Why Story

1.1 The Narrative Animal

There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.

— Zora Neale Hurston

Story has been central to the human experience for as long as we have been human. Evolutionary biologists increasingly believe that our capacity for narrative is what helped to make us human. As Lisa Cron writes in Wired for Story, "Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to." There is growing consensus in the scientific community that the neurological roots of both storytelling and our enjoyment of stories is tied to our social cognition and the way individuals connect to form groups. It is this expanded capacity for narrative that makes humans truly unique in the animal kingdom.

Humans are hardwired for narrative. Brain researchers have discovered that hearing a powerful story about an experience will stimulate the same neurological region as having the actual experience. A 2006 study found that when participants read words with strong smell associations like "coffee" and "perfume" their olfactory cortexes light up as if they were experiencing the real scents. When a story carries us into another world (what narrative theorists call "transportation") that experience is literally real at the level of our brain chemistry.

Narrative is so deeply embedded that often we see it even when it's not actually there. In one foundational 1944 experiment, psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel showed subjects an animation of a pair of triangles and a circle moving around a square, and asked what was happening. Overwhelmingly, the subjects did not describe the literal events of shapes moving around on the screen, but instead their responses revealed how they mapped a narrative onto the shapes in order to tell a story about what they observed. People would describe the film as the social interactions of three human-like characters who possess personalities, emotions, and intentions. The big circle was a "bully" who was "chasing" the triangles, the square was a "house," the events were a "fight." Numerous subsequent studies have reiterated how humans, as social creatures, project stories and narrative qualities onto almost everything we perceive.

We remember our lived experiences by converting them to stories and integrating them into our personal and collective web of narrative.

Humans are the narrative animal constructing our social reality through our ability to create, interpret, and contest the stories around us. We remember our lived experiences by converting them to stories and integrating them into our personal and collective web of narrative. We think, dream, imagine, and believe through the filter of narrative.

This is what led narrative theorist Walter Fischer to suggest that rather than scientifically classify ourselves as Homo sapiens, which roughly means "knowing person," we should consider our species Homo narrans, "storytelling person." In fact, these two concepts — knowing and storytelling — have always been deeply linked in the human experience. The word narrative itself derives from the Proto-Indo-European root gno-meaning "to know" because to know something is to know the story about it.

1.2 Hacking at the Roots

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

— folk poem, 17th-century England, author unknown

In July 1846 the philosopher and author Henry David Thoreau was confronted with a choice: either pay his taxes to support America's expansionist war against Mexico or go to jail. He took a stand of conscience — against imperialism abroad and slavery at home — and chose imprisonment. His single night in jail inspired his essay "Resistance to Civil Government" advocating for civil disobedience in the face of unjust government. His writing would inform Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and generations of people of conscience.

Thoreau famously lamented that most activists spend their efforts fighting the symptoms of contemporary problems rather than confronting the roots. Concerned that his abolitionist and antiwar values weren't reflected in the political discourse of his time, he wrote: "There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

Thoreau's metaphor of branches versus roots continues to frame a common question: Why isn't there more outrage about the causes of injustice? Why isn't more energy going into confronting the roots of our problems rather than just the symptoms?

One answer is that the types of injustice Thoreau decried are often invisible, even as they are hidden in plain sight. These are structural evils that have been consciously made invisible within the day-to-day workings of institutions, concealed by oppressive cultural norms, or the intentionally limited terms of political debate. Taken in total as a "system" the institutional relationships of power that constitute modern society are often opaque. They become hidden by the dominant stories of the culture that justify the status quo of power relations and define "normal." These stories become so routine that most people in positions of privilege (for whom the system is working) don't think to question them. In this way unquestioned mythologies (as we'll discuss in Chapter II, mythologies are the most powerful form of narrative) emerge to bolster historic power structures while concealing the roots of systemic problems.

For social change practitioners to hack at the root, we must build the capacity to identify, analyze, and intervene not only in the institutional power structures, but also in the stories that are preventing the changes we know are needed. Through agitation, successful social movements change more than policy — we reimagine the story of what is possible in our society. Particularly now, for those of us who feel both the urgency and the opportunity of this unique historic moment, this book argues that our movements must prioritize narrative as a lens to shape our strategies. This is the arena of story-based strategy.

1.3 The Era of Outdated Stories

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

— William Faulkner

Five centuries of European colonial expansion and organized white supremacy have wiped out countless cultures, devastated ecosystems, and left us with a legacy of racism, economic disparity, militarism, and global inequity. Over 200 years of resource extraction, industrialization, and fossil fuel–driven economic growth have pushed our planet's life-support systems to their breaking point.

Over time, the...