The Big Story

We run the world. Or so the story goes.

In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about the contemporary landscape of storytelling and the problems that I see with it. 

I think my biggest beef with today’s media environment is the idea that we’re getting fundamentally different and better stories: despite the relentless cultural and economic power wielded by today’s multi-billion-dollar entertainment industry—to say nothing of the endlessly recursive (sometimes hysterical) commentary around it—we seem to be repeating different versions of the same story to ourselves.

I think of this as the Big Story. 

(Wikipedia informs me that people who are smarter than me call this a “metanarrative,” and also that postmodernism has supposedly made us much too clever to fall for anything like it. I call shenanigans.)

Here’s how the Big Story begins: the world belongs to The Strong, who wield their power through mastery of technology and violence.

With great power comes great responsibility. The Strong, because they control the world absolutely, have an obligation to protect The Weak, from Bad People and from the environment. Everybody knows that The Strong are wise and judicious rulers, with the best interests of The Weak at heart, otherwise how could they have become The Strong? And if any Bad People somehow seize the levers of power with their endless scheming, well, then it’s up to The Strong to fight their way back into the control room and kick the living shit out of whoever gets in their way, because power is nothing if not the ability to dispense violence. The balance of power is restored, with The Strong returning to their rightful place at the top. World without end, amen.

Sometimes the fight will be long and hard; still, The Strong will be able to draw on the resources of a completely passive environment—which includes every component of the natural world, and also the lives and minds and bodies of The Weak—in order to overcome the Bad People, thereby valorizing the sacrifices asked (or expected) of everyone and everything surrounding the conflict. Occasionally, troublemakers will ask why the world should be this way, divided as it is between The Strong and The Weak, but those people are probably just nascent Bad People who will soon need to be dealt with (kinetically) unless they get back in line.

None of this has changed much, despite all the cultural warfare. The faces of The Strong are different than they used to be; The Weak and The Strong have changed places a few times. Nevertheless, the Big Story itself has remained the same. Even the stories that aren’t explicitly to do with this power dynamic are still reinforcing the same narrative. If you look closely, underneath, even the little stories that seem unrelated to the Big Story are just wooden sleepers in the same railway, supporting the tracks that it rolls along.

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The Big Story is the story of civilization.

One of the most important parts of the Big Story is The Wall—the boundary, real or imagined, that circumscribes the power of The Strong. The Wall is there to protect The Weak. Outside The Wall is a harsh and hostile place, beyond the palings. First, there’s The Frontier, where the Bad People hide and hatch their plots. Further still is The Wilderness—cruel, untamed Nature^¹. Hic Sunt Dracones. The only reason we have anything nice is because of The Wall, in defiance of Nature, through superior technology and martial force. And one of the most important functions of The Strong is to defend The Wall², to preserve civilization. 

Of course, The Wall is always crumbling. The threats posed by the environment and the Bad People are always just about to overtake us, and so we need even more complicated technology and more powerful weapons. Fewer and fewer people have the skills to wield this power, to be among the elite of The Strong; The Weak, who famously breed like rabbits (because of their low moral character) swell in number. More people to protect from increasingly diabolical dangers, to keep safe within The Wall, means that The Strong must be entrusted with ever-greater power. But if we keep the faith and stay the course, we’ll all (all of us, all the good people anyway, truly, we promise) eventually break the sultry bonds of Earth and fly off into space. We’ll finally, finally, finally zoom away at the speed of light: away from The Garden we can no longer enter, and away from The Big Bastard who kicked us out of it.

It’s the story of civilization, and it’s a good one, because who doesn’t want electric lights and water heaters and the chance, someday, to go Full Kirk on some pliable alien flesh? We got here because nobody wants their kids to go hungry in the dark. Civilization has had a remarkably good run, these past few millennia.

So why turn away from the Big Story when it offers so much?

Because the Big Story is about control. The Strong control the world: they maintain The Wall and stomp the Bad People and keep the wolves away from the gates. That’s how this whole thing keeps chugging along. In order to believe in the Big Story, you have to believe that humans are capable of controlling the world for any meaningful length of time. The Big Story only holds up for as long as that control endures.

We’re not talking about politics. Or at least I’m not. I’m not getting involved in whether one group or another has the moral license to wield power. Those fights about stories and which ones to believe are all about who The Strong should rightfully be. Each faction is pulling for their guys, or gals, or nonbinary individuals; they claim that if The Strong are raised up from a particular background—a certain nationality, gender, religion, philosophy, or phenotype—then the world will necessarily be better. They will be the best at protecting The Weak from the Bad People. They will make wise use of the resources that God or Science has given us dominion over³. They will defend The Wall most capably. We won’t have to worry about all this other nasty stuff, and then we’ll get all the good things we were promised in the brochures, like flying cars and tradwives and full-automated luxury space communism and whatever other goddamn thing is on offer inside The Wall.

I’m not getting into any of that: I’m only interested in how effectively the Big Story functions as a metanarrative, and what the consequences of giving it our unquestioning belief might be.

Because the sticking point, for me, is that I don’t believe it anymore.

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I’m a simple man from humble stock⁴. As far as the wheel of Progress goes, my people have been on the rim for most of our history. I'm not a historian, not a scientist, not a theologian; I can’t back any of this up in terms of sociological trends, or macroeconomics, or the penal substitution theory of atonement. I don’t have the diploma to make a grandiose claim like “We’re living in a post-political society, in which any claims based on leveraging power in the world will be met with increasing skepticism.” I'm sure if I sat down and looked at the data, there are all sorts of exceptions and complicating factors that would make it logically difficult to hand-wave away humanity's capacity for dominating the world.

All I know is that—at a gut level, where good stories are supposed to register—I just don't believe it anymore.

I don't believe that any person or group auditioning for the role of The Strong can credibly back their claims. There’s just too much chaos in the world right now. Good luck organizing a bake sale these days, let alone an empire. That version of the metanarrative is collapsing. I can't make myself believe it.

Whenever I hear some version of the Big Story these days, in my heart of hearts, a quiet voice says, “Nahhh. Fuck off.”

In terms of historical comparisons—if you’re looking for another time when there were so many sources of instability at all levels of global civilization, colliding all at once—you have to go pretty far back in human history. Back before we started telling ourselves the Big Story. (I’d venture to say ‘back to the end of the last Ice Age,’ but that’s another story for another time.) We’ve spent so long in the world within The Wall, where the power of The Strong is a foregone conclusion, that we don’t know how else to imagine reality. 

And I don’t believe it anymore. 

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

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What if the The Wall falls and can’t be rebuilt?

What if the world isn’t entirely under human control, and that’s okay?

What if there’s more power outside of technological solutions to the problems that we’ve created?

What if there’s a better way to live outside The Wall?

What if we never make it off this rock, and we’re left to clean up our own mess?

What if there is no Super(wo)manperson?

Most of all—what if we all find ourselves living in a world outside of our control, in real life, and the only way we’ve imagined that reality is unmitigated horror?

I think people cling to the Big Story because they’ve been conditioned to feel like they can’t survive without it⁵. This makes them feel sad and scared and confused in ways that they can't fully articulate. One of the ways we can treat this anxiety is by giving people imaginative alternatives to the Big Story: stories in which people don't control the world, but life—more than just harried, grisly survival—is still possible.

We need better stories.

As it happens, there’s a whole long tradition of stories about what the world is like when we’re not the apex predators anymore. They never really went away; they’ve just been crowded out by the bright lights and blaring music of civilization and its Big Story. Those older tales used to sit comfortably beside the civilizing myths of material progress; we could celebrate our successes in providing food and shelter and medicine and education for people, while still acknowledging that we would never fully understand the world, never completely control it. 

Then we became victims of our own success. Those other, older stories got pushed out by the Big Story. The old ones were too scary for the kids. Better to tell them that The Wall would stand forever—that The Strong would always save The Weak, would triumph over Nature and the Bad People, no matter who they are. 

And it’s held true, for a long time now. 

But still just for now.

We don’t need to flip over the applecart and get rid of the Big Story altogether. Still—as we confront an increasingly unpredictable future, for all sorts of reasons—it might be time to bring back some of those older, more complicated stories. 

Maybe they’re not as scary as we remember.

1. Sometimes we encounter people who have found a way to live in Nature, outside The Wall. Their crude tools and quaint superstitions count them among The Weak, who must be protected—from the Bad People and the environment, but also, especially, from their own backwardness, whether they like it or not.

2. And whether you can admit it or not, you want them on that wall. Or so they say.

3. As I understand it, one of the more consequential mistranslations in the Bible turns on the root word of “וְיִרְדּוּ֩” in the original Hebrew of Genesis 1:26—whether it derives its meaning from “descending to, spreading out, walking amongst as an equal” or “trampling, as in a winepress.” One single letter made all the difference when the Old Testament was translated from an oral tradition into a written document. Empires have been built on that one letter.

4. The salt of the earth. The common clay of the digital frontier. You know: a moron.

5. The Horror Story is the dark inverse of the Big Story. In this version, The Strong aren’t able to wield their power effectively. The Bad People and the environment and something called “human nature” [sic] are allowed to run amok. Monsters and sadness and despair stalk The Weak at every turn. Nobody bathes. Brunch is fucking cancelled. Sometimes a small group of The Strong manage to band together; with weapons and gadgets, they carve out a little patch of hierarchical sanity in this lawless world. But it’s never quite enough. We wake with a collective gasp from these dark visions, thankful that The Strong are here to watch over us, because we’ve seen what happens otherwise. Just by way of example—The Walking Dead was a cultural landmark for an unconscionable eleven seasons, not counting spin-offs and the inevitable reboots that are undoubtedly shambling toward us. Meanwhile, The Last Of Us looks poised to pick up its severed arm, still clutching that same torch. These post-apocalyptic horror stories are now endemic to our culture.