The Absolute Power of Storytelling
What do storytelling, the tendency to depict political opponents as evil, and the rape of young children and the disadvantaged on Porn Hub have in common?
The conventions of human storytelling
How many Hollywood-style productions have a villain? In fact, how many human stories have a villain?
It's de rigueur.
Villains are part of the ancient art of storytelling that requires such a person, as stories require heroes, helpless ladies, evil Natural Forces, and the all-important rulers of society.
In the end, such devices pull the content of stories out of reality and into our fantasies where events are easily explained, unlike in a documentary where humans are composed of many impulses and thoughts which means none of us are villains, heroes, or helpless in the storytelling sense, and no one will pay over a billion dollars to watch our truths.
It is crucial to realize that people pay cash for what they want
and they don’t buy what they don’t want.
Movie and TV receipts show unambiguously that billions of people want to watch bad guys get theirs and people to have sex (implied or explicit are both okay) especially if it is forbidden. We see this in video stories that make loads of cash on places like Porn Hub. Many of these are geared to the ugly forms of sex that are present but forbidden in all cultures at all times and in all places: the helpless forced to endure rape and severe physical and emotional abuse for the pleasure of anonymous men.
In Reality
Of course, the link I shared above about the real Prince Charles is about a TV dramatization of the lives of the British Royal family in recent decades in which Prince Charles is the villain. In life, as he has lived it, Prince Charles is a very interesting person who was forced by tradition to marry a woman who would give the royal family acceptable heirs.
Diana, his hapless first wife, was caged in the same set of social expectations and tried to make an untenable relationship work while the world watched. I pity them. I admire them. They did what they could to fulfill the expectations of their families and society.
The world’s obsessive desire for titillatious images killed Diana.
Charles was finally free to marry the woman of his choice, with whom he has been noticeably happy. More power to them.
Vampire-like, story makers have sucked the details of their lives from the marrow of our boredom and obsessions and spewed them out for our pleasure and the story makers’ profit. These stories say nothing about the real Charles, Diana, and royals. They are only about the poverty of our minds and imaginations.
Why does the structure of stories humans will buy matter?
Because we attempt to force our interpretation of current events into the old storytelling format. A great example is the actual structure of public thought in the United States that historically held out hope for equality among propertied white men (not women, not blacks, not natives, not immigrants), that was transformed by women, blacks, natives, and immigrants into rousing hope for equality among all persons. This has become a fight to the death between the hopeful and those who would keep them under the boot.
I say the death of US society because such story structures are thousands of years old. They exist in layers of our minds most of us don’t even know exist.
I have given a sobering recounting of our current situation in storytelling format where we are all villains and the world we plunder is the good guy. But, will people buy it? Will this story make a billion dollars and accrue billions of shares?
It will not.
Those who want to sell stories must produce what people will buy. That does include the rape of children for pleasure and profit and painting people as villains who are just people in complex situations not of their own making. It is a tired and old format, but it is home to our minds and imaginations.
Sadly, those who buy stories in mass quantities have their complex stories too. They live in a world society in which human worth has been associated with ownership of things, including people and other living beings, for as long as we have records. But, in our stories, each of us are the heroes, not the villains. If we live to oppress others or rape children for money, we are doing so as an act of dissidence against villain oppressors, some of whom might include Nature, the younger or older generations, those damn corporate elites, or welfare parasites on the good works of the elite.
In Reality
Among humans, stories have absolute power, or Q-Anon would be out of luck. That absolute power can elevate minds, but what people buy suggests that an expanded, more realistic mind is not what most people want.
Where does that leave our race, as we recklessly continue the destruction of our environment to own things and to exert control over each other?
Staring over an abyss of our own making that most of us refuse to see.
I wish us luck.
