Living the Fiction

 We are sense-making, storytelling creatures. This is our power and yet our weakness.

How did this scrawny creature called the human being end up ruling the world?

Since the beginning of homo sapiens, stories have bound us together and driven us apart. Cave drawings were a convention for telling stories to bind together a tribe. And tribal beliefs and territories drove us to war. Now it is our fine arts and books that tell our story. It is stories that have banded us together, giving us the power to eventually rule the earth. That is the one distinguishing feature of the human race; we can imagine, put our imaginations into words, tell stories to others about those imaginations, and then choose to believe or not, individually or collectively. This is the process that allows countries, companies, governments, and religions to be formed out of nothing but imagination and vision.

Stories are foundational to culture and society.

Stories are foundational to countries and governments.

Stories are foundational to business and the free market.

Stores are foundational to religion and spirituality.

There is reality.

Then there are fictions.

We create and believe fictions to facilitate us working together for the common good.

We create and believe fictions to mitigate the fear of death.

We create and believe fictions to overcome our limitations as human beings.

We create and believe fictions to garnish power over others.

We create and believe fictions to dominate (preserve or destroy) the earth.

We create and believe fictions to give us our civil and human rights.

We create and believe fictions to find meaning and purpose.

We create and believe fictions to become, in our minds, eternal beings.

What is a fiction?

It is that which is not real.

It exists only in our heads.

It is a story we tell ourselves

About what we think is real.

Fiction is created by thought.

Thought creates our world.

… and we believe it.

A uniquely human phenomenon:

~ “How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”

~ “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

~ “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.” 

~ “Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.” 

― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

• Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth (paraphrase). All of mythology is summed up with this: There is a plane of existence where we live. It is tangible, visible, temporal. But behind it is a plane of existence that is invisible, eternal, intangible, and yet, metaphorical. This metaphorical plane supports the temporal plane. This is what our myths (stories) tell us. This is how storytelling creatures make sense of the world; giving it meaning and purpose.

• See also, David Bohm on the Implicate / Explicate Order in quantum physics.