Just as you hear it, this is more challenging than the aphorism: “history is written by the victors”, history understood as a story.
Why the need for storytelling?
To satisfy the needs for: security and transcendence, expectations, motivation, meaning, in any form of consciousness one may have.
Mortality and uncertainty are the cost of having consciousness; as a consequence, feelings of anxiety, fear, and stress are generated, especially in modern urbanized men and women, who are promised order and certainty.
In the world of life, the human species feeds on and is nourished by stories. Stories intertwine past, present, and future; they foster social cohesion and give meaning to life.
Imagination, memory, truth, illusion
An Argentine philosopher and anthropologist, José Ingenieros, said at the beginning of the 20th century:
“Illusions have as much value in guiding conduct as the most exact truths; they can have more than them if they are intensely thought or felt.”
Illusion is imagination with motivation, desire, and intention.
Likewise, illusion, like reality understood as mediation, makes use of human imagination and memory. Human imagination and memory vary, depending biologically, physiologically, historically, sociologically, and culturally on each individual; each person is a unique, personalized hardware and software.
In other reflections, we have already discussed truth, indicating that it is elusive. We have listed three categories, three forms of belief to approach the truth, the object, the thing, and they are: through logic, rationality, observation and experimentation "What is" - Aletheia, Greek -; another, through the credibility of "those who say it", those who have authority on the matter - the "Veritas" of the Romans -; and the other, by a simple "act of faith" of those who receive them - belief, the Hebrew "Emunah".
So the best story will have a combination of these three criteria as its ingredients. And they will be more or less effective depending on the awareness of the majority who consume them, that is, their relationship "in and with the world," how credulous they are.
Therefore, a truth is true until proven otherwise. Perhaps that's why in justice systems innocence is presumed—a provisional truth—until proven otherwise; the defense's strategy focuses on creating reasonable doubt, while the prosecution's strategy focuses on convincing the public with evidence and testimony to arrive at a procedural or legal truth. Absolute truth is not the goal; that is left to scientists, philosophers, and theologians.
A good story is always useful for presenting the past, the present, and projecting the future.
This statement is presented as a hypothesis: "whoever creates and tells the first and best story about the distant past, about the recent past, which we call the present, and about a projection of the future wins."
The story about the distant past serves to rationally support an ethnographic or racist power hierarchy, to legitimize and justify widespread violence, dispossession, conquest and plunder of one civilization by another, among many other motivations.
Some examples to illustrate:
-The ancient culture and philosophy of Black, Sub-Saharan Africa.
Thanks to the scientific and philosophical reinterpretation of Egyptian culture achieved by the Senegalese Doctor Cheikh Anta Diop, who through the study of melanin in mummies, the radiocarbon dating of the remains and the genetic and phonetic connection between current black African languages and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt defended and proved, at UNESCO, before the Egyptologists, in 1974, the black origin of Pharaonic Egypt; 52 years later it seems that most people in the world still do not know it.
-A brown-skinned Jesus
The archaeology of Western Asia - the Near East -, forensic anthropology, and contemporary social history have provided solid evidence on the ethnographic profile of the Jewish population of Judea and Galilee in the 1st century, which allows us to recreate with great precision what Jesus of Nazareth looked like and what ethnic group he belonged to; he was neither blond, nor white-skinned, nor blue-eyed like the story that has been told all these centuries, through different mediations.
Other changes in official history that are little known, perhaps because they are recent: The myth of Adam Smith's barter system; informal credit as a primary economic activity; debt is older than money; the myth of the Dutch Tulip Mania of 1637; rewriting of gender roles: warrior women and shamans; the "lighter" as Neanderthal technology and the use of fire which dates back 400.000 years, meaning they had intelligence; the Amazon as a massive and densely populated urban center in the past; the birth of religion 11.000 years ago, before agriculture, based on the discovery and dating of megalithic temples at Göbekli Tepe, in Türkiye.
These findings were achieved thanks to the discovery of new deposits, new technologies, and new methods.
In the immediate or recent past, which we call the present, the use of narratives to achieve political, social, and economic objectives is very common; these are called fake news, also known as post-truth. They are disseminated in various ways and through various media. They can take the form of new theories, prospective studies, and predictive models. Their spokespeople range from television anchors, influencers, opinion leaders, and scientists to presidents of powerful countries and their defense ministers. They can be broadcast on television networks, digital platforms, and presented as papers at international forums such as the Davos Economic Forum or political forums such as the UN General Assembly.
They must be credible, plausible, as far as possible; we've seen cases like the story about weapons of mass destruction told by the US Secretary of Defense before Congress, which later turned out to be fake news since no such weapons have yet been found. They can be in any format and any genre: film, documentary, news report, social media post, television series, song, novel, and so on.
Regarding the future, stories designed to create expectations are the most commonly used in marketing, politics, and economics to influence markets, consumption, public opinion, and elections.
The more distant the story's subject matter is, both in time and space, the greater the creative freedom. Adding methodology and scientific rigor will make it even more compelling. You'll be able to choose the most relevant perspectives and facts, make connections, and give it meaning.
This story will be assimilated differently depending on whether the audience is the community of scientists and intellectuals, the political community, or the masses.
What people believe is one thing, and what happens in the real world is another.
The more real facts a story has, the further it will go.
In the world of life there is a paradox: most people live in the 21st century, those who lead and make decisions rely on theories and laws—stories—from the 18th and 19th centuries, and the leading intellectuals—philosophers, scientists—have another way of describing, understanding, and comprehending—stories—the phenomena updated to the 21st century.
In the next installment, a simulation will be done of how to use stories with a methodology that has already been tested and made public.
