I have, as of late, been stuck on the idea of story. Every conversation, every issue, every idea that comes into my head, I have not been able to help but to frame the matter in terms of story. If one spent any amount of time seeing the scribbles on social media over the last few years you might already sense there is a problem with story. Some call it magical thinking, others fact-less feelings; these are what some of the contrived tribe called the right say about story, even if they do not know they are speaking about story themselves. When a person says “feelings do not care about facts,” sometimes, the person saying that might not realize that they are telling a story with that statement, a story juxtaposed against the story someone else just told.

We tell stories all the time, in business, at parties, in arguments. One of the most tiresome things I have observed over the last few years is the online debate bro culture, you have seen them, folks that make a sport of debating others on videos. If you have ever stood back and thought it is a silly endeavor, then perhaps you were also thinking, “stop arguing about semantics and compare the story you are each trying to tell – compare that to higher truth”. Now, before I lose you, let me say clearly, facts matter, rigor matters, precision matters, due diligence matters, and critical thinking matters. These are all of secondary importance.

I must give credit where it is due. I stumbled upon a talk by Jonathan Pageau last evening, and he added layers to this concept that I had really only muffled over the years. I have often said that one has to get their metaphysics right, then have a working conceptualization of a cosmology below and dependent upon the metaphysical and then we can weigh and measure the material realm. This is still a correct view, Pageau agrees in his talk, but he adds a psychological element when relating this to stories. The stories we tell, and the facts we highlight, are related to care, what we care about specifically, and in the case of universal stories, human care more broadly.  His complete talk is located here. I recommend it.

We, of course, know this is true; no matter what vocation or profession we work or worked in, we know that when things get serious, and we are asked to explain a thing, we find the facts that support a story we want to tell. Why, because we care about ourselves, and to a much lesser degree, about our work. There is a commercial that depicts this perfectly, it is called Dashboard Confessions. In the commercial, someone “confesses” that their boss asked them for a chart that shows how a project is going. The confession is that they select the only “positive” metric available, one that is implied to be useless in real terms. A factually correct, but untrue story that is crafted via human care, based on what the human telling the story cared about. In this case, getting the boss off their back.  We do this in life, in relationships, in politics, science, and more broadly in the common variants of universal stories we tell over and over.

The addition to the topic that Pageau added, that care drives what facts we choose, is important, but the more fundamental concept remains: measuring a story against higher truths to see if we actually picked the right facts and did not exclude others. Did we test that our stories are not only factually correct, but also true. True because they include all the relevant facts, this is just standard, ordinary critical thinking, but that is not enough. Are our stories true because we included all the relevant facts and they comport with higher truths? Of course, if we believe we have used some methodology, the scientific method, critical thinking or the latest fad from business schools and gathered all the relevant facts, and the story still does not comport with higher truth, then our story is not true.

I do not know what term we ought to apply to this process. “higher critical thinking” works grammatically, but those words in that format might have weighted postmodern meaning that could easily be misunderstood. Intuition or common sense are excellent candidates, and capture the notion well. Our minds consult our consciousness, which is informed by the literal natural law written into us at Creation. That is really what we are speaking of. I will leave the labels for now, I have told you the story of what this means. Apply the term or metaphor you desire to make meaning for yourself.

Here is a personal story, since this is about stories. I was married for 25 years and divorced twelve years ago. Now, my ex-wife and I both had a story about what happened and why. Both of us summoned facts to support our story. Our stories were and are widely different. Same history, same facts available, different stories. Is one, both or neither of the stories true, you must merely take my word for it that both included some facts?  I would say YES…and then I would say NO. We both cared about something very different, thus we told very different stories. Which of our stories comports nearest to true truth, to the natural law, to the “Book of Nature” and more importantly to the grand narrative about topics like duty, loyalty, sacrifice and love portrayed in the revealed text of Holy Scripture? Well in that lens, there might be an answer as to which is the truer story in this narrative dual – but the care that crafts stories also applies to us hearing stories. We have to be able to know what the metanarrative says about mothers, fathers, families, duty, and sacrifice. Not the snippets we pull to make stories, but the big picture and measure our stories and the stories we hear against that.

My example story above about story probably hits home. If we think hard about it and reason out this problem more broadly, we see one of the fundamental flaws of humanity. Think about a trial and a jury, two lawyers in slick suits, each trying to enter or get suppressed facts they like or do not like. Think of the process, the judge says the jury cannot see this or that, if something slips in, the judge tells the jury not to consider that. It is preposterous on one level. The justice system protects the people who are supposed to decide the case from all the facts. Yet, it is in some way an acknowledgement of human frailty, of our inability to hear two stories, and measure them against higher truth. We built a system of justice that acknowledges that a jury of our peers cannot know right from wrong consistently, thus we entrusted people we select to guard their eyes and ears from facts that would confuse them. Of course, this opens up another problem: if judges are merely using the methodology of the law to include or exclude facts, they are not measuring those decisions by higher truth. In the justice system we merely formalized the flaw.

Enough examples, you grasp my meaning now. I have a much richer appreciation for story, why we tell stories, and how we hear stories. I understand more why we have collectively told similar stories across history and cultures. Not merely because the commonality in those stories logically points to a truth buried in history that we collectively remember, that is a fact that is usually true in these stories. The more interesting thing is why we retained the stories about these facts, barely remembered, as opposed to other stories about things that happened. Why those? In all these stories, mythology, and religious texts, there is either a story that ultimately comports with truth or is the inverse of it. The inverse of truth is a form of care too, humans very much seem to care very often to rebel against truth, and many of our myths pick facts or remember facts in a version of the story that ultimately inverts higher truth, but there is a lot of human care baked into that. Intent before content, I have written about this before; it was a useful concept I began to apply around 2012 in my reading. This relates to story. The intent of a storyteller informs us of the care they used in picking facts.

We live in a world where story is more important than ever. It is important to progressives, scientists, and politicians. I am not sure many that populate social media on the right grasp the importance of story, not narrative, narrative is just a long-form version of a debate created to “own an opponent”, no, I mean real story that aligns with the ultimate story and ultimate truth.

Last thought, I am not, as I said, arguing that we ought not be curious about the mundane and the material. I love a great mystery as much as the next guy. Show me a set of facts that do not add up, let me get a whiff of smoke that something is going on, and I will dig and probe just like the rest of us. I love solving mysteries and theorizing about what facts mean. However, we ought to put that in perspective. Theories are theories, sometimes new facts emerge. No matter what odd things manifest in our material reality, no matter how bizarre this or that event is, and no matter what science believes it discovers this is all secondary stuff, interesting, useful, sometimes fascinating…but it is not The story, not the ultimate story, and however we care to think about the secondary and tertiary stories, if we do not measure them against the ultimate story, we are merely wasting time.