In our hyperindividualized age, a lot of us are searching for a storyteller: someone or something to tell us what our lives mean. Compared with the sense of purpose and identity that past generations found in sturdy communities, now “it’s very difficult to tell the story of who you are and what you’re doing,” Dr. Kommers said. “Psychology and A.I. don’t have a way to help us with that. That’s one of the reasons there’s this pervasive feeling that technology doesn’t make our lives better.”
Americans are still waiting for a leader who invites us into a plotline that moves beyond 2025. We need a story that reckons with reality, but does not trap us in it.
Does it matter whether the story is true? If so, how do you judge whether it is true? Is it just about whether there’s a factual basis for it? Facts should, of course, matter. But more important than facts is the interpretive frame, which foregrounds some facts and backgrounds others.
Recently, Francis Fukuyama imagines his grandchildren being taught a story of our present moment that isn’t strictly non-factual, even if it is abhorrent to most Liberals:
The world in the 2050s is peaceful because most Americans have come to accept that there is no such thing as universal values. Each country has the right to follow its own traditions and culture, and if those differ from the preferences of the United States, so be it. If another country wants a strong central government, one that can control media critics or declare a state religion, it has a right to do so. The United States is no different in this regard.
In this dream, I realize how easy it is to control historical narratives in this age of the ubiquitous internet. From the Civil War until the digital age, the historical narrative was controlled by a small group of left-wing elites, who brainwashed Americans into believing their version of events. The internet liberated ordinary people from control by those elites, and now it is easy to get lots of people to listen to whatever narrative you want to promote. You don’t even have to force them; they want to believe what you are telling them, and to help you spread their new gospel.
I begin to wonder if I myself have been deluded for all these years by the narratives I have been fed since childhood. As I fly out of Donald J. Trump International Airport over Washington, D.C., I wonder if I really want to wake up.
I’m sure if in the 2050s such a story should become the official one, what part of it would be egregiously non-factual? There will be those who object to it, but once a story becomes official, it’s because it became the primary interpretive frame accepted first by key charismatic cultural influencers, then the mainstream media, and then educational institutions. Any facts that don’t fit into the official story are easily backgrounded. Those on the Left who insist on “alternative facts” will be dismissed as kooks. The culture war that we are currently suffering through is essentially about whose story will provide the primary interpretive frame.
Will such a story as Fukuyama fears become the official one? I see no reason why not. It flows from the postmodern metaphysics that rejects a transcendental foundation. Reality is pretty much just what people decide it to be, and whoever tells the best story wins. Skepticism about grand narratives is powerless against the power of narratives, even untrue ones, that meet the current need.
The cultural Left has embraced this postmodern skepticism about narratives since the 1970s, but the Right has used this mood of skepticism far more effectively to its political advantage. Why? Because the Right tells a good story, and the cultural Left? Does it even have one unless its “science is real”, and “people should be nice to one another”. The Right’s narratives meet meaning needs in a way the Left skepticism about narratives just cannot. That doesn’t mean the story told by the Right is true or healthy, but it tells us something important about what a good story requires.
Worthen has written about how charismatic figures derive their charisma by meeting these meaning needs. Charismatic figures are not just charming, she says. She claims that even an AI chatbot can mimic charm because it’s so formulaic:1
But charisma may remain one of the few human dynamics that elude A.I., because it is not the conversational allogrooming at which A.I. excels. It is based not on primate instincts of attraction but on our aspirations to higher meaning, enlivened with a dose of the social friction that A.I. agents are designed to eliminate. Charisma can be just as repellent as it is attractive, so it usually baffles or disgusts anyone not under its thrall.
My research took me from Puritan mystics and early Mormons to Black nationalism and Pentecostal revivals to the cults and management gurus of the 1970s and ’80s, all the way to President Trump. Some of these figures possessed good looks, great oratorical skills, sex appeal or charm — but surprisingly few, as far as I could tell.
They had something far more important in common: They promised to pull back the veil on secret truth. They revealed how followers’ struggles have a purpose — one that the reigning elites and institutions belittled or missed entirely.
In other words, it’s not just who tells the best story wins, it’s who tells the best ‘meaning story’. These charismatic figures told a story that met the meaning needs of a lot of people. But doesn’t it matter whether the meaning story is just fiction or whether it is in some very real sense true ? Yes, but first you have to believe that a true story is possible. I do, but a true story is cannot be ‘true’ in some purely scientific, data-driven sense of ‘true’. It’s more complex than that.
So if such a story is possible, by what criteria do you evaluate it? I would suggest that there are four main criteria: Scope, Coherence, Richness, and Adaptability. If a grand narrative, a big meaning story, fails in any one of them, it can be judged as untrue. It's not that parts of it can be true; its falseness lies in what it leaves out.2
Adaptability: A story that embraces the broadest scope of scientific, historical, and broadly reported experiences and insights of the great sages, poets, prophets, and artists of the world’s great civilizations that have stood the test of time.3
Coherence: A story that integrates these facts in a coherent narrative. In other words that weaves together in a dynamic interplay the vertical and horizontal axes in the diagram below. The current secular Liberal narrative fails because of the way it it backgrounds the north limb of the vertical axis, and foregrounds the horizontal axis. Fundamentalist religious narratives fail in their rejection of the horizontal axis. Some stories can achieve coherence only by rejecting the “facts” foregrounded by an alternative story. A story that has coherency by itself doesn’t qualify as true. A story that achieves internal consistency only feels ‘truthy’ because it rejects or backgrounds as irrelevant facts that don’t fit. This is as true of secular narratives as it is of religious ones.
Richness: A story that is richly meaningful in meeting human spiritual needs and provides practices and institutions that helps people to meet them. Premodern societies foregrounded the vertical axis in a way that made life within them profoundly meaningful. Alienation and meaninglessness was not a problem for any society that is symbolically rich and embraces the multidimensionality of reality. Modern and Postmodern societies are atomizing and soul-flattening because they foreground the horizontal axis and are one-dimensional in their utilitarian materiality.
Adaptability: A story that celebrates human history as an evolving story that is all about expanding its depth of knowledge and wisdom on the vertical axis and its breadth of knowledge and understanding on the horizontal axis in a continuous effort to integrate the two. Prophets and mystics have always and will continue arise who will challenge the consensus reality. Should all of them be taken seriously? Of course not. Whatever they say has value only insofar as it meets the moment in advancing an evolving story that integrates the vertical and the horizontal.
In other words, if whoever tells the best story wins, it matters what qualifies as best. Bad stories will win unless all four of these criteria are met and work together in an integrated way. So I’m saying that the best story is one that integrates the transcendental with the immanent, the spiritual with the incarnate, the eternal with the historical in ways that align with the wisdom of the ancestors in such a way that it delivers a factually supported meaning story that celebrates an open-ended expansion of knowledge about both the world around us and the depths of the human soul and heights of the human spirit.
The transhumanist story fails these criteria because of the way it rejects the vertical axis and the scope and richness criteria. The reactionary/fundamentalist religious stories fail because of the way they reject the horizontal axis and the scope and adaptability criteria. Neither story seeks to coherently integrate the vertical with the horizontal.
I like Worthen’s line at the end of the opening excerpt: “We need a story that reckons with reality, but does not trap us in it.” Our primary reality-defining story right now is what I’ve been calling the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, and it is a trap. We have to reckon with it as defining the current consensus reality in all the ways that matter in this moment for shaping the human future. But we also have to reckon with the way it entraps us and prevents us from evolving toward what a truly flourishing human future requires. We need a better story to get us there.
1. But I think it could be argued that the stories these “charismatic'“ figures tell is algorithmic as well. I. I see no reason why a chatbot couldn’t do that at some point. There are stories of it doing so already. See also here.
2. Maybe these criteria can be tweaked, but they’re a good starting point to think about how a “grand narrative” might emerge that could be broadly accepted as legitimate.
3. I would include shamanic religions as providing knowledge especially about phenomena that are mapped on the southern axis in the figure above. How the north and south axes interrelate is an important issue.
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