Humans are a Story Telling Species

the nature of life, and the (retelling of) and the (conveying of information about) past events

I watched on the news today that someone in the US killed other people, then killed themselves. It happened recently, so there is nothing more in the story; just that someone killed other people then killed themselves. The story ends there… People have died.

Then the news channel showed the county sherrif making a speech about the incident…

Those who remain must tell a story. The people who are still alive, tell the story of what happened to others who are also still alive. It’s like the saying ‘to live to tell the tale‘.

It’s almost like the point of surviving is to tell the tale of what almost killed you.

What I’m trying to point at is, how there are actually two very different concepts in play here: Humans telling a story, conveying information through language–VS–something actually happening, which cannot be expressed through the medium of language. You sense it through your senses, and reality has such a different existence than our attempts at portraying it with language.

It’s almost like existence gets cut into two different parts. Touching, but not combining:

Reality X Story.
The real world; versus; The tell-tale world.
What actually happens. The physical body.
And the concepts to which we give metaphysical bodies, through our words, which we use as representations. The world of narrative.

See,

People.
People with stories. They speak. Speaking is really important for them, and they set down plans for the future using their language. They have created concepts through their symbols. Symbols of sound, symbols percieved through vision. Symbols felt through touch… These people talk of ‘doing things’. They are talking of something that has happened!

And see,

People.
People as themselves are only physical existences. They are organisms. When one dies, it’s just death. Someone has died. Death is such a personal experience…isn’t it? How do you percieve it? Which sense percieves death? It just sort of happens, doesn’t it? All we feel of it. Is nothing. There is nothing to feel of it. It is just gone-ness.

Death, in the narrative world, involves all these different meta-physical things getting thrown around. So many blobs of thought, of abstract representation, get thrown around, clash against each other, melt into each other, block, fight, flow through…

Just so we can wrap our minds around death.

Whereas, maybe, there is nothing to be wrapping it around, anyways.

There is no narrative of death.

I just said “gone-ness”. I wonder how many concepts and words we came up with, to describe this one event in the physical world.

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So how does this tie in with the police story? Let’s pick the thread back up.

A story is told by the police for those who are part of that community, foremost. They tell the story for the affected community to listen and make sense of.

And further stories exist: who was the shooter? An old man. And he shot people in a dance hall for older people. How were they connected? We are trying to make sense of the situation. And then there are personal stories: who were the people who died?

Even this question betrays the truth about the dichotomy of reality and story.

Who were the people who died? They were simply people.
What the question is really asking is, tell me a story about these people. Make me, as a language possessing, community building human, relate to it, get sad, understand how i must position myself in the future to be able to react properly to possible threats.

And that makes us come to a realization. The story is needed for the human. The story is needed for the human because it will determine something very real: future actions.

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Other humans listening to the story will make a very real change in how they will act in the future. The story changes their physical reality.

Could we say, the same way monkey calls can convey information to other monkeys about the approach of a leopard, the stories we tell convey information about what threatens us?

However, we as humans can directly say “a predator is coming!“, we can warn of immediate dangers the same way monkeys do. Instead, we create elaborate stories; about people, what happened to them, we try our best to explain WHY things happen… And all the elements of our story goes into how we will react in the future.

Language and long term thinking work very differently for humans.

The police officer’s story can make me change my course of action in totally unrelated ways. The “escape predator” call can only encourage one reaction. It has only one purpose. But the police story can have an infinite number of outcomes.

It may make me pro-gun or anti-gun. Some may interpret it in a way to think “I should carry a gun on me to fend off this possible threat”. Others may interpret it to think “If the gunman didn’t have access to a gun capable of mass-murder, this would have never happened.”

See how the story affects our actions? The same story can initiate us on totally different courses of action.

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This surfaces in how we name things too. We have so many names.

An extra information from the story is that the gunman targeted dance halls in an Asian American district. Learning that, you may think there were racist motives behind this shooting. Then the story reveals the shooter’s name: Huu Can Tran. Now since that is a Vietnamese name, you are no longer compelled to think this was a racist shooting.

Do you see how far we strayed from the simple “People have died.” ?

We give names to people. Names tell a story.

We have names for persons, and we have names for concepts. Just by learning the shooter’s name, we gained new information about the story. The name alone changed our reaction.

Racism is also a name. Racism is what we call a way of behaving some people have against some other people. The actions that are part of this way of behaving, which we have named ‘racism’, are actions that have real life consequences. Thus, we have to give the concept a name, so that we can incorporate it into our stories.

And the stories we tell determine how we will react to these actions.

Story telling is the method we use to determine how we will change the ways we act in the future.

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Possible Further Explorations:

• Language and long term thinking work very differently for humans. Write about the language and memory trade off theory for chimps and humans. Then focus on how our language shapes how we percieve reality, and how we interact with it. A story about our tell-tale world.
• Names, and Identity. How can a name change the way we think? Why do we give people names? And why are people-names the way they are? How are our names connected to identites?
• Language, and Myths. What are the different ways our story-telling determine our actions? The English language version of Snorri Sturluson’s edda ends with “I haven’t seen anybody hear this much of the story of the world, and still have questions to ask!” If we are crafting our tell-tale world through our language, we must look at those ancient people who told stories of how existence came to be. Like astrophysics, which seems to be the modern scientific story of how existence came to be. Then, what does saying “Thor’s chariot causes the Thunders” change in somebody’s mind…How does that story shape their physical reality?