What Stories Are You Telling?
We live in a world of storytelling, whether we choose to believe them or not.
And it is storytelling that makes it possible for humans to rule the world — be that as tyrants, benevolent benefactors, or absentee guardians. On this blue-green planet, only we use our imagination to craft stories that teach us how to live on earth.
We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on the planet, can create and believe fictions, fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values.
- Yuval Noah Harari
We live in a world where storytelling has also been split into fact and fiction, or at least it used to be seen this way — until along came “fake news” to remind us of the very thin line between those two categories. And so, we find ourselves, almost daily, bombarded by different kinds of storytelling that we make sense of in order to live our lives.
In many ways, storytelling is a creative act — one that is imbued with much symbolism and meaning…
