Stories change the world.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
You’ve probably heard that before, mostly from writers and artists who were telling themselves what big cheeses they were. Like me, you probably discounted that idea on the principle that in a just universe pompous egotards are always wrong.
Alas, we do not live in a just universe.
Even at the level those guys mean it, which is that Art and Literature by Approved Arters and Literators change the world, they are partly right. Our current society is extremely atypical and it didn’t get that way without a mountain of film and fiction pushing it along, or at least suppressing social antibodies against change.
The point is even more true if we demystify it. Story and narrative don’t have to be fiction and they don’t have to have a plot. You learn this when you become a parent. Your children ask you, “tell me the story of when you and Mom got married,” or “tell me a story about when we went on vacation.” They like it if these stories have dramatic incidents, but those aren’t necessary. Your wedding day may not have been full of dramatic incident and narrative arc. They still love it.
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly a wedding proposal rang out. All was going smoothly until a howling bat-jaguar grabbed the bride in his venomous jaws and flew off to the ceiling of the church trying to crash out through a stained glass window. The quick-thinking groom grabbed a garland and made a lasso. The bat-jaguar kept jerking its head until the quick-thinking bride shoved a veil up its nose. In its blind panic the groom snagged it, it was brought down, the bride was saved, the marriage went through, and the happy couple drove away with Just Married written on their car in bat-jaguar blood. The End.
Your marriage didn’t go like that? Neither did ours. But my kids still like to hear about it in all its mundane glory. So do yours, or they will when you have them.
Stories are just hearing about what matters. They are models for what sorts of actions are meaningful and worthwhile. No one really invents this on their own. Stories are how we determine, as social creatures, what matters to the group. Even in the unlikely event that some existentialist hero forms his own sense of meaning and value without reference to anyone or anything else, at minimum stories will still be of interest in understanding how everyone else will be thinking and acting. Besides, that guy is probably just acting out an existentialist story that he absorbed somewhere.
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back
-Keynes
Besides fiction, there is a whole range of story that starts with what we would call tittle-tattle if it were malicious or juicy, but don’t have a term for if it isn’t, all the way up to biographies and long non-fiction pieces in prestige magazines.
Being an entrepeneur for something new is hard because there is no story for how exactly to do it. It’s something new. You are making up the story as you go along. On the other hand, America still does great with entrepeneurship because it has lots of stories about how to be an entrepeneur in general.
In fact, most successful entrepeneurs are part of a network where they can get advice from other entrepeneurs. That advice usually takes the form of models and personal stories.
America also has a number of stories about the turn-around CEO, so it has a number of those. It has very few stories about the founder’s successor, so succession is often a problem. Everyone has to make it up, follow a few very basic and ineffective models, or ignore the question.
Japan has successful bureaucrat stories. America has successful activist stories. So Japan has competent bureaucrats and America has competent activists.
We encourage so much attention to permaculture, reading about it and doing it, because it is one of the few sources of models and stories for creating and owning and sustaining healthy, growing, long-term set-ups. Statesman, executives, leaders, and parents would do well to learn a bit about it even if the only ecosystems they care about are corporations or neighborhoods or states. Successful permaculture stories help with mindset, meaning, and sometimes even methos.
Family Stories
There are little-to-no models for sustained and growing multi-generation families including fictional models. If you are aware of any, let us know. Commit now to supporting clan fiction if any is ever made. We have no plans to make any, but we have made that commitment.
Even the chain of basic nuclear family stories have been disrupted for many, which is why Mommy bloggers and their ilk are doing such good work. We thank them for their service.
You are still in a position to use stories for your own efforts. Every family story has the implied message that your family matters, that its existence is good, that perpetuating it would be beautiful. Telling elaborate tales like Tolkien is a great thing. Nonetheless, the essential stories that you must tell are the ones about your actual family. How did you meet? What was your wedding like? What w
ere your early days of marriage, and the pregnancies, and the births? What was it like to be a kid in Grandpa and Grandma’s home? These are stories anyone can tell. Ask them to tell you these stories sometime.
You should make a point of telling these stories. They will also emerge naturally from sustained time together without absorbing sources of media such as smart phones. Road trip time, camping without phone reception, doing physical work together, even just scheduling an evening that is phone free while playing a game of some kind. If you have extended family, visits are peak narrative times. There is a scene we have experienced many times, both as children and as adults. The adult brothers and sisters and Grandpa and Grandma are gathered around, it could be in a living room or a patio or a campfire, and they are reminiscing. They enjoy each others’ company so much. They are telling stories on each other—do you remember when you wanted flaming punch for your birthday? Do you remember the time you tried to put diesel in your old beater Chevy? Do you remember when we found out you thought Athens was fictional? Hey, what about last year which was the first time you figured out our high school Monarchs mascot wasn’t a butterfly? They bring up old jokes, and their faces are lit up. And around them are a sea of kids sitting Indian-style, rapt.
Because every laugh is telling them that they matter, they are safe, they have an identity and a people, they have a place.
Phones and Social Media and Felt Presence
In our last transmission but one, we talked about the concept of felt presence, how you define your children’s existence just by being there where they witness you. Your felt presence is a kind of story: you are providing models for how to be.
But just as with the natural emergence of story telling opportunites, felt presence requires that everyone is at least a little bit conscious of what is going on around them. If you can’t ban screens and phones completely for your children, you must develop limits with teeth and blatantly model social-media control yourselves.
Hang a Lantern on What You are Doing
Remember, propaganda is good actually. Hang a lantern on telling family stories. “Who loves family stories as much as me? They make our family so strong.” Hang a lantern on your felt presence. “Did you see me at the computer? I was balancing the budget.”
In fact, do it now. Tell your kids, if they are around, what you just finished reading, and why you read things like this.
You are creating the greatest thing in creation, a fully realized man or woman, and you are doing it their peak setting, the fully realized family. You are living the dream. Live it in full.
"There are little-to-no models for sustained and growing multi-generation families including fictional models."
I know you said you don't know of any, but what would you like to see here? Idealistically? I'd love to put thought into this too.