We Live Our Lives By Stories

There are few threads that commonly connect human beings, that every human being that we think of as “human” experiences. There are so few things about which we can say “All humans that we consider to be humans, not just beings who are wearing human flesh but are not human in how they think, have experienced with certainty.” Parenting is not one, there are many orphans who have never known their families, their mothers nor their fathers. We can rule out war, because there are tribes of peoples out there who have never known that there were peoples beyond themselves to war with until civilization finally found them. It is not theater, or writing, for those are fairly recent creations of civilization. But there is one definite constant, and that is the tradition of telling stories. All societies tell stories, and all stories follow the same patterns. We live our lives by these stories, and think of our lives in terms of stories, because that is how we have always, and probably always will, explain the world to ourselves, and we can see this because there is real evidence, from the Monomyth, to Jungian Archetypes, to the 2, or 20, or 36 or however many types of narrative you wish to support at any given time, all pointing to common literary experiences that hold universally.


Now, for the single greatest resource of collective archetypes, tropes, and various tools of story telling, you should go look at Tvtropes.org. This website is an enormous wealth of various literary and narrative based syntax by which we can find similar threads in all stories, and each page includes not only a break down of the “trope”, but also go into examples drawn from various types of media, as well as real life examples. I lay this down as the first bit of proof, that if we did not, on some level, define our lives by the stories we tell, how could we attribute narrative tools and mechanisms to real life peoples and events? I challenge you to spend time browsing on this website for any period of time without beginning to think “hey, I know someone like that”, or “yeah, I know a situation like this” about a real life thing or person. In fact, go do it a little right now, then return here and finish reading, it’ll give you some insight into exactly what I mean by “narrative tools”, a term I’ll be using throughout this post and feel needs little explanation at this point (I will go into the term in depth later, for the moment just think of them as types of plots, characters, and events that go on in stories).


Now, the simple fact that we can attribute narrative tools and tropes to real life things, people, and events is not enough to claim that we define our lives by them. I ask you this though? How are we taught our first lessons in life? When we are young and listen to bed time stories from our parents, or they play audiobooks for us on the nights they are too tired to read to us themselves (and in my case, it was always both, first a bed time story, then fall asleep listening to an audiobook). These stories do more for our development than we might think. They instill in us values, world views, thinking patterns, and reasoning abilities based upon what we hear and relate to when we are young. Jonathan Young put it best in this article when he said:

These tales are psychological mirrors and we become more complex as we mature. The storytellers intentionally loaded the adventures with heavy symbolism to reveal more meanings as we develop a deeper awareness of ourselves. Bedtime stories have enormous influence over our identities. People identify with certain characters in the stories they heard in childhood. To some degree, many live out these stories, largely unaware of how much the old tales may be shaping our lives. 

Nothing could be more truth than this statement, and these stories remain true, on some level, inside of us throughout our lives. Little Red Riding Hood tells us about how we should avoid strangers and beware dangers, as well as instilling the sense that authorities can and will save us when all seems lost. The Three Little Pigs tells us how hard work and dedication will protect us from danger and reward us in the end. And is there a person alive today who does not know the story of the prince and the dragon? Told and retold a thousand times until we don’t even think of it as a story anymore. The princess is kidnapped by a dragon and the prince rides out to save her, slaying the dragon and bringing her back to the kingdom to be crowned king and marry her. It is something so integral to how we think of the world that a thousand teenage girls each year wait to meet their “Prince Charming”, their knight in shining armor, and end up horribly disappointed. They have it PROGRAMMED into them on some level to want a boy who is handsome and brave and rescues them from danger. At the same time, the boys are instilled with a need for physical prowess, an idea that there are things a boy does and does not do, that they have to be there to save the girl and fight some imagined or real dragon for the right to deserve her. This is but the simplest example of how stories shape our lives, but it is such a basic one that it has come to have a name all it’s own: The Monomyth.


The Monomyth, as we understand it, is the Heroic Journey, and was has most famously been explained and analyzed within Joseph Campbell’s seminal work: The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The story is simple, it tracks the progress of the hero through his journey away from the world he knows, into the depths of hell and adventure, through some transformative experience, to triumph over the evil that drug him away from the world he knew, and back to the real world, his home, transformed and with skills he can apply to make the world he once knew a better place. For an incredibly instructive diagram of these events, I encourage the reader to look here. Read through that list counter-clockwise, and you’ll no doubt think of a thousand different legends, stories, and tales by which you can place it. The most obvious being the Lord of the Rings, but similar examples can be seen in Harry Potter, Eragon, and other modern tales. You can even apply it to real life. We set out from the world we know, we are transformed, we go through hell, we learn something new, gain a powerful skill, and overcome the challenge we face before returning home, our new skill in hand, to make our world better. Then, we once more experience the call to adventure, and once more we seek out a new skill, a new ability, a new experience, to overcome the challenge at hand, and a thousand, thousand times throughout our lives we will live out that cycle until our dying breath.


So we’ve proven that, at least on some level, that we live our lives by plot types. But what about character types? Do we see the world in terms of character archetypes? I would say yes, definitely. And not just in terms of characters, but in terms of events and situations in real life. An archetype is a kind of universal, it represents a thing, a very real thing, a symbol of something simple yet complex all at the same time. An archetype can be a character, or a situation, or a location, or an item, as long as it fits the base definition of that thing. Jung was one of the first to go into the "indefiniteness of the archetype, with its multiple meanings" (Collected Works of CG Jung, 16:497), and you can get a more in depth look into how archetypes function and what they are on the A.R.A.S (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism) website. Most powerfully, at the end, it says:

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us (CW8, 342).

Think about that for a moment, think about this, and then think about the tropes and archetypes you browsed through earlier when reading TvTropes (you did browse it right?). Symbols are how we understand this world, and Archetypes are the most primal and basic kind of symbols, a writing mass of work throughout human history all interconnected and indivisible from one another, infinite and expansive and simple all at the same time. Things that are complex and divisible into infinitely smaller units, yet at the same time so simple that we can apply them over and over again to the most basic of human interactions in real life. That is what an Archetype is.


Let’s take a closer look at one of Jung’s Archetypes in particular, Anima and Animus, or the Syzygy. In principle, these are the man who completes the woman, and the woman who completes the man. I’m sure not a single one of my readers can fail to think of a couple who seemed so completely opposite of one another, that they it left the mind boggling as to why they had gotten together. This might give us some insight into that. It’s certainly a common trope within videogames and literary narratives. Look at Ron and Hermione from Harry Potter, opposites, the bungling clumsy boy who seeks to do what’s right even if it means (and sometimes especially if it means) breaking the rules, and the girl who is the opposite side of the same coin. Studious and proper, always sticking to the rules and trying to get things done “the right way.” Is it any wonder the pair end up married in the prologue of the last book? (If this is a spoiler for you, go get a life, please do not clutter up the comments section with complaints. Thank you in advance.) In even simpler terms, almost everyone believes in the idea of a soul-mate, someone who is your perfect match, who in their relationship with you fills in the weaknesses of your own personality. I know I do, I’ve seen it happen, and almost every one of us has experienced it on some level. We meet someone (or sometimes witness it in a pair of other someones), a pair of complete opposites who seem content together and love one another deeply. What can be more basic than this in human life? And yet we define it by a story, by an archetype, we take our cues from things like the Prince and the Dragon and a dozen Disney movies we grew up watching just to figure out how and where and why we should act in particular ways. Can there be any more obvious evidence of our dependence upon story telling?


Okay, so we now have pretty solid evidence that our lives, that is to say, modern lives are defined by our stories. But has this always been the case? I think it must be, because there is an enormous body of work in this direction, dating all the way back to the Renaissance in Italy. The most recent works can be seen in Northrop Frye's Theory of Narratives, in George Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, and in the almost ubiquitous “20 Plot Types” that permeates so many writing classes and guides throughout our society. There are tons of these, ranging from 7 plot types, to a single one, to as many as 69 different plots. Some argue that this means there is no “set number of plots”, and yet he simple fact remains, however, that they EXIST. We can actually put names and formats to them, and while some are simply more broken down forms of others, and some stories are hybrids of various plots, and some stories even include multiple plots running in tandem. This doesn’t change the fact, though, that we have a set of names for these plots and what goes on inside of them. We have defined them, and we define them because we experience them. You cannot define something you have not even conceptually experienced. Stories are powerful for this reason, we relate to them because we see real life situations inside of them, and we see this universally, and always have done so. Every story can in existence, from the oldest to the newest ones can be defined by the narrative tools and tropes and archetypes that they use, even if we cannot, exactly, place a set definition on them when all the building blocks are put together.


We see our lives as stories, and we live our lives by them. We have always done so, and we can see this in how tropes and archetypes permeate our lives and the oldest of stories. The divine pair of Syzyngy, the Anima and Animus in how we see true love and soul-mates, the Monomyth and the heroic journey as how we develop and overcome challenges, and the relationship of real life situations to the plots and stories we tell ourselves. We read stories, and we tell them again and again because they are true. Not in a sense of true that they really happen, but because they tell us, through symbolism and archetypes, how the world functions, and we expect the world, on some level, to function as if it were a story being told to us by reality.

Fate and Freewill (A prelude)

I'm writing this as a prelude to something that I will be posting later on (about Narrativism actually, hopefully that one will give you a good idea of my specific take on the world), but for now I want to talk to you about my thoughts on Free Will, Self Determination, and Fate. Now, Self Determination and Free Will might seem like the same thing, but for the purposes of this post, please think of them in the following ways:

Free Will is actually having choice, that is to say, you are not predestined to do anything.
Self Determination is the actual belief and assumption that you have such, and acting in such a manner, whether or not it is true.

This is a fine line, but an important one give how I spoke of Self Determination and Value previously. Self Determination is not invalidated by a lack of free will, it doesn't matter whether or not it is COSMICALLY or PHYSICALLY possible to make real choices, only that we perceive it as such. If, indeed, we are all predestined and we will make the same choices no matter what, then Self Determination can still exist given the definition above.

I will state here and now that I make my decisions based on Self Determination, I assume Free Will exists, and I try not to allow myself to blame Fate or a similarly nebulous source for my failures or successes. This is not to say I do not accept that predestination and Fate or similar mechanisms might exist on a cosmic level, making Free Will an illusion that we perceive only through our belief in Self Determination, but I do not allow the possibility to be used as a crutch.

Now that that is out of the way, let us look more deeply at how these things function. Fate and Free Will are things that greatly interest us in this day and age, and have been ever since Newton proposed the idea of a clockwork universe (for more on this, see the second paragraph and down of this work), where if one could see the starting positions and velocities of all things in the universe, one could perfectly predict the future with advanced enough mathematics. Now, the ideas of Fate and Free Will have taken a large place in our psychology for much longer, one can look at Descartes for an idea of this as well, his works on proving the existence of -anything- at all has significant implications on Free Will (after all, if we are merely a mind existing in a void, our perceptions controlled by a demon, then our choices are not truly our own by based on stimuli provided by the demon controlling our perceptions). But I choose Newtonian Determinism as a starting point because it was one of the first SCIENTIFIC theories to bring into question the existence of Free Will. After all, if one can predict the future, then one will know what choices are made. If Newton's theory of a clockwork universe is true, then all of our interactions, every firing of every synapse of every mind, is all plotted out and has been since the beginning of time. This theory is the basic outline of the first of several possibilities for the existence of Fate and Free Will. Newtonian Determinism is in the first camp, or the "Fated" camp. "Fated" means our universe runs on a tapestry of Fate, all choice is an illusion, we are predestined to run through our lives in the exact pattern defined at the beginning of time, and will continue to do so until the universe burns out.

Outside of the "Fated" camp, there is also the "Implied Fate" camp, in this set up, there are things that will happen no matter how we struggle against them or try to stop them. We have choice, but ultimately our choices are either to go with the flow of Fate, making it easier on ourselves and working within history to allow what will be to happen, or to struggle against Fate and suffer for it, as what is predetermined will happen no matter what. A webcomic named Erfworld actually runs through this idea fairly succinctly, and it appears to be a major element in the fictional religion of the Qun from the video game Dragon Age from Bioware.

The next possibility is one of "Fateless Ones", that is to say, MANY of us are fated, either by mechanisms of the "Fated" camp, or by the "Implied Fate" camp, but it doesn't matter which one, in any case, there are a select few who, by some means or another (whether they are born that way, they found the celestial cheat code to unbind them from Fate, or they just lucked out at some point in their lives), have true Free Will. Their decisions matter in ways ours do not, and they change the way the world works on a monumental scale. The rest of us only have Free Will, effectively when in reference to how we react to their decisions, as Fate has no hold on them or the way things react to them, only on the after effects, the ripples they leave in the world. This is actually the driving focus of the video game from 38 Studios: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, where you play the Fateless One who is cut loose from Fate after being raised from the dead (making the player character unique in all the world and obviously primary protagonist material).

Finally, there is "True Free Will", and in this camp there is no difference between Self Determination and Free Will, there is no such thing as Fate at all, only probability. Nothing at all is certain or predetermined, only highly unlikely. When I kick a ball, it is only "highly probably" that the ball will go soaring in the opposite direction, rather than, for example, transforming into a pumpkin and splattering across my kicking foot. In such a world, Free Will, our choices, actually matter tremendously, and there is no one to blame but ourselves, and very occasionally more mechanistic forces of nature, when things go horribly wrong.

Of the three, I prefer to act as if our world lies in the "True Free Will" camp, not letting the idea of mechanistic forces of the cosmos forcing my hand into this or that act as an excuse for what I do, or what I fail to do. In actuality, I believe in the "Implied Fate" camp, since that is the one that actually makes the most sense to me. There are things in this world that are predetermined, past actions, or Newtonian Determinism, or Historical Imperative, or Narrative Causality, or some equally nebulous and cosmic force compels history and mankind to follow certain courses of actions, punishing us when we fail to do so, or outright oppose it. I try not to let this belief effect my actions, but it I find it interesting to think about all the same, and hope I've given my readers something to consider as well.

Worth, Value, and Importance

Worth is a loaded word. Worth is one of those words that means so much, and has become something of a taboo word to apply to people. In our world of special little snow flakes, "Everyone is worth something!" I'm not so sure this is true. Worth means value, it means that on some level, you are important, that on some level, the world would be a lesser place for the loss of you or whatever the object of worth was. With this in mind, we can say that to be worth something, you must leave the world a better place than it would have been without you. The world must have been made better by your actions and what you left behind to have been of worth.

I don't think this is unreasonable to say. I think this, by itself, is something we can all admit. The problem is when we have to argue whether or not a person was of worth, whether they, by their decisions and actions, left the world better for their presence. It might be that they make awesome pies, or they painted a wonderful picture, it could be anything, provided the world was a brighter, more fulfilling place for it.  By this definition, those who go about, doing nothing, not creating, simply existing, thugs on the street, lazy children, layabouts and people who just don't do anything, could be seen as worthless. And this would be true. It is cruel to say, but it is true. The teenage thug who does nothing except mug people, smoke on the corner, and assist his gang members in whatever activity they decide to do, could easily be seen as worthless. This, is not to say, they are valueless. Unrefined oil is practically worthless, but it has value, value is not just what you have done or are capable of, but what you have the potential to do. No one on this earth is without value, though there are quite possibly many worthless people, people who are valuable for what they might become should they choose to pursue it.

This is important to recognize. Too many people believe they are "special little snow flakes" that they have their own irreplaceable talent, that they are IMPORTANT. This is not true. Importance is not something any of us here reading will likely ever have. Importance is how much the world as a whole views you in terms of value and worth. Most of the readers of this blog, including it's writer, could die here and now, and relatively few people would know about it or care, where as someone like the president could die this very moment, and it wouldn't be an hour before most of the world had heard about it. No, we must be willing to admit to our children, and to ourselves, that in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of us are not important at all. We have value, and we may have worth, but we are not important. Further, we have to impress on ourselves that we are worthless until the moment we can say "yes, the world would have been a darker, less fulfilling place for my absence, if I had not done this or that, it would not be a better world." At that moment, we can say we have worth. And the more we can say that about ourselves, the more worth we can believe ourselves to have. What we do have to impress on everyone is that they have value, they have potential, they have the capability to do a great deal with their lives, maybe not everything or even anything, but that they are capable of having worth, of making the world a better place, and they can do so without being special, or important, but by just being themselves.

Opinions on Libertarianism and Self Determination

Something has always irked me about the Libertarian view, and that is how incredibly naive it is. Just like Communism, it works perfectly on paper, but it fails to take into account something basic: Corruption. Libertarians believe that the government should have either a minimal or nonexistent role in regulating the economy, and while there are merits to this view, it ignores the simple fact that people with loads and loads of money tend to spend it to secure their place, they spend it to ensure others cannot threaten their power, and usually the best method of doing so is by attacking methods that allow economic mobility. After all? If you're the only one with money, and you see money as power, then you see yourself as the only one in control, you see yourself on top of the world and completely secure. This unfortunate, and all to human habit, of hoarding and sabotaging the efforts of others, is why Libertarianism cannot work in our world today.

The counter argument of course is that big government, governments that get too heavily involved in regulating the economy, tend to squelch entrepreneurial spirit and prevent growth, which can be true if the government is too heavy handed. But the simple fact of the matter is that the purpose of government is to maintain order and allow tomorrow to be very much like today, which was pretty much like yesterday. The purpose of government is to keep horrible things from happening to us, and the economy is far too big and influential a thing to be allowed to run around without some kind of controls on it. One needs to only look at what happened to Wall Street only a few years ago to see that, quite clearly, when the economy starts to plunge, it takes quite a few people with it, even if they had nothing to do with the cause of the plunge. Something so powerful HAS to be controlled, it can't simply be left in the hands of private interests who do not have what is best for the average Joe on the street at heart. The purpose of governments are to maintain things so that disaster does not strike out of no where at those who are not responsible for such disasters, and to help secure the lives and livelihoods of those who are struck by those disasters that cannot be avoided or slip past the government's guard. Now, this means, obviously, that some freedoms have to be given up, but the question becomes: "Are they the IMPORTANT freedoms?"

The most important freedoms we have are those that permit Self Determination. That is to say, the ones that permit us to actually make our way in life, in the way we choose, so long as it doesn't interfere with others choices at the same time. Libertarianism believes it is defending this, but it fails to do so in actuality. To be able to self determine properly there must be choices, and a world without economic regulation almost always will end with monopolies, a lack of choices, only a few options that are not actually options but really just a bunch of people working together to keep prices high and using their funds to ensure that political maneuvering doesn't undermine their goals. There is no real malevolence in this use of money, I highly doubt the rich and powerful of the world wake up every morning and say "I'm going to go stomp on the throats of the poor so they don't get as rich as I do." I just think it's human nature to use all of one's available resources to defend one's place in the world, and as long as those that suffer for those choices are not visible to you, nor being shoved under your nose, you won't think too much about it. What leads to corruption is not some inherent, deep, evil associated with money, but simple survival instinct combined with a lack of perspective. Self Determination is protected for the few, and to them they see nothing wrong with doing such. They fail to recognize that the purpose of government is to protect everyone that is a citizen under that government, no matter how much in taxes they pay, and no matter what their social class. When an economy becomes deregulated, the government stops being able to control it, and then becomes controlled by it, as wealth is constantly accumulated with those who already have money. The purpose of a regulated economy is NOT to redistribute wealth, as so many Libertarians seem to believe, but to keep money MOVING. When money stops moving, economies halt, and the machine of civilization begins to slowly grind to a halt, and then finally fall apart. As the purpose of government is to make sure this great, vast machine never falls apart, it behooves any sensible government to maintain regulations, but not total control of, all aspects of the world that can harm the machine of civilization. Our right to Self Determination stops exactly where it begins to allow the choice to attack the machine that allows us to Self Determine at all.