If Thomas King is right, and stories are all we are,
then it seems to me we have two choices in life. We can either live the
story that others have written for us, or we can write our own story.
The story of our culture, the story others wrote for us, teaches us:
- that we are at heart sinful, lazy, untrustworthy, in need of salvation or redemption
- that our world is a place of danger, frightening, cruel, brutal, plagued with scarcity and adversity
- that we should do what we're told by our betters, and be grateful for what we have
- that the world was created for man and man alone, as his dominion
- that we should multiply and fill the earth, regardless of the consequences for the rest of life
- that we should spend our life working hard and acquiring, because our worth is measured by what we own
- that our heroes are fighters, warriors, those who struggle and conquer and overcome
- that no matter what we do, god will forgive us and clean up our mess before it gets too bad
There are several novel resources that those of us who find this story
unsatisfactory, counter-instinctive, and dangerous, can use to write a
different story, a New Story:
- Steve Denning, formerly of the World Bank, has a whole archive of storytelling resources, including how to write a 'springboard' story -- one that precipitates change
- Creating the 21st Century has an introduction to storytelling that explains why storytelling is so powerful
- Inner Self, drawing on the work of Daniel Quinn, suggests a setting for a new story, almost the antithesis of the adversarial setting in which most of our culture's stories are written
- In business the process of writing a Future State Vision is
very similar to creating a new story -- envision a possible world, a
few years in the future, from the perspective of your 'representative'
character, where her/his objectives have been met and her/his problems
resolved -- and let the reader fill in the blanks on how the future
state was achieved (in other words, invent the possible)
- My own earlier post on Why Stories are Subversive has links to several other storytelling resources
Not that we should not be bound by how others say stories should be
written. I think we know instinctively how to tell stories. Children
start telling stories, to themselves and anyone who will listen, almost
as soon as they can talk. And it's only later when they fall victim to
the cultural biases that say that a story needs tension, drama,
heroism, conflict, resolution, and substantial length. Some of the best
stories are joyful, simple and brief.
Economists Peter Jay and Marshall Sahlins have both told stories that
have essentially rewritten 'pre-civilization' history, changing our
conception of hunter-gatherer cultures from poor, dirty and brutish to
affluent, comfortable and carefree. Regardless of their focus, good
stories change the way we think and therefore change who we are. They can even show us a new way to live, and hence be transformational.
As I've written often in these pages, I believe the only hope for our
world is for some, then many, and finally most of us to walk away from
the old culture, the old economy, the old politics, the old business
models, the old religions, that are driving us headlong to ecocide,
endless war, violence, psychosis, oppression, and physical and
imaginative destitution. We can't fight them, change them. But we can
create new ones that will undermine and replace them. But to walk away
from the old, we need something to walk to.
Through stories, we can invent a new world, a new culture, completely
different from the one we live in now. Instead of teaching us the eight
dreadful lessons bulleted in red above, these new stories could teach
us some things almost unimaginatively positive and astonishing, things
that we somehow forgot when the existing culture took hold 30 thousand
years ago:
- that we are magic, perfect, wonderful
- that our world is a paradise, and we are inextricably part of it and welcome in it
- that we should trust our instincts, and that by listening to the earth we will always know what to do
- that the world is a sacred organism of sacred organisms, and that it belongs to all of us and to none of us
- that our purpose is to be and to let others be, in balance and in harmony
- that we should spend our life experiencing and sharing joy and learning
- that we do not need heroes, leaders, hierarchy, order, possessions, property -- earth works perfectly well without them
- that we are all responsible for sustaining the balance of the natural world to which we belong
Is it naive to believe we could achieve a world like this? Maybe. Is it
contrary to basic human nature? Not at all. Our destructive,
acquisitive, fearful modern culture has only been around for a mere 30
thousand years. For three million
years before that humans at least behaved as if they believed, for the
most part, the green bullets above. I think we know, in our hearts,
instinctively, that there is something very wrong with our culture and
what it's done to our planet. I think we know that if we really knew
what sustains our current culture -- what goes on in prisons, third
world child labour camps, slaughterhouses, corporate and political
backrooms, torture centres, factory farms, schoolyards, dictatorships,
hospitals and asylums and old-age homes, and behind the closed doors of
private homes where women and children are beaten and abused -- we
could not allow this culture to continue, we could no longer believe
its false stories. But in the absence of an alternative, a New Story,
we turn away, preferring not to know the terrible truth about our
culture.
Imagine that the Nazis had 'won' WW2. Do you think today we would be,
most of us, angry and ready to overthrow the Thousand Year Reich? We
wouldn't. The opponents would have been exterminated and the rest of us
brainwashed to believe that aryans are 'naturally' the master race, and
that corporatism (that's what Mussolini called the complete integration
of corporate and government power and the suppression of opposition to
it via a ruthless police state, before the historians renamed it
fascism) was necessary to the order and good government of society. The
education system would have taught us, elite and masses alike, stories
that reinforced the rightness of this status quo, and ensured our
obedience, our subservience to the powerful, our fear of scarcity if we
didn't conform, our inability to imagine any other way of living.
Our situation today isn't all that different. Don't believe me? If my Ten Things To Keep You Awake
list wasn't enough to convince you, consider this: The most successful
story-teller of 2003 (his was the best selling CD of the year),
entitled (and there is no irony in the title) Get Rich Or Die Tryin
is a guy named 50 Cent. The number two best sellers were a band (can't
remember their name) who have made their entire fortune around a new
line of sneakers (they have a 20-foor Reebok sneaker that they dance
around during their numbers). MTV and MuchMusic have entire programs
devoted to which celebrities are currently endorsing which products,
including customized six-figure limited edition 'gangsta' vehicles
issued by the Big 3 US auto makers. These artists don't care if people
download their songs free -- they make their big money on endorsements
from Nike and the Gap, who in turn make their
real money from third world sweatshops, offshoring American jobs and
child and slave labour. Now, guess what the messages of the very
powerful stories in these artists' very popular songs are (check out
the lyrics if you doubt me):
- money and power and property are the measure of every man
- life is brutal and violent and you must be ruthless and competitive to survive or succeed
- it's OK to kill, cheat, rob, rape, lie if your victim is
even vaguely associated with your 'enemy' -- the end justifies the means
- women are chattels, property to be collected for the pleasure of rich and powerful men, for display
- god is on the side of the rich and powerful -- why else would they still be alive and have money and power?
Sound a lot like the red bullet list above? Sound like the belief
system of some corporate and government leaders you know? Today's best
selling artists are bombarding a generation of sadly under-educated
kids and uncritical young adults with the fiercest corporatist
might-makes-right neocon cultural propaganda since the McCarthy and
Nixon Eras, and they're eating it up.
This is why we desperately need new stories. We are running out of
time. The defenders of our bankrupt, reckless, out-of-control culture
know what they're selling is counter-intuitive, irrational, unethical,
but they have everything tied up in its continuance, everything to
lose, and they're holding on, throwing all their money and influence at
keeping it going, at subverting opposition and attacking other ways of
thinking. Our only defence is three million years of instinctive
knowledge, and the power of stories. The power to change everything.
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
