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2022-08-12 World Weavers

We Are the Storytellers

In the episode of On The Media entitled
Full Faith & Credit
⁠
, we learn about the story of money.
What we learn is that money, in itself, has no value. It has value only because of the stories that we tell each other about what has value. In the retelling of these stories in our everyday interactions, these stories become
the water that we swim in
⁠
. We believe our own hype.
So, that is the thing about the realities that we are always writing for ourselves in real time. They are infinitely malleable. What is not so malleable is human perceptions, thoughts, and behaviours—at least within the social architecture that we create around ourselves that reinforce perceptions, feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. We are social animals and we learn through mimicry. We copy each other. We absorb information from each other and reproduce it in many forms. We respond by reacting against an idea or resonating with an idea. Ideas become reality as perceptions are translated into feelings and feelings into thoughts and thoughts into actions and actions into habits and habits into behaviours and behaviours into collective social interactions, institutions, and the infrastructure and architecture to form our social, economic, political, religious, technological, and ecological realities—our social architecture.
Westworld is a narrative deconstruction of the dystopias that humans have created for themselves out of their own collective imaginations.
Jane McGonigal, in her book Imaginable, provides tools for building our future by engaging in episodic future thinking (EFT) that can enhance mental health, cognitive ability, behavioural change, and creativity.
A medium is a filter for perception. A medium stands in between an experience and a person having an experience. Very often, the experience is an authority of knowledge or information or a distributor of resources. A medium can be money, as in a medium of exchange. But a medium can be any technology. A medium can be a voice, a musical instrument, an alphabet, a pictographic writing system, a book, a newspaper, a magazine, a radio, a television, a phone, a tablet, a computer, a film, a building, a school, a bank, a parliament, a country, a church, a corporation, a network, a planet.
The earth is a medium for life. Life grows out of the earth. A thin membrane on the surface of the earth is the medium for all life that we are aware of in this solar system.
A story is a medium for the human understanding of reality. We store our past experiences in the form of stories that give language to those experiences. The memories might transcend language, but it is harder to tell someone about a sensation, feeling, thought, emotion, or experience without language. We can project those experiences of reality into the future by imagining what stories we could be living and experiencing in the future.
We have invented an entire field of creativity dedicated to the creation and orchestration of experiences for apps, websites, and computers: user experience design or UX design. If we extend this process to the experience of a brand, a corporation, an institution, or even a country, we might call this service design. Transcending these limitations of the particular medium, we might speak of human-centred design. Transcending the limitations of a particular species, we might speak of experience design. Transcending the limitations of the physical, we might speak of metaphysical design.
At this point, the scientists might object. Now, we are venturing into the realm of philosophical conjecture, psychological theories, spiritual ideologies, religious dogmas, and mystical musing.
Whenever we venture into the realm of language, meaning, values, and purpose, we have transcended what empirical study, quantifiable measurement, and scientific rigour can speak to. We have transcended the physical into what we tend to call experience and consciousness without having any idea how to explain in physical terms what experience and consciousness are. Science tends to explain consciousness as an effect of the physical brain.
However, abstractions are not so easily explained in terms of the physical, because ideas are effects of the mind and perceptions, sensations, thoughts, emotions, and intuitions are not physical phenomenon but mental, even though they arise out of physicality. In that sense, they are metaphysical.
To leave out the metaphysical from our understanding of the world is to leave out most of human experience.
Through storytelling, we turn our experience of physical reality into a metaphysical exchange of perception, sensations, thoughts, emotions, and intuitions through ideas, language, music, song, dance, art, and architecture that speaks to identity, values, rituals, customs, traditions, and culture.
The social, economic, and political are human institutions that are the hierarchical expressions of the human behaviours of caring, sharing, and cooperating. When these behaviours are managed at scale, institutions are formed to meet the needs of the collective. However, if these institutions cease to function as intended, if social institutions becomes ineffective and indifferent, if economic systems increase and accelerate poverty, inequality, and injustice and enrich only a select few, if political structures empower only those who have the means to dominate through psychological manipulation, economic influence, and violence, the institutions become ends in themselves, benefiting the few who are members of the hierarchies by maintaining traditions, protecting orthodoxies, and perpetuating the status quo.
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