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We continue from where we left off, so if you haven’t read the previous one…
Reality: based on a true story
The reason I wanted to write this in the first place is because I keep noticing how often people tell themselves a story about what’s happening while ignoring objective reality that contradicts that story.
I’ve also noticed that conversations are often just an exercise in hearing each other’s version of reality and gently adjusting them for each other.
Arguments are a more direct attempt to edit somebody’s version of reality while protecting our own. We’re just trying to talk about reality, but the only way we can do so is by converting it into narratives. Facts in isolation, or even in list form, do not “tell the story”, do they? The entire information industry—including military intel—is based on converting data into stories. You can listen to intel operatives explain their jobs, and they’ll tell you that it’s no different than pitching a screenplay in Hollywood. You need to grab their attention, sell the big idea, and walk them through the story. News and blogs are much the same, as you probably know from being on Substack.
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This happens subconsciously and automatically. To make sense of something, it can’t just be an assortment of details. Stories weave information into the larger tapestry of reality, but depending on how these stories are told, or by whom, the same information can be woven many different ways, and into very different tapestries. So in the end, it’s a subjective reality, constructed by storytellers.
On the more personal level, we do this with our jobs, families, and neighbors. We tell a story about our own life, and who the people around us represent within that story.
Casting
Once we settle on a narrative to explain the facts of our own lives, we cast people we know into roles that support that version of reality. This becomes our identity in a sense, so there’s usually a selfish bias in the process. If we decide that we’re a righteous person who is constantly putting up with insufferable fools—perhaps because we lack patience and don’t see our own hypocrisy—we will be quicker to cast a stranger as morally inferior to us. But if we decide that we’re a screw up, and that everyone hates us, we will be quicker to blame ourselves for problems, give up on challenges, and shove responsibility onto other “better” people.
This gives new meaning to the word “characterize”. We turn real people into fictional characters in our own subjective story.
At the same time, we are being scripted into other people’s stories, and cast into roles that make sense in their version of reality. Your coworker might cast you as a goofy brat who can never be taken seriously and gets defensive whenever you’re criticized, but this could be because their own story is that they’re a serious truth teller who exposes people’s flaws and has little patience for humor. Another coworker might cast you as a thoughtful therapist, there to listen to their endless problems and give them sympathy and understanding, but this could be because they’re neurotic and self-obsessed, and don’t care you’re just being polite because you don’t want to upset them. You can be many things to many people while not acting any different. What surprised me is the extent to which everyone is doing this constantly.
Panscription
Pan- universal
Script- writing
Panscription is the term for mankind’s uncontrollable need to edit the story of reality; to make sense of things by integrating facts into narratives; to create expectations about the future and explain things in hindsight; to project our own bias onto what’s happening, or to contend with the stories of others by offering counter-narratives. Storytelling is so pervasive and ubiquitous that we don’t even see it happening, because it’s just… what it means to be human.
I was once in a (quite nerdy) argument about how humanity would behave if they achieved unlimited resources and luxury interstellar travel. My counterpart argued that humans would develop entirely new ways of behaving because they would finally lose the baggage of our awful shared history and adapt to radically better circumstances. The Federation concept from Star Trek. Without hunger, pain, and death, humans would become nobler, smarter, and almost enlightened beings. Envy would be eliminated because everyone could have as much as they wanted.
I, on the other hand, argued that basic human dynamics would never change, even though circumstances would change tremendously. I said humanity would be doomed to repeat the same relationships at every scale possible, given enough time and diversity. And this, I said, was not because our evolutionary instincts built into our DNA, or because we’re knit together in a collective unconscious like Jung said, but because of language and perception.
Categorically speaking
Stories are created using language. Stories are required in order to find an identity, gain purpose, and make sense of anything, and we need those things to even survive, especially in societies where many things are interacting and affecting us in predictable and unpredictable ways. But the rules of language are tied to psychology so intimately that you can hardly talk about one without tripping over the other, which means our capacity to tell stories tends to gravitate toward the same tropes, no matter where we go or what we do.
We will always attempt to define our experiences, and we will always do so by creating categories and then filling those categories with examples. Words like happiness, suffering, evil, healthy, sad, and scary are part of every language, because we need a word to express those things to others and ourselves. (And again, we need to express these things because we need to tell stories, to make sense of reality.)
Simply by defining categories and then filling those categories with examples, we end up creating a scale by which to compare everything that is new. Some experience in your life was the most happy you’ve ever been, and something else is the most you ever suffered, etc. Those are the extremes. Most of your experiences will, therefore, be relatively “normal” and not feel special. In the end, we have what is called a “normal distribution” that is unique to us, and totally biased.
In the next part, I will talk about how people develop their personalized scale of experience from childhood to create wildly different cultures and lifestyles, while still fitting the same patterns of behavior.
Conclusion
By understanding panscription on the personal level, we can learn better habits and help others to do the same. When I conclude this little series of posts, I want to tie all of this into what it means to us as Christians, but for now I want to focus on the more mundane human experience, where we can still do a lot of work.
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