Quotes About Narrative

Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.

We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

Alternatively, people might completely give up on having a global story of any kind and instead seek shelter in local nationalist and religious tales.

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

If liberalism, nationalism, Islam, or some novel creed wishes to shape the world of the year 2050, it will need not only to make sense of artificial intelligence, Big Data algorithms, and bioengineering but also to incorporate them into a new and meaningful narrative.

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero.

But numbers alone don't count for much in history.

In the beginning, the liberal story cared mainly about the liberties and privileges of middle-class European men and seemed blind to the plight of working-class people, women, minorities, and non-Westerners.

Contar histórias eficazes não é fácil. A dificuldade está não em contar a história, mas em convencer todos os demais a acreditarem nela.

Humans will no longer be autonomous entities directed by the stories their narrating self invents. Instead, they will be integral parts of a huge global network.

Con la aparición de la escritura empezamos a oír la historia a través de los oídos de sus protagonistas. Cuando los vecinos de Kushim lo llamaban, podían haber gritado realmente «¡Kushim!». Es revelador que el primer nombre registrado en la historia pertenezca a un contable, y no a un profeta, un poeta o un gran conquistador.

There is no justice in history

The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus' journey to America or the Apollo II expedition to the moon.

Hayat?n anlam?n? ve hangi anlat?ya inanaca??n?z? bilmiyorsan?z ne yapar­s?n?z? Seçebiliyor olmay? kutsalla?t?r?rs?n?z.

When we say 'I', we mean the story in our head, not the onrushing stream of experiences we undergo.

El libre albedrío existe únicamente en los relatos imaginarios que los humanos hemos inventado.

If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer. The exact details don't really matter. Any story is wrong, simply for being a story. The universe just does not work like a story.

Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories.

We identify with the inner system that takes the crazy chaos of life and spins out of it seemingly logical and consistent yarns. It doesn't matter that the plot is full of lies and lacunas, and is rewritten again and again, so that today's story flatly contradicts yesterday's. The important thing is that we always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps even beyond).

La repetición eterna confiere poder al relato, pues implica que este es el devenir natural de las cosas, y que si Arjuna evita el combate o si Simba rehúsa convertirse en rey, estarán rebelándose contra las leyes mismas de la naturaleza.

So perhaps happiness is synchronising one's personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.

Los humanos pensamos más en relatos que en hechos, números o ecuaciones, y cuanto más sencillo es el relato, mejor.

Fiction isn't bad. It is vital.