 It's funny how things come together sometimes. Monday, after posting my advice column on blogging time-savers,
and saying the most important thing is to get away from your computer
and your reading and get out into the real world and give yourself time
to think creatively about what really matters to you personally, I
followed my own advice. Chelsea and I went for a long walk. And soon my
head was filled with rage about all the things wrong with this world
and the ten things that still keep me awake at night. And I wanted to know why they go on, ignored, uncorrected. Things happen the way they do for a good reason, I've always said. You need to understand why all this stuff has happened and continues to happen. Find the root cause, not the symptoms.
People love to read editorials and blogs that rant cleverly,
emotionally and articulately, and blame other people for what's wrong.
Pointing the finger at others exonerates us, takes the heat off, makes
us feel better about ourselves. What's the root cause, and who's to blame?
And then I came back in and read some more of The Truth About Stories, the book I blogged about on Sunday so enthusiastically. And at the end of the book I found my story, perhaps our
story, and all the rage I had focused outside was refocused inward,
because this story is, at its root, a story of personal failure,
cowardice and fear.
Here is what I read:
The truth about stories is that that's all we are.
The Nigerian story-teller Ben Okri says that "in a fractured age, when
cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also
live in them. One way or
another we are living the stories that are planted in us early or along
the way, or we are also living the stories we planted -- knowingly or
unknowingly -- in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives
meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we
live by, quite possibly we change our lives."...
In North America, we talk about our environmental [and business] ethic.
[We get outraged about incidents like the Exxon Valdez spill and the
Enron fraud and demand action]. To listen to the noise generated by
these two events, you would have thought that we cared. But in fact, we
don't. Not in any ethical way. Oil tankers are supposed to be safe.
Financial institutions are supposed to be bastions of integrity. But we
do nothing to prevent such disasters from happening again. And when
they do, and they surely will, our reaction will be the same, because
the story we tell about moments like this is that they shouldn't have happened, that they're someone else's fault,...that there's no way to avoid them completely, that the environment and investor confidence will recover eventually...
The Canadian government closed down the East Coast cod fishery. The cod
were already gone, had been going for years, and everyone knew it. The
reason was simple. Overfishing. The fishers blamed the government. The
government blamed the fishers, everyone blamed the large foreign
offshore trawlers, seals, global warming, El Nino, Native people...
Could such a thing have been prevented? Of course. So why didn't we
prevent it?
The oil industry and our oil-based economy depend for their existence
on the ability of geologists to find new fields of oil and our
willingness to ignore the obvious, that at some point we're going to
run out of oil. This would suggest that reducing energy consumption,
curbing the proliferation of cars and multilane highways, and
converting to sustainable sources of energy would be our first
priorities. But we have no such priorities. We only hope that the
exhaustion of the oil supply won't happen in our lifetime.
It's not that we don't care about ethical behaviour, the environment,
society. It's just that we care more about our comfort and the things
that make us comfortable -- property, prestige, power, appearance,
security. And the things that insulate us from the vicissitudes of
life. Money, for instance...
The proof of what we truly believe lies in what we do and not what we
say. We've created the stories that allow [the ethics of what we do and
don't do] to exist and flourish. They didn't come out of nowhere, from
another planet. Want a different ethic? Tell a different story...
I weep for the world I've helped to create. A world in which I allow my
intelligence and goodwill to be constantly subverted by my pursuit of
comfort and pleasure. And because of knowing all of this, it is
doubtful that given a second chance to make amends for my despicable
behaviour, I would do anything different, for I find it easier to tell
myself the story of my failure as a human being, than to have to live
the story of making the sustained effort to help.
Our stories are lies. We know they are, but we keep telling them to ourselves and to each other. We keep living them and living in them. Thomas King acknowledges that this, The Truth about Stories,
is in itself not a very satisfying story. "No plot. No neat ending. No
clever turns of phrase." (The remaining stories in this book have all
three, and are remarkable).
We don't want to hear the other
stories out there in the real world -- the stories of what goes on
inside the walls of abusive homes, factory farms, prisons, workplaces,
schools, laboratories and institutions, and which are overtly played
out in inner city streets and throw-away third world countries, the
endless litany of violence, physical and psychological, personal and
institutional, that occurs millions of times per minute throughout our
world. These other stories detract from our 'comfort and pleasure'.
They threaten to crack open the lies in our own story. That we cannot
bear.
So the 'root cause' I was seeking during my walk with Chelsea is the
subversion of our culture, this modern culture of negativism,
acquisition, paternalism and scarcity whose ubiquitous, tyrannical
story leaves everything in the hands of fate,
or god, and absolves us of our responsibility and our sins, and fills
us with the constant and consuming terror of not having enough. And we know who's to blame: The Man in the Mirror (that song was written, ironically, by a woman).
Our story is unfinished. We could change the ending if we want. Create a better ending. It's all up to us.
[My novel-in-progress will be
an attempt to create a new ending, and perhaps a completely new story.
I still hope to have it finished by the end of June.]
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
