How Your Story Changes the World

Every life is part of society, and therefore every personal story is part of society's story. When you use the word "America," an unfolding story is implied. America stands for a history that has its own values, prejudices, crises, hopes, and fears. The same is true when you talk or just think, about topics like religion, immigration, terrorism, or the economy. All these topics are actually unfolding processes, and with each one comes a story. Fitting your personal story into the bigger story is complicated. When you cast a vote you are influencing a larger process, causing the story of society to move one way or another. Pulling a lever in a voting booth is a simple act, but people bring so many personal stories into the booth with them that nobody has ever been able to figure out a simple way to reliably predict how voters will act. Everything is at best a trend, and trends can change overnight. We are all constantly thinking about how our personal story is going, using emotionally charged terms like success and failure, rich and poor, satisfied and dissatisfied, getting worse and getting better. These terms are all judgments, and even when a word doesn't express a judgment on the surface, there's one hiding just beneath the surface -- consider current hot-button words like Christian, terrorism, illegal immigrant. It's hard to say them without touching on a host of opinions, assumptions, beliefs, and predictions. They too, are constantly changing. Modern life has become hundreds of times more complex in large part because there are too many stories to keep track of. To give just one example, before 9/11 the average citizen wasn't following the story of Iraq, al-Qaida, Afghanistan, the Taliban, Sunni and Shia, and other related topics from the Arab world. Mostly they lumped the whole Arab story into one word: oil. Suddenly, however, a thicket of new stories has sprung up, and each signifies a different process that is unavoidably touching on ours. People who can't or won't handle this proliferation of new stories continue to say "it's all about oil," but they are fooling themselves, trying to return to an old chapter after the page has turned. It may sound abstract to refer to narratives and processes but in fact nothing is more powerful. "I am getting richer" is a far different story from "I am getting poorer." History is changed by the twists and turns of such simple, basic stories. When people think about the world, whose story is much too complicated to grasp, they must simplify it. This can be done is several ways that turn out to be totally fictitious but extremely powerful. 1. You can apply blanket labels.2. You can pretend that a process is actually fixed and unchanging.3. You can look only at what applies to you personally.4. You can attach yourself to a bigger story that needs no more thought on your part.5. You can defend yourself against stories you don't like. In our current global situation, everyone is doing some of these things and sometimes all of them. Nationalism, for example, is nothing more than attaching oneself to a bigger story (my country) and then shutting down the mind. Terrorist is a blanket label. Anti-immigration is a defense against anybody else's story except your own. Politicians rise and fall depending on their ability to manipulate these simplistic methods of making a complex world seem manageable. A family living in Egypt or Lebanon is experiencing an unfolding process that never stops, which means that their life is the same as yours. But once you slap a few labels on them (foreigner, Muslim, fundamentalist), apply a few judgments (anti-American, enemy, terrorist sympathizer), and defend yourself against them (homeland security, Army, CIA), or simply turn your back and retreat into your own private story, you have seemingly come up with a way to think about people in Egypt and Lebanon when in fact you aren't thinking at all. Certainly various politicians deal with the world situation in exactly this way. In a larger sense what you have done is to turn reality into illusion. If enough people follow suit, then you wind up with collective illusions, and reality has no choice but to shift to keep up with a new story that has gained a life of its own. Anti-Semitism was part of the European story for centuries. Even when it was fairly quiescent it was a delusion. Once the Nazis inflamed it, anti-Semitism was no less illusory (in the sense that "the Jews" were being labeled and judged in hostile, simplistic ways that had no relationship to how actual Jews lived). But once the illusion gained mass momentum, reality shifted. Actual Jews got swallowed up and annihilated because they had become "the Jews." The question we need to ask ourselves is this: Aren't we witnessing the exact same thing happen right now? (To be cont.)

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