There Are Our Stories

"So we live in stories. When you understand a little bit about the structure of stories, then a whole array of things about mythology all of a sudden make overwhelming sense. 

It’s so useful. What you see is that many of the things that are standard occurrences in everyone’s life are portrayed universally in mythology. 

It’s very helpful. First of all, it de-isolates you.

That’s actually a relief to the doctor, but also a relief to you, right? You come and say, 'Look, I can’t go out of my house much anymore. I’m afraid on elevators. I have heart palpitations, and I sometimes end up in the emergency room. My interactions in the world are increasingly restricted. I find myself staying at home. I’m afraid I’m going to die of a heart attack.' 

The psychologist says, 'Well, you have agrophobia. It’s like, lots of people have that. Here’s usually how it developed, and here’s the treatment course. We can probably do something about that. Well, you’re not going to die of a heart attack now, probably.' 

That’s a real relief. You’re not crazy in a completely unique way, and you’re crazy in a way that might be treatable. And so it’s such a relief. 

People come in there with a pile of snakes of indeterminate magnitude, and they walk out with one manageable Snake. 

It’s still a Snake, but One Manageable Snake beats a Hydra."

Freddie The Frog was a Professional Burglar. 

He was disloyal to his friends.

He was a Womaniser, 

A Home-Breaker,

A Con-Man, 

A Thief, 

A Liar, 

and 

A Cheat... 

So, no, Rodney — 

You're •nothing• like him.

The End.

Now, I got a better one. 

This is a Story of 

Love and Loss, 

Fathers and Sons, 

and 

The Foresight to retain International Merchandising Rights. 

Let's Begin with Part Four. 

One of the things that’s pretty interesting about modern neuroscientists—especially the top rate ones, and those are usually the ones who are working on emotions, as far as I’ve been able to tell—is that they are often quite enamoured of the psychoanalysts. Jaak Panksepp was a good example of that. They came to understand the psychoanalyst’s insistence on underlying, unconscious, personified motivations as an accurate reflection of how the brain worked. So you can think of yourself as a loose collection of autonomous spirits that’s governed by some overarching identity. That’s a reasonable way of thinking about it. A question that arises from that is, what is the nature of this a priori structure that you use to interpret the world? I think the clearest answer to that is that it’s a story, and that you live inside the story.

That’s very, very interesting to me. I believe—I have a couple of videos that lay this out—that Darwinian presuppositions are, at least, as fundamental as Newtonian presuppositions. I actually think that they’re more fundamental. The fact that we’ve evolved story-like structures through which to interpret the world indicates to me that there’s something deeply true about story-like structures. They’re true, at least, insofar as the fact that we’ve developed them means that here we are, living, and that it’s taken 3.5 billion years to develop them. They’re highly functional. We don’t have a much better definition of truth than highly functional. That’s about as good as it gets, partly because we’re limited creatures and we don’t have omniscient knowledge.

The best we can do with our knowledge, generally speaking, is to note its functionality and improve it when it fails to work properly. I think the scientific method actually does that. The fact that we’ve evolved a story-like structure through which to interpret the world is pretty damn interesting. It says something fundamental about stories. It’s strange in the same way that the fact that we have hemispheric specialization for the known and the unknown—or for order and chaos, respectively—also says something fundamental about the nature of the world—if you assume that we’ve evolved to reflect the structure of the world, broadly speaking. That’s obviously not just the physical structure—the atoms and the molecules—but all of the pattern manifestations of the physical molecules as they build structures of increasing complexity across time. That would include human interactions, political interactions, economic interactions, familial interactions—all of those things that are a very important part of our reality, but perhaps, in some sense, are not as fundamental as the physical attributes that the physicists concentrate on.

So we live in stories. I want to talk to you a little bit about stories and their structure. When you understand a little bit about the structure of stories, then a whole array of things about mythology all of a sudden make overwhelming sense. It’s so useful. What you see is that many of the things that are standard occurrences in everyone’s life are portrayed universally in mythology. It’s very helpful. First of all, it deisolates you. One of the things you learn as a clinical psychologist—contra the anti-psychiatrists, let’s say—is that diagnosis is often a relief to people.


There’s a problem with being diagnosed: you might be labelled, and the label can follow you for the rest of your life. Once you’re labelled as a something, then strange things happen around you that often reinforce that label. Maybe you start acting it out more, or you adopt it as an identity. There’s a flip side of that, which is that the last thing you ever want to hear when you go see a physician or a psychologist is, you know, I’ve never seen a case like yours before. Right. That is not a relief, man. If the message is, I’ve never heard anything like what you’re telling me, the outcome is going to be either not so good for you or you’re not going to get listened to at all. You’re such an anomaly that your existence is annoying to the integrated knowledge structure of the medical profession that you’re attempting to receive advice from. It’s definitely the case because, you know, if you can be put in a box, then the box tells the doctor what to do with you.