In the end, they are all stories
Perception is Reality is Perception
As human beings, stories are how we make sense of the world. When we are confronted with facts about “the world”, from the limitlessness of the cosmos to our worth as human beings, we interpret them and form it into a coherent story.
We do not do this alone. As a society, we often need to agree on our understanding of those hard facts to properly collaborate. Those stories, then, transcend the individual as we share them with others. We share our ways of understanding the world with other people, be it through poetry, art, philosophy or mathematics. Those stories, in turn, affect how we interpret other facts going forward. Stories are social infrastructure for making sense of the world.
Every mathematical theory, every fashion piece, every essay publication, every hearth song, contains within it a way of interpreting the world.
What we refer to as culture is but many stories about who we are, told through many different mediums, intertwined and venerated.
The power of a story
After the world has been interpreted for us to understand, we then go forward and act on it. Humans take actions in the world based on our understanding of it. It is because of this that I believe that stories are one of the most powerful aspects of human society. How we operate our societies, how we view and treat each other, the values we elevate and the ills that come of them, it all comes down to our stories.
Stories are lenses through which we see the world. This much I have said. What's more is that they have tint. Like sunglasses, or even corrective lenses, they alter our sights. We often do not notice that a story has fully influenced the way we see the world; stories can be subtle like that. More so, when we share that story with other people--perhaps with all the people within our inner circle--then that story gets disappeared into significance. The fact that the interpretations that the story offers is shared, ubiquitous and culturally elevated make it seem like those interpretations are the only valid one.
A now famous parable by David Forster-Wallace illustrates this well.
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer.
The atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”
It is important to note that they do not disagree on the facts of the events. They both would agree that the man was stranded in a blizzard, prayed to God and was later rescued by some Eskimos. However, as mentioned, those facts need to be interpreted by a story to grant them meaning. Their point of disagreement is not in the facts of the matter, but in the lens through which to view it.
To me, this is a fascinating thing. Based on their varying intepretations of the very same story, the atheist will continue to not believe in God, and the theist will continue to believe in God. They will continue to live their lives in accordance with their stories. This shows us something important. Stories are how we view the world, but they are also how we create the world.
Stories encode a value system
Whether it be fairy-tale or fable, sonnet or song, stories of all kinds have values encoded within them. Even those stories whose authors created to explicitly have no value system consequently encode within them a value system. Humans both search for, and bleed meaning wherever they go. Humans operate in a meaningful world. It should not surprise us that even in our most nihilistic expressions, we have encoded a paradoxic system of meaning.
A fable that has uplifts the principles of wisdom, honesty and patience over vapidity, dishonesty and rashness necessarily sets up wisdom, honesty and patience as more admirable and desirable than its counterparts. Crucially, the fable doesn’t have to be true to do so, it just has to be internally consistent.
People once believed that in much older times, the sky was much closer to the ground. They could only do that because they never had to actually prove that the sky was so in those older times. If they had to, then they’d face the problem of a lack of consistency between their stories and the facts. Incidentally, without archeaology, history and all the other human disciplines that help us document the past, we could claim anything as possible so long as it was out of living memory. Many stories still told only work because of this one trick. I will leave it at that.
Value systems are the stuff of politics
Societies are built upon the things we have in common. Chief among those are our stories. It is our stories that compel us to join our brothers on the hunt, and they are what influence who gets what when the boar is down and the meat is to be divvied. If we define politics as the process of deciding who gets what, then stories, with their value systems and their totality, are the basis of our politics.
In the end, all of it–all of our humanity–comes down to our stories.
Paying attention to our stories
If our stories determine our reality, then perhaps it would make a lot of sense to pay attention to them. Perhaps we should be mindful of the stories we tell and the lenses we wear. Perhaps, it would do us a lot of good to reflect exceedingly upon the sort of actions we take and ask which stories brought them about.
What sort of morals does that story uphold? Do I agree with them? Who benefits from the proliferation of those morals? Do they affirm life or destroy it? Do they uplift other human beings or degrade them? What sort of world do they create?
I cannot put this any better than a quote from a novel I hold dear:
“Look, there are as many walkaway philosophies as there are walkaways, but mine is, ’the stories you tell come true.’ If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, you’ll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.”
- Walkaway, Cory Doctorow
Let us turn our focus to two influential stories in our society.
Darwin and Kropotkin
Charles Darwin was the biologist who provided the scientific basis for the process of evolution through the method of natural selection. Our analysis will benefit from a short summary of his theory:
When environments face a scarcity of resources upon which a certain population of organisms depend–let’s say the organisms in discussion are humans–this creates pressure upon the humans within that environment. Those organisms compete with each other for those scarce resources and in doing so, they lose abilities that hinder their struggle and obtain new abilities to aid their struggle. Those with unfit qualities may die off, leading to a greater population of people with more fit qualities. We refer to this struggle of all against all as Mutual Struggle. The mechanism where preferable traits are selected for is referred to as Natural Selection, popularized as Survival of the Fittest.
For example, in a competitive classroom environment, some students may gain the ability to study harder and synthesize information better as well as lose the propensity for wasting valuable time. Or in a flood, people with the ability to swim are more likely to survive when compared to people who cannot.
There’s nothing wrong with this story, it seems. It seems to describe reality well enough.
Some groups of people, who we refer to as the Social Darwinists, bastardized this story to claim that perhaps this explains and justifies the ills in human society as well. When people are poor and destitute, when people are disabled, or sick, or weak in any way, then this is just the laws of Nature taking their cause. If they had traits that Nature deemed worthy then they would be rich and successful, they would be part of the “superior” group, as opposed to the “inferior”. More so, they believed that, to interfere in that process was a fool’s game, and it was best to let Nature do what it does and eliminate the inferiors. It was all about the survival of the fittest, and they were the fittest.
This is a tidy and genrous way of putting it. Many of the atrocities of the previous two centuries owe their basis to this story, from racism to colonialism. Wikipedia puts it bluntly:
Social Darwinists believe that the strong should see their wealth and power increase, while the weak should see their wealth and power decrease.
And so, what did they should be done about those who were currently losing in society?
In Galton’s view, social institutions such as welfare and insane asylums were allowing inferior humans to survive and reproduce at levels faster than the more “superior” humans in respectable society, and if corrections were not soon taken, society would be awash with “inferiors”.
Once we start to examine the morals of this story, what do we find? We find a sort of brutality towards other human beings. We find stratification, greed, animosity and spite. We find a necessary separation of humans into in-groups and out-groups, and with it the destruction of any modicum of solidarity. We find the degradation of other human beings, all to the profit of a very limited, and frankly, ungrateful few.
I do not agree with this world.
For the scientific minded, there’s a certain defeatism that comes with scientific fact. Once something is claimed and upheld to be “scientific”, we often look at it as though it were the final word to be said concerning the topic. It is because of that bias that the story of Pyotr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid is so important. In essence, Kropotkin found that cooperation was, in most cases, a better means for survival and the development of more sophisticated skills than competition.
Pyotr Kropotkin examined Darwin’s story and went to experience it in the world by himself. Instead of this finding only this ruthless competition that Darwin had described, he found that, Mutual Aid was just as great as, or a greater force in the process of evolution. Mutual Aid is the voluntary aid of members of the same species, or even different species.
We’ve all seen it happen, many of us have partaken in it. We engage in mutual aid when we help old people cross the street, when we participate in meaningful volunteer work and when we give to the beggar on the street. We’ve even seen it happen among humans as well as animals when they adopt offspring that are not theirs, or even offspring of another species. We draw from its power when we are down and our friends help us up.
Imagine for a second that we actually had to live our lives as the story of aggressive Mutual Struggle suggested. If we followed the logic of the story well enough, we’d necessarily have to push an old person off a cliff, along with much worse atrocities, given that there was no one to witness and punish us for those acts, because “that’s one less enemy to worry about”. We’d necessarily betray our friends at the earliest convenience, or even refrain from trusting them in the first place as we expect them to do the same.
I don’t consider the world brought about by that story as worth fighting for, and so I disagree with the morals of the story.
Based on this updated view of evolution, Kropotkin created his own political philosophies of Mutual Aid that embody voluntary organization and cooperation. In Kropotkin’s stories and in his political philosophies, we do not find the morals of greed and spite, but of solidarity and brotherhood. We find a world where humans cooperate against the tides of Nature, instead of sacrificing one another to appease it.
What lenses do you don?
Moving forward, let’s be a little bit more critical of the stories we tell and the lenses we adopt. Let’s be mindful and reflective of our actions, for they betray the stories behind them. Let us examine on the world as it exists in front of us, for it tells us so much of the world as it exists within us.