Why Stories Matter — Part One
A year ago, I read the book Sapiens by Yuval Harari. It was a deeply insightful book which brilliantly explains how humans managed to rise from being a relatively unimportant species lying somewhere in the middle of the food chain, to become the most powerful beings on Earth. This month, I finally got around to reading Harari’s follow up book, Homo Deus, in which he manages to take the concepts that he had introduced in Sapiens and really explore the different paths which humanity could take in the future. In both the books, he highlights certain core aspects of human nature which have been unchanged over millennia, and which have influenced our behaviours more than anything else. Learning about these forces had a profound impact on me and I wanted to share some of what I had learned in this blog post.
What struck me the most while reading the books was the realisation that so many of our perspectives, our dreams, and our goals are dependent on the invisible forces of history. It’s like we are born with our heads gripped to face in only one direction, and it takes enormous strength to be able to break free from that grip and imagine alternative futures. We must study the past not just in order to understand it, but also to break free from it. When we truly understand history, we realise that the chain of events that led to this moment in time could have been completely different. And with it the stories that we tell ourselves would be completely different. And according to Harari, these stories are the most important components of our realities.
It’s often hard for us to even recognise that we derive meaning for our existence from stories or imagined orders. And that’s because we think there are only two kinds of realities. The objective reality, which roughly corresponds to the physical world we live in, and subjective reality, which is a function of the emotions and sensations that we feel. To give you an example, stubbing our toe is a physical phenomenon which is objectively true, but the pain that we feel exists only subjectively in our minds. But there’s one more layer of reality that we often discount. This is the inter subjective reality which consists of the imaginary entities that we conjure up in our collective imaginations, and which provides a web of meaning to our lives. There are countless examples of this; money, law, governments, and corporations being some of the prominent ones of today’s age.
All of these are fictional entities which have been invented by us have no basis in objective reality. Take money for example. The paper money we use today has no intrinsic value attached to it. It’s just a note issued by another fictional entity, the government, which ‘promises to pay the bearer the sum of x’. The value of money evaporates the minute people stop believing in this promise, or in the government. The demonetisation of Indian currency notes of 2016 is a prime example of this. The same thing could happen and have happened to laws, gods, and even entire nations. Our beliefs shape the reality that we live in. And we don’t want to admit this because these beliefs are what gives meaning to our lives.
Meaning is created when significantly large groups of people start believing in the same thing, and they start weaving together a common network of stories. Why do actions like fasting for Easter, or getting married in a temple, or voting in an election seem meaningful to us. It’s only because our parents, our friends, and everyone else we know think it’s meaningful. But that doesn’t mean that such actions have always been meaningful. History has shown us that people weave a web of meaning, and believe whole heartedly in it, only for the web to unravel sooner or later. Looking back on it, we would find it really hard to understand how anyone could have taken such stories seriously. Who knows which of our present day stories and customs would be laughed at by future generations in the same way that we laugh at the customs of our ancestors.
But why did we start inventing fictions in the first place. Harari argues that it’s exactly this ability of ours which has allowed us to conquer the planet in such a relatively short span of time. If you look at individual human beings, we are definitely not the strongest species by any stretch of imagination. In a one on one fight with a lion, or a tiger, or even a kangaroo, we would pretty much be dead meat. Yet we’ve managed to drive these species to the brink of extinction while we thrive. One could argue that it’s our intelligence which gives us superiority, and while it definitely has helped, it’s not the whole truth. What truly distinguishes us from every other species on Earth is our ability to cooperate flexibly with each other in large numbers.
The stronger the cooperation, more are the chances of domination. Even within humans, it’s always the more disciplined groups which win conflicts. If you look at the countless revolutions which have peppered our history, although masses of disorganised people can precipitate the fall of a regime, it’s always a small band of organised revolutionaries who end up taking control. And throughout history, the organised elite have attempted to ensure that the disorganised masses never learn the tools of cooperation. If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself, ‘How many people will be willing to follow me’. Instead ask, ‘How many of my followers will be able to cooperate effectively’.
There are other species such as bees and ants which have evolved the ability to cooperate well for collective gains. But their cooperation lacks flexibility. Our nearest evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzees also cooperate, but only in small social groups built on the basis of familiarity. While on the surface, humans are similar to chimps in our propensity to form tight social bonds, what truly distinguishes us is our ability to weave intersubjective webs of meaning which allows us to cooperate in really large numbers. These webs allowed us to organise the crusades, socialist revolutions, and human rights movements.
The basic abilities of human beings have not changed much from the Stone Age to the present day. In fact, you could even argue that our hunter gatherer ancestors were better than us, physically and mentally, because of the harsher evolutionary pressures they faced. But the web of stories that we tell ourselves has grown stronger and stronger, pushing us from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age. Fictions enable us to cooperate better, and the stronger the fiction, the better our cooperation. However mistaken you think the biblical world view might be, it still provided the basis for large scale human cooperation, the likes of which the world had never seen before.
But there is a price that we pay for the cooperative abilities that our belief in fictions give us. The choice of fiction determine the goals that we strive for. During the Crusades, a young Christian soldier would have gone to the battlefields expecting a holy battle with devilish Moslem warriors, only to find young men on the other side,very similar to him and believing in much the same fictions. The only thing which divided them was that one chose to believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the other that of Prophet Muhammed. “History is not a single narrative, but thousands of alternate narratives. Whenever we chose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.”
Problems appear when we forget that the stories are just mere tools. When they become our goals and our yardsticks. Much of the conflict and issues that have plagued human society to this day stems from this simple fact. We begin wars to ‘protect the national interest’, and destroy entire ecosystems to ‘make a lot of money for the corporation’. Corporations and nation states are fictional entities that exist only in our imagination. But we forget that we invented them to serve us, and now we find ourselves sacrificing our lives and livelihoods in their service. The only way to break out of this paradigm is to slow down from time to time and try and perceive things from the view point of a real entity.
And how do we know if an entity is real? Harari suggests that the simplest way to do say is to ask yourself, ‘Can it suffer’? Google, Chevron, The USA, China, Christianity, Hinduism…none of these fictional entities can feel suffering. But real human beings suffer when a war breaks out in the name of nationalism or religion. Real animals suffer when an oil spill destroys an ocean ecosystem. Thus it becomes imperative to develop the ability to distinguish fiction from reality. And it’s a need which is becoming more and more important in the modern age. We have now reached a stage where our technology has become so advanced that the inter-subjective realities that we create threaten to completely overwhelm our objective and subjective realities.
We are developing the ability to manipulate our real world in any way we see fit and the lines between what is real and what is imaginary is becoming increasingly blurred. More and more people are choosing to spend their time in digital realms than in the real world. Religious fictions are slowly becoming replaced by technological fictions driven by the incessant capitalist desire for more and more growth. In the second and final part of this series, I will be breaking down why Harari believes that the most pressing objective of the age is actually to figure out what should be the right story to believe in, and why it holds the key to our long term survival.
Check out Part 2 here.
