Who knows when this started happening? Perhaps it is the result of Evolution. Perhaps it follows the discoveries of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, the wildlife biologist who believes that the more an action is repeated, the more likely it is to happen again. Perhaps for tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, mankind congregated around fires and told stories. The stories made order out of chaos. They put everything around them in its logical place. The stories defined them, and their enemies. The story was something the clan agreed to believe in, to ascribe to and it governed the actions of the clan members. It told people their roles, and defined their path forward. Storytelling itself is primal, basic, at the core of our very humanity. The very act of telling a story is ingrained in every fiber of our being.

Once a person believed a story and began to tell it, the story itself took root. It had a life of its own. Every time someone told the story it acted like a living cell dividing. It lives again in its retelling. In every retelling more spice was added, flavoring for the new generation, as it were. But essentially, the story itself survived long after generations have passed. The story is how we remember what transpired, why there is conflict now and how to find peace. It tells us when we are right and when we are wrong. It defines our enemies. All these things are hidden or implied in the story.

The story wasn’t always told with words.

When I was younger I took up Kali, a Filipino stick fighting art. The first thing my instructor did was put on ethnic Indonesian music and started dancing. The dancing looked a lot like Hula dancing we see from time to time in movies. Suddenly he started exaggerating the moves and simple dance flourishes turned into strikes and blocks. The Indonesian government was threatened by the martial arts, so Indonesians who created the martial art learned new ways of teaching it and saving it. They turned the art into a story. And they told the story in a dance. The philosophy of the art can also be taught with a dance. The complex bowing done before combat in Kali is itself a statement, each move tells a story.

There really is a Rain Dance, a Ghost Dance, and a Buffalo Dance. Indians in North America, Hawaii, Sumatra, Persia, Africa, in fact in every corner of the world, there are long histories of interpretive dance where the dance tells a story. There are people whose history is recorded in dance, or art, or song or spoken word. So yes, sitting around campfire and dancing, or singing, or going through your band’s oral tradition, these are all subsets of storytelling.

There is another important point to make about stories.

Essentially stories are a matter of faith. Every one of us believes stories that have pieces that do not fit. Every one of us ascribes to belief systems that vary in slight ways from established stories. But a corrupt politician or a bad general generally doesn’t dissuade a patriotic man from joining the army. We don’t have faith in a god. We don’t have faith in a principle. We have faith in stories. Stories are what show us the rightness of believing certain facts and excluding others. It is the story of Jesus and the story of Mohamed, and it is the story of Moses that creates the religion. It is the story of Jesus and his resurrection and his healing powers and his lessons of love and forgiveness that unfold and activate Christianity itself. It is the story of Moses, set to drift in the river as an infant and ended up leading his people out of slavery. It is the story of the certainty that a literal “nobody” can rise to be a partner with God that infuses Exodus with power.

The evolutionary process about storytelling is that every generation produces a new generation of storytellers and each one adds their own thumbprint to the story. You start with this man who rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, lepers, “the least of us” as it were. Jesus hated the gouging moneylenders. He hated war and violence and preached love and acceptance. He hated the exclusion of the poor and sick. The story keeps getting told from one generation to the next and each one emphasizes the parts that appeal to them the most. So by the time you get to today’s modern American Republican Christian, you have a very different Jesus. This Jesus thinks invading Iraq was an act of munificence; and this champion of the poor and downtrodden would be fine with shutting down unions and denying desperately needed public aid to the poor; this Jesus is a man who judges others; one who mocks the weak, the infirm, those that differ from the mainstream. It really isn’t the same Jesus described in the Bible. What happened to Jesus here? Remember it isn’t the facts that are germane. It is the stories that are germane. You can decide to tell the whole story, or pick parts of the story out and make them tell a story that draws a different conclusion. You can tell a story that turns a gentle loving Godly man into a mercenary if you pick out the right parts.

The facts conform to the story.

Not the other way around.

And if they don’t, then tell a different story.

Always.

The Thirty Years War was one of Europe’s bloodiest wars and that is saying a lot when you consider the conflicts on the European continent in the past two thousand years have been almost endless. It was the perfect example of how people can be motivated to kill a complete stranger for the offense of merely believing in a different version of the same story you believe. In 1618, the Catholic League, a large and powerful shock force army invaded the Germanic city-states to force Lutherans and Protestants to conform to the will of the Pope. Millions died in this war, and it was one of the first to see large civilian casualties. Today in Iraq and in Afghanistan Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims slaughter each other in good part because they each think the other is telling the wrong story. When the Prophet Mohammed died in 632, there began a long series of accessions to the throne of Islam based on Mohammed’s descendants. At some point in the succeeding generations, many Muslims felt one did not have to be related to Mohammed to lead followers. So those who believed one had to be blood relative became the Shias, and those who believed any Muslim righteous enough could lead became the Sunnis. Countless nameless faceless millions have died on both sides of this centuries long and titanic battle. Think about this for a moment. We are saying the impetus for all this bloodshed was a different interpretation of the same religion. That people would be killed and tortured for something happened centuries ago is almost beyond comprehension. But this is the power of stories.

Consider the story of Scientology. If you ever doubt the power of stories, think about the story of Xenu, a dictator from a distant and ancient civilization that millions of years ago brought billions of people to Earth in DC-8s, placed them in a volcano and then killed them with hydrogen bombs. Their disembodied souls of these billions of people were then captured using some sort of “electric ribbon” and forced to watch 3-D propaganda films for 36 days. The rest of the story is that the troubles we experience personally and as a race of people are caused by this previous trauma and only Scientology can treat you for the trauma. This is the central story of one of the fastest rising and politically powerful religions in history.

The public opprobrium of Scientology for telling the Xenu story is so powerful that Scientologists will walk off sets to avoid discussing it. They will attack you for asking about it. They will mistreat their own followers for questioning its truth no matter how odd and cartoonish it is. The story of Scientology is so powerful that followers must believe their spiritual leaders came here in DC-8s. The very retelling of this story has a power all its own to the Scientologists.

Jonathon Swift commented on this power in Gulliver’s Travels. The diminutive Lilliputians went to war with rivals over which end of an egg you crack first.

This is the power of stories. Once vested in a story, people will do almost anything, no matter how strange or painful, to assert the truth of their version of the story.

Or we have faith in science and that is the story we embrace.

The tiny differences between stories can cause tremendous tensions.

It is interesting that Erich Von Daniken looked at ancient cave art and saw a new story told. The new story was that the Gods were not spiritual beings at all. They were in fact aliens from another world, and their technology was so great it looked like magic. Von Daniken read Biblical stories and reinterpreted them. He told a new story, Ezekiel is not about angels and people. It is about alien beings and people.

Right now, Conservatives are trying to tell a different story about Lincoln, about Jefferson, about the flag, about the age of the Earth and more. They need not concern themselves with facts. They know the facts will only be forgotten and the story will live on. I can tell you now that no matter what happens, they have a big story prepared to tell. No matter how they win or lose, they have stories pre written and prepared for how to grow their base and stay in power.

Liberals are decidedly not. They are whistling Dixie and they are just not prepared for modern politics. The Republicans will start telling simple, emotional stories and the Democrats will counter with logic that exists outside of story context and the Liberals will no doubt snatch defeat from the jaws of victory with some long winded boring double speak.

Stories are the central cultural node of all humanity. Stories hold our values, our history, and our future. Those that understand the power of stories will prevail.

Because stories prevail.