Power of story
Power of story
Story is what
makes us human
Story is God’s breath into Adam.
It is the mobilizing lightning strike to the primordial mind that turned brute to scholar. It is the spark of imagination that made human civilization possible.
Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens posited that this imagination to speak about what wasn’t real – things outside our physical world – supercharged human development.
These “fictions” enabled humans to think collectively in large numbers through the shared common myths that made religion, modern states and economic systems possible.
"Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world around us and the world within us."
- Pamela Jaye Smith
From the pre-dawn of history till today, we make sense of the world through story. It allows us to see patterns in the chaos, to find meaning in randomness. Stories give us license to build our inner and outer selves.
It is the universal constant of the human psyche. We create, as Arlie Hochschild describes “deep stories” to explain the world that we feel rather than the world that we see. Stories are our personal truth.
