How Culture Shapes Our Hidden Narratives

The Hidden Stories Our Cultures Tell Us

Overstory means the story above — like the unseen highest branches of the great trees that tower over everyone and everying else in the forest. Image by Simon Alpha from Pixabay.

Culture — the cult of what we worship — eats narratives (and economics, politics, and religion) for breakfast.

It’s the overstory (the story above), the uppermost canopy of a forest above all other activity. That cultural canopy almost invisibly shapes all below (people, plants, and planet).

“We need to pay more attention to the songs we’re singing,” Malcolm Gladwell argues in Revenge of the Tipping Point, a new book showing the overstories shaping the grand narratives of our time.

When we speak of “changing narratives” or redefining our “worldview,” we’re tackling the overstory, the invisible story above.

That cultural approach is why we see Donald Trump issue so many orders freezing spending while changing language (reviving terms like “illegal aliens,” replacing LGBTQ with LGB, and deleting “climate change”).

“People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.” ― Richard Powers, The Overstory

Culture is the Overstory: Songs Shape Laws