisms, and this fuels sentiments of social impotence.”

 “It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.”

It would seem that Huxley was right in Brave New World Revisited, and consumerism has replaced utopian dreaming, or as Frederik Jameson poignantly declared: “It is easier to imagine the end of humanity than the end of capitalism.”

The lack of alternative political stories in the current world may be another factor contributing to the current complacency. No matter what one thought of the alternatives, just the fact they were visible provided a challenge to the established norms; they were a reminder of alternate stories. It was often declared in post-cold-war euphoria that liberal democracy will be the last ever political system. What is certainly true is that when the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989, the last major political ideology threatening the West crumbled with it. Now we are left without visible reminders that our current political story is not a law of nature.

“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.”
– Ursula K Le Guin

The Potential of the Future

We change the world by changing the stories we tell. In this finale, I’m exploring how “utopian dreaming” and shared imagination give us the spark to move from ideas to action. It’s not about a perfect blueprint; it’s just about finding a vision worth chasing together.

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