Before we start: hey there, Thought Readers. It’s been a while. How’s it hanging? World seems great right now. Rest assured, though, that I have not abandoned you. I did move to a new city and start a new job and have to get a new computer (RIP my dear 2009 MBPro, you were a champ) and for some reason those things had a bit of an impact on my creative process. No idea why that would be. Anyway.
I’m planning on being back this year, exposing my Thoughts to the oxidizing light of screens. I have plenty of them hanging out in various states in my drafts, but finishing and polishing them up has been just too much of a bother for my poor delicate constitution. (If you want some behind the scenes reasons why, I will sum up by simply saying GIANT INTERNET CONGLOMERATIONS BAD and you are free to conclude from that what you will. Related note: you might want to subscribe to the email version if you aren’t already to keep seeing these. If you want to keep seeing these.)
I have also realized that one of my big sticking point for posting my thoughts is that I struggle with conclusions. Not wrapping the post up, I mean my brain is telling me that I need to find a way to conclude, as in, idk, a solution?? So here is the first New Year’s Resolution that I have made in maybe my entire life: I resolve to not feel like I have to first find The Solution to the problems that I start mulling over in order to post about them. There usually aren’t solutions, and that is the whole point, you know? So if my post seem messier and more open-ended going forward, well, welcome to an even closer facsimile of my brain I guess. I’ll probably also leave in more of my tangents that I used to edit out, so buckle up. Now on to the main event.
Humans love stories. Story is how we have made sense of life, since the dawn of humanity. The random chaos of an indifferent universe is too much for us to deal with, so we create stories to explain, to give meaning to our lived experiences. Stories also help us make sense of our internal lives. Our emotions are a different chaos than that of an indifferent universe, but they can be similarly overwhelming.
So what are the elements of story? A-number-one is character. Plot comes in at a distant second place, and trailing somewhere in the foggy middle distance of third place is setting. (Story nerds might yell at this point that I’m missing some major elements. Unfortunately, story nerds would be wrong, because those missing elements go under those three categories, COME AT ME NERDS. Conflict is character. Resolution is plot. Theme is literally just [just] the story, what are we doing here? You might want to think about those conceptually to write a story but that’s not what we’re talking about now. Nerds.) But wait, I hear you (non-nerds) say, isn’t story all about plot? Isn’t story The Things That Are Happening? No. If that was the case, history classes would be hot-ticket seats instead of nap time.
But if humans use story to explain the chaos of the universe, then isn’t that almost necessarily plot-driven? Isn’t that explaining The Things That Are Happening? The sun rises because a god drives his chariot across the sky, or because an eagle opens its wings. The world was birthed by the earth mother, or created from primordial mud brought up to the surface by a giant turtle. Look at all those plots. No. Wait. Reread those examples. Those are about the characters. The important part is Helios, is Atabey, is Kisosen: the important part is the character. Story comes in as the how the characters react to circumstances; the circumstances are not the important part. Story is the because.
In story, generally, ideally, there is a narrative structure, which ends with the main character or characters having changed in some way, or having learned some critical lesson. The key here is that there is an ending, a conclusion, some decisive denouement. The characters have found the missing piece to their lives, the conflict has been resolved, everyone can ride happily into the sunset together, or maybe everyone died horribly. The End.
Of course, this is not how real life works (spoiler alert). Real life just keeps going, unfettered by narrative structure. Which is… exhausting, if you think about it. We set goals for ourselves to counteract this: graduate, get a job, get married, have kids, retire, raise llamas, die. Start a band, go viral, learn a language, write a novel, start your own business, remodel your house. What’s even easier is setting goals for ourselves that other people have come up with: the expected goals. That has the added advantage of not requiring us to put thought into what we want. Just let someone else take care of the thinking. Let society mete out expectations. If enough people have gone along with them for long enough, they have to be the best options, right? If enough stories and books have described an arc from beginning to decisive end, that has to be achievable, right? And that means there is a goal to achieve. An endpoint. (But an endpoint other than death, please, we don’t want to think about that.)
You know what also doesn’t follow a narrative structure? Democracy. And it really, really seems like it should. There are characters. There are battles. There are victories and losses, and there is progression. There are different settings and high stakes. There are all the elements you would expect to have in a story — and yet. Democracies are made up of people, real people, in the real world, which means that they are just as messy and just as arbitrary as real people in the real world.
Democracies demand continual care and attention. You can win a monumental victory, but that is never the end. You can never rest on your laurels. Just like your own individual life, it just keeps going, one battle to the next. Today it’s unexpected car trouble, tomorrow it’s fringe candidates trying to take over the local school board. The only constant is that it is constant. And, again, that is exhausting. More than that, it is messy. Everyone is different and has different opinions, but everyone gets a say, so there will always have to be compromises and debates. No one person gets to be the ultimate arbiter of all.
So maybe all the current democratic backsliding into fascism and authoritarianism makes sense. Why keep fighting election after election when, instead, you can pick the team that can win once and then be set for good? Why not pick the team that sells such a beatiful narrative — not one of constant compromises and fights, but one of Right and Wrong and Victory? Why have to constantly concern yourself with the nitty gritty ins and outs of current events, which you never have the time or energy for, when you can instead appoint someone who will simply take care of it all for you? We are already electing representatives, why not simply take that a step further?
Now, just to be clear, I do think that democracy is a good thing. But I also think that story is essential to the human psyche, and I’m not sure how to square those two things. Can we find a different way to tell the story (so to say) of democracy? Is there a way that democracy is fundamentally at odds with how humans work, or is it more that currently our current system as a whole — society, politics, economy, everything — is what is at odds with humanity?
