Excerpt from a provisional foreword to the Tragic Law.
Material conditions shape the world. We create stories to explain the world. Stories direct how we act. Our actions shape the material conditions around us. The cycle continues, thesis antithesis synthesis neverending.
The central function of story is an interpretative one. It takes in the chaotic, random, and senseless phenomenae of life and organises them in ways we can understand and make use of. Every story is a heuristic. All are incomplete, but some are more useful than others. In this way and more they are similar to scientific theories: We make predictions all the time based on stories. The car will stop at the red light, because red lights mean stop. The train will arrive on time because the timetable says so. My neighbour will not kill me, because people don’t do that. Social fictions are what power our societies. However, this does not mean that changing the story will change the underlying material reality that caused the story to take shape in the first place. Empedocles’ story told him that he was a god, and the volcano disagreed. The Donner party’s story was manifest destiny, and the wilderness triumphed. Material reality always wins against a story, unless in living our lives according to our stories we change that material reality. Our actions shape reality, which feeds back into our stories, reinforcing or weakening them. Sometimes we hold on to our stories in spite of what reality tells us. Sometimes, a particularly powerful story inspires actions so powerful that the story seems vindicated retroactively, when in truth it was our actions that made a new reality.
Stories on their own are worthless, acting—shaping reality—is what counts. But without stories, we cannot organise our actions. And when we hold on to a story against the whims of material reality, reality always wins. And right now reality is winning, as global warming throws away the old story that humans are masters of the earth and our stories about money and work choke us in our serfdom. So what is to be done?
We must shape our stories just as stories shape our actions.