III - MORAL

But why are stories wrapped around a question and answer? Why does that seem the right way to recount events? We tell them that way because stories are about morals.

Here the word “moral” means a statement about the nature of reality, as in “and the moral of this story is _______.” It is a general statement of truth of larger scope than the specific events of a particular story. We get not just knowledge of the adventures of the characters, but insights into what sort of place the world is and what life is all about and how to live it.

For example, take the story of the three little pigs. We have the Big Bad Wolf, the down-to-earth, hard working pig, Practical, and his two frivolous brother pigs, the musicians Fiddler and Fifer.

Practical builds his house solidly of brick, but his brothers use inferior materials, straw and wood. The hungry wolf blows down the flimsy houses, but Fiddler and Fifer run to safety in Practical’s brick house, against which the Big Bad Wolf’s industrial-grade lungs are useless. End of story.

What is the moral? What larger truth was shown here? The answer is open to where we see the primary thrust of the story. If we take it as a comparison of Practical’s virtues to those of his brothers, then the moral might be “working hard and building solidly for your future is the only way to be secure.” If the story is seen primarily in terms of the wolf versus Fiddler and Fifer, the moral might be “in times of trouble, seek help from other family members, especially the responsible ones.”

Usually there is more than one moral in a story; much of a story’s interest comes from the interactions between the morals.

Morals are not about Sin
Please note that I am not using the word “moral” in this book in the ethical sense, labeling virtuous and sinful behavior as “moral” and “immoral.” Dramatic and ethical meanings of “moral” are related, for statements about reality carry implications that some actions are better than others. Even so, it is important to keep in mind we are talking about the nature of reality, not ethical judgments against sin.

Guides to Action
A moral is a statement about reality. It may be a simple statement of fact, such as “spring is warmer than winter”. Often, though it is a guide to action, such as “it is wise to be kind to strangers”, that helps us know what to do. We combine these two to give facts greater meaning. “Spring is warmer than winter” together with “warmer weather is a better time for gardening” or “if you are out for a walk, you are less apt to be bitten by mosquitoes in cold weather” gives us morals with greater usefulness.

Morals help us know how to live and enhance our chances for survival. This is why morals matter to us. Neutral statements of fact by themselves are not guides to action so by themselves lack importance for us. We forget what does not matter, so we remember facts by turning them into ways to change our lives, giving them meaning they did not have before. “Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso” will not stay in your memory by itself. If you accept the moral that learning obscure facts makes you better than you were before, that moral will combine with the fact and you will probably remember it because then it becomes a way to improve your perceived position in the world and is therefore directly useful. You give the fact meaning.

We always face the problems of who we are and what to do next. We use morals, statements about the larger reality, to gain an understanding of life so we can feel secure and take effective actions. The most basic and important morals are never explicitly stated. We are unaware of them because they seem so obvious nothing else could be possible. Quite literally, they go without saying.

Moral Demonstrations
The source of morals is their demonstration through the action in stories. We think of action as physical, but it can take other forms, such as intellectual, emotional, imaginary, social, or spiritual. It is any change affecting a character and his relation to the world. The action in the story demonstrates to us the truth of the moral. If the demonstration is convincing, we will accept the moral as true, even though we have been given only a single example, not a proof. When a story shows an example of how a moral is true, that is a moral demonstration.

Morals arise out of story action. The observation of the weather is action in the story and demonstrates the moral that you can go outside in spring and feel the warmth. From that we can create the abstract idea that spring is warmer than winter. We also make a moral demonstration out of the emotional symbolism we feel by association with a warm spring day, commonly that “life is good.”

The obvious moral demonstrations are those resulting from actions taken by a character. We pay attention to what he does and how his choices of action fare. Less obvious are the morals demonstrated by actions not taken. A decision not to do what might ordinarily be done makes a statement about reality. Why didn’t he act?

Morals are also demonstrated by the setting. What kind of place it is makes statements about the larger world even if no character is there. Is the setting warm, safe, and sheltering or cold, damp, and creepy? We imagine characters there and react to that. “It was a dark and stormy night” is more than a description of the weather.

Morals can be demonstrated, but they also can be expressed directly. I can tell you a moral as well as show you. My telling you can help you understand the moral, but to fully get it, you need to see its demonstration.

Even so, the act of telling you the information is a demonstration of my attitude towards what I am saying that will affect how you assimilate and use the message. As soon as I tell you the moral, your mind, on some level, will start making stories using the new input to get the resultant moral demonstrations that lead to understanding.

I constantly witness the demonstration of the moral “people think in story form.” The purpose of this book is to help you recognize that moral when you see it demonstrated and to understand its many implications about human nature. After you read, you need to go out into the world and get the moral demonstration by seeing for yourself how stories structure our thoughts and lives.

The Answer to the Question Why
A moral is expressing that quality of the larger reality that caused the actions in the plot to have the results they did. We induce the moral from action that demonstrates the moral’s validity. Once we have accepted the moral, deduction allows us to use the moral to guide our actions. The moral is the principle behind the specific events. The moral tells us why things turn out the way they do. In addition to being a statement about reality that helps us know what to do, we can see a moral as the answer to the question why. Why did Fiddler and Fifer get in trouble when Practical did not? Because working hard and building solidly for your future is the only way to be secure. The pigs’ fate was controlled by a principle of reality, the moral. Whenever you ask why, you are asking for a moral, a statement about the larger reality behind the situation at hand that controls the events in question.

Nonverbal Morals
We think of a moral, a statement about reality, as something we can say in words, perhaps in a sentence or two. This is true of some morals but not true of most. A statement does not have to be verbal. It can arise from any experience we have. Movies have visual morals. So do paintings and sculptures. You see truths about the larger reality demonstrated and any attempt you make to put them into words falls short of their full meaning. Nonverbal statements can also be auditory. A person’s tone of voice creates moral demonstrations that can go far beyond his literal words. What would song lyrics be without music? Morals also can be emotional, imaginative, physical, or any other way we perceive.

Show me the Moral
Even though a moral is a statement about reality, it is usually not stated in the story. Most storytellers do not wind up with “and the moral of this story is _____,” telling you in so many words what the story is there to teach. Sometimes a character makes a speech near the end where he pounds the author’s point home. Both those techniques are too heavy-handed for graceful storytelling. A good story will do its work without them.

A basic rule of storytelling is “show them, don’t tell them.” The story does not tell us the moral is true; it gives us a convincing example that shows us the moral is true.

Through the actions of the characters and how well they fare against the obstacles and each other, we are shown what works and what does not, allowing us to extrapolate to what is true and what is not. A moral demonstration is a showing of some aspect of what the world is like and what our place is in it.

A story is not a proof of the truth of a moral but merely one example of it. A proof has to show how the moral is true in all cases and how contradictory morals are not. We get impatient with proofs. They are tedious because our minds don’t work that way. Our minds say “show me how it is and then I’ll understand.” We seek not a proof but a demonstration of the truth of the moral. A story delivers what we want.

A good story raises a question about what kind of place reality is and keeps the uncertainty hovering until the end. The story makes us doubt our own understanding of life and our place in it. The doubt is easily provoked, for we all have anxiety about our relation to others and how we fit into the overall situation. We may be able to forget that anxiety, but it affects us all the time. Notice how you are aware of your appearance even if no one else is around; we create ghosts of other people that watch us from inside our minds.

The moral is the answer to the moral question that drives the story. For the three little pigs, the moral question “Is it better to be a worker or a slacker?” organizes and directs the action. The moral question stands behind the story question of whether or not the wolf is going to eat the pigs. The story question is a setup for the moral question. As the plot gives us an answer to the story question, we get a moral demonstration that answers the moral question. We face similar questions in our own lives, so the moral question holds our interest. The question awakens our insecurity causing the story to engage our anxiety and making us care about the answer and thus be a good audience for that story.

If the story works for us, we will want to believe its validity. We enter gladly into the state of willing suspension of disbelief. We feel a relief when we enter into Storyland where life is less complex and moral demonstrations are clear and can be counted on.

We want to believe that the three little pigs escaped being eaten by the Big Bad Wolf and that nothing different could have happened. We have a need for solid answers in an insecure world. We want to be able to depend on the validity of the moral demonstration.

Creative Freedom
If you have ever written a story, you know better than that. You have a stack of blank paper in front of you. What you write is your choice, as is how far you take your story and what morals you care to demonstrate. The wolf could just as well have blown down the brick house and eaten all three pigs. The moral might then be “no matter what you do, if the forces of evil come after you, that’s it.” Or perhaps the wolf goes home and returns with a sledgehammer and knocks a hole in the wall. At that point Fiddler opens his violin case to reveal a Tommy gun with which he blows the wolf away, yielding the moral “God bless the Second Amendment.” The story could have been told many different ways.

In a work of fiction, the author can tell whatever story he likes and demonstrate any moral he wants. It is his choice. If he tells his story well, the audience will accept the moral demonstration. Being a storyteller is a powerful position.

A good storyteller chooses his characters carefully. The story is driven by the actions of the characters, yet they cannot believably act beyond the morals they bring to the situation and what they can reasonably learn or think up on the spot. The actions necessary to advance the story determine what sort of people the characters will represent, since who they are limits their possible actions. Don’t ask Huck Finn to act like Winston Churchill.

The storyteller needs to keep the development of the plot true to the characters and reality present when the central question of the story was raised. If you are writing a historical novel about King Henry VIII, don’t suddenly give him the powers of Superman to battle an invasion of flying saucers.

What a character can do will be limited by his abilities. Within those limits he decides what to do next based on the collection of morals that determines his view of reality.

The storyteller will want to have the next character live by a dissimilar group of morals, causing the two to perceive the world differently. They will thus have opposing desires, creating lots of conflict and an engaging story.

Moral Packages
The various morals, statements about the nature of reality, that a character lives by are one example of a moral package. A moral package consists of several morals with a unifying quality. You have one. Your overall concept of what sort of place the world is and what it all means is built out of the collection of morals you live by. Your moral package determines your world view, your values, and your priorities for your life.

Any philosophy or religion consists of a moral package, a theoretical model of reality, plus supporting structures such as stories and logical arguments to prop up its credibility.

Every human organization and social group has a moral package. We will explore this further in the Group Myth chapter.

In the course of events, your experiences affect your moral package, both directly and through information from others. This causes morals to evolve throughout life, often slowly, sometimes suddenly. A change in morals across time is a moral progression.

Stories are moral demonstrations. They exist to give examples showing the truth of their morals. They show us what kind of place the world is. They make statements about what happens if certain actions are taken.

The protagonist is given a particular moral package at the beginning. The storyteller will then choose obstacles that challenge that moral package. The protagonist will act to overcome the obstacles, but his problems are bigger than his moral package. His actions will have unforeseen consequences that demonstrate the flaws in his decision making, due to gaps and errors in his moral package. As he is forced to cope with one obstacle after another, his moral package will be altered and thus his perception of the world. At the end of the story, due to this moral progression, he will be different.

Furthermore, we, the audience, will be different. The story will have an impact. It will probably persuade us to believe the world is not quite what we thought. For us to care about the moral progression we must become aware of the gaps in our own moral package. Even if the thrust of the story only serves to confirm our previous moral package, if the story held our attention we will have had our morals put in doubt by the development of the plot and we will have undergone a moral progression of our own.

Characters are not People
In a story a character seems to be a human being. On stage Hamlet is portrayed by a human actor. His lines and his moves are what a person might do in similar circumstances. The audience emotionally accepts Hamlet as human. Yet he is not. He is a fictional character in a play. They are not the same. You have been alive for years. Hamlet enters in Act I and dies in Act V. His entire existence happens in one evening. What you see, what you hear, that’s it for Hamlet. That’s all he has. Hamlet has no experiences outside the play. Those five acts are his entire world. A character has only the story. He has no existence and no attributes outside the story.

You, however, have been alive for a long time. Countless experiences have made you who you are today. You have had to deal with many different moral questions. Hamlet only has to face the few in the script. On most issues he has no awareness and therefore no moral stance at all. What is Hamlet’s moral relation to grilled cheese sandwiches? None whatsoever. They don’t exist in his world.

Your complex life has left you with a huge moral package, one you have been building every second of every day of your life. You are incapable of listing every moral you have ever demonstrated. There are just too many. Hamlet has very few. He has only those that are necessary for the moral demonstration that is the play. Anything else would be superfluous and distracting. Too many morals spoil the plot.

Hamlet, as created by Shakespeare, is not a person but a character, and a character is a simplified moral package in the form of a human allegory, created for the purpose of moral demonstration. You can read Shakespeare’s script and learn everything there is to know about Hamlet. You, however, are a human being and can never be fully known.

Confusion arises due to the human obsession with seeing people as characters. Suppose you spend two hours telling me about your boss. You won’t talk about what he is like at home or in church. Your stories will present a view of a man in just one of his roles: your boss. Furthermore, it will not be a complete picture of even that. You have already decided what sort of person your boss is, and will tell me only that which supports your predetermined conclusions about your boss and how you two do or don’t get along. The boss ends up like Hamlet-a character described in a short period of time and limited to those qualities that support a moral demonstration you wish to make. It is your story and you will tell it in such a way as to further your position. Note that the boss as the character you created lives only in your story. The boss as human is quite distinct and will be in the office on Monday morning with a different story to tell.

A character is a simplified moral package in the form of a human allegory. Hamlet obviously qualifies, as do the three little hamlettes, who are clearly not pigs but humans in pig form. However, we can turn anything into a character. If you say “my car won’t start,” you have an obstacle between you and going to work. If you say “my car doesn’t want to start,” you have transformed the obstacle from an object into a character. The difference is an implied consciousness, the ability to make a choice, which comes out of the interplay of the situation and the moral package you imagine the car to have. The implied consciousness, free will, and moral package make the character as one of us, a human allegory.

Our predilection for turning inanimate objects into characters is a good example of the power of story over our lives. Treating a car as if it had a mind of its own is rationally ludicrous but dramatically advantageous. More characters can make for a better story.

We normally think of the characters and the situation as the foundation of a story. Here are some characters. They are who they are. Here is a situation. It is what it is. We put the characters into the situation and whatever they do, that is the story. Any morals demonstrated are the result of decisions and actions of the characters. This is a useful way to look at stories but it is not the only way.

Why do the characters do anything at all? They respond to the story question. Otherwise there would be no story. So only characters that will respond to the question will do. Furthermore, the characters and the situation must be the sort that can credibly answer the story the way the storyteller wants. Therefore, we can look at the question and answer as the basis for stories.

What about moral? We can start there, too. Why is the storyteller attracted to a particular question and answer? What about the question and answer did the storyteller find meaningful? No story stands alone. Stories are always part of the larger picture. Otherwise we would not care. The moral connects the world of the story and the larger reality.

In creating a story, you can start anywhere. Stories have grown out of morals, questions, characters, situations, relationships, actions, objects, a line of dialogue, a feeling. Anything that can be found in a story has been used as a starting point. But what about that starting point made it appealing, mentally engaging enough to inspire a story?

Ultimately the impetus comes from moral, the need of the storyteller to raise moral questions, to provoke moral anxieties, and to be a source of moral direction for his audience.

The characters and their actions are all morally driven. What the characters do comes out of their moral packages, which suggest to them what is the right thing to do. What they do is also in service of the storyteller and what moral he wants to demonstrate.

Story Defined
A storyteller is a god. When he says “Once upon a time,” he is creating a world. That world has no past and no future outside the story. It is a simple world, contained within the story, with some embellishments added within the mind of each audience member. In a well told story, there is no extraneous information. Only that without which the story cannot be told will be contained in the story. This makes clear the intended moral demonstration by only including what matters in this particular case.

Each character represents a different set of moral positions, a unique moral package in some way relevant to the main question of the story. These moral packages collide with each other, the world, and themselves through conflict, the obstacles that constitute the plot. How well the characters deal with these obstructions we understand to be a passing of judgment on the validity of the moral packages they represent. In a well told story, a moral package will evolve as a result of the obstacles it encounters. In other words, characters learn from their experiences, yielding moral progression.

A story is a test of a moral package. How well do its morals stand up to the challenge of the main question? We want to know, and we also wonder how we would fare in similar circumstances.

We see stories everywhere, but not everything is a story. We need a definition of story, so we will know one when we see it. There are three necessary conditions for information to be a story. Together they are sufficient to define what is a story. First, there will be one or more characters. They may take the form of humans, animals, spiritual beings, inanimate objects, or something else, but they all will have some moral relation to ourselves. Second, the situation and/or the characters will be affected by one or more actions that have some relation to the characters’ moral packages. Remember that actions are not necessarily physical. Third, arising from the combination of character, action, and any setting that may be present, there will be one or more moral demonstrations.

Stories may be large and involved, as Moby Dick. They may also be small. You open the door to your house. That is a story. You are a character and put your moral package to the test by the actions you take to deal with the obstacle of the locked door. You successfully open the door and demonstrate and thus confirm your moral that a particular set of actions will open the door. If you are fumbling in the dark and try to open the door with the wrong key, the story gets more complex.

Examine your life in light of this definition and you will realize the universality of story.

With story thus defined, we see that what we think of as a single story is really a sequence of related stories. Each attempt by a character to overcome an obstacle involves action resulting in moral demonstration. A closer look reveals that any action is a sequence of smaller actions, each with its own moral demonstration, so that the more we subdivide action, the more stories we see. Thus the obstacle hierarchy is also a story hierarchy.

Conversely, every story is a limited view of reality. There is always a bigger picture and a bigger story of which the story at hand is only a part. Every story contains smaller stories and is part of larger stories. This is true at whatever scale we observe the situation. It is a dramatic parallel to fractal geometry.

Everywhere we look we see stories. We think the world is full of them. We are mistaken. There are no stories out there. Stories exist only in the mind. They are a creation of the mind.

The novel on the shelf does not contain a story. The book is nothing but a bound collection of pages marked with ink. If you can read, you have the ability to look at the ink marks in a way that releases your awareness of words that generate a sequence of thoughts and images in your mind that form a story with some similarity to that envisioned by the author who created that particular sequence of standardized ink marks. The book is just a way to transmit thoughts from the mind of the author to the mind of the reader.

Your life does not contain stories, either. For a story in life to exist outside the mind, there must be action by a character yielding a moral demonstration, all in the larger world. Plenty of action happens outside ourselves. If you drive your car to Dallas, you did not just imagine the trip; you and your car really went.

What about character? You are a character in the car trip story and you did drive the car. Yes, but no. You, a person, an agent of action, physically drove the car. You, a character in the trip to Dallas story, are a dramatic device in the organization of information that is the story, and that happens only in the mind. You or anyone else can never know all there is of you. The best that can be done is to mentally create a character that represents you with some degree of accuracy.

Moral demonstration is also confined to the mind. The interpretation of action to yield validation of statements about a larger reality can only exist within us, where in combination with our perception and interpretation of character and action we create stories.

We tell stories in person or in writing or other forms of expression, such as pictures and music. We also enact stories, so that we experience the story directly rather than an account of it. Movies and stage drama come to mind. These are all stories in which the answer to the main question is predetermined.

Sports as Story
Other stories do not have a predetermined answer. An example is a football game. It is a highly structured situation—football has definite rules. Yet the outcome is in doubt. The main question, “Who wins?” will be answered after sixty minutes of obstacles. The Baylor Bears meet the Texas A&M Aggies on the football field. Who is the protagonist and who is his enemy, the antagonist? Both teams will play offense, and both teams will play defense (not at the same time, though). Is the protagonist simply whichever team has the ball? No. Stories don’t work like that. We want to identify with one moral package, be that one character, or one allied group of characters. So we do. The teams are in a symmetrical situation. Each is trying to outscore the other under the same set of rules. Yet everyone seriously watching the game will make a choice. Some choose Baylor as the protagonist. We call them Baylor fans. Those that see Texas A&M as the protagonist are Aggie fans. The choice is made through some form of personal identification with the team and the moral package it represents. Perhaps the choice is made in sympathy with (or in opposition to) the choice of a friend. Perhaps you went to one of the schools. Perhaps a thousand other reasons. But if we believe in the game we make a choice. Otherwise, the game wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t be any fun. It wouldn’t be a satisfying story.

And just as a story demonstrates the validity of a moral package, a football game is seen as a test of moral superiority. The fans accept the demonstration on the playing field as validating the superiority of the moral package of one side versus that of the other. If Baylor beats the Aggies, Baylor fans will feel that they are superior to Aggie fans, and that Baylor has been proven to be a better school than Texas A&M. Meanwhile the Aggie fans feel let down by their team and talk a lot about next year. That a football game could prove anything other than who scored the most is rationally ridiculous but dramatically valid. If the crowd watched the game for what was actually happening on the field, the prevailing attitude might be one of intellectual curiosity. It is what the game symbolizes that makes the fan a fanatic.

Football is a particularly clear example of the hierarchy of story. The sport is an ongoing cyclic story, year after year, in modern America. Each year’s football season is a story within the larger whole, beginning with spring recruiting and training and climaxing in championship games the following winter. Within the season, each game is a story. Who will win? Within the game, each half is a story. Within the half, each possession is a story. Can the team score? Within that story is the obstacle of getting ten yards and a first down, which depends on trying to make a gain on each play. Within the play there are many smaller stories. Can a linebacker get to the quarterback before the wide receiver is in the clear? The offensive line is trying to give the linebacker plenty of obstacles for his story with the quarterback, and each block is a story in itself made up of smaller stories yet.

Politics as Story
Our presidential election campaigns are the enactment of story. Each candidate is trying to place himself as the protagonist in the public mind. We vote for whom we see as protagonist, the one we care about, the one we have chosen as central to the plot of the campaign story. Our candidate will face various obstacles—gathering support, fundraising, getting on the ballot, getting known, getting his message (indicative of his character’s moral package) out to the voters, the primary season, and the fall campaign leading up to the election. The country has largely lost interest in the details of the national conventions because they are no longer a significant obstacle in the story.

War as Story
War is also story. In the abstract, war is a process by which one group forcibly bends another to its will. But wars are never fought in the abstract. War wears a heavy coat of presumed virtue. Each army says “God is on our side.” Each claims to be fighting for peace and justice. Each side is totally right and the other is totally wrong. The story begins with a question, proceeds through various obstacles, and has a moral progression to a conclusion. The dominance gained through winning the fight is seen as sufficient proof of moral validity. We as a nation asked ourselves a lot of questions after we were defeated in Vietnam that did not get asked after we won against Nazi Germany.

War is an inherently crazy activity. Wrap enough moral demonstration around it and you can get people to believe it makes sense. In Vietnam, we were fighting “godless communism.” We wanted to demonstrate that God was on our side and that demoncracy was a better form of government. A moral goal is seen as a greater justification for the sacrifices of war than a practical goal.

How could you believe in a war without seeing it as a demonstration of morals we idealize?

Life as Story
We put human achievement into story form and see it in those terms. When we set a goal for ourselves, we have created a story. The central question is “Can I achieve this goal?” We then proceed to deal with the obstacles between ourselves and the goal. We see the goal as one demonstrating some position we value, some kind of moral advancement. This does not necessarily mean that we become more “virtuous” in the classical sense, more honest, kind, enlightened, thrifty, etc. We well may. But the goal will be to advance us on some scale which we value. It could be, for instance, a reversal of social dominance—to get the upper hand over a bully, or make the neighbors green with envy, or to convince a friend of our point of view. It could be to make a lot of money or learn calculus or lose fifteen pounds. It will be something to change the situation to be more as we think it should be, to bring forth our values, our priorities, our moral position into the world, as validated by moral demonstration.

The appropriate goal will be neither too hard nor too easy. Its difficulty lies in the obstacles between us and its achievement, the obstacles of the story. Obstacles that are too easy seem trivial, not a significant moral test and therefore not worth doing, for lack of story progression. Boredom results.

Obstacles may be too difficult to overcome; one can die trying. We have two words for people who are attracted to goals with such obstacles. People that do so in demonstration of morals we support we term heroic. The others we call foolish. But for most of us, if we understand the goals to be impossible (not available at any price) or too hard (not worth price charged), we give up rather than face continued counter-demonstration of our morals. Price is much more than money. Price consists of sacrifices in forward progression of life on some fronts to gain progress on others. Is the goal worth the price? Is the moral demonstration sufficiently relevant to our story?

It is a story. We take on a commitment to a goal. Normal life has been interrupted by a question that will be answered before we can return to normal farther down the line. Life won’t be the same normal, due to our experience with the goal and our actions toward it. We will deal with various obstacles along the way which are relevant to our moral progression toward the goal. The goal will in some way be reached or not, answering the original question. This is story all the way. An appropriate goal holds our interest best, because for us it is a better story.

We use story form because we are on familiar ground. It makes sense to us, we understand it, and we find it both engaging and ultimately satisfying.

We see the lives of others in terms of story. What is gossip but stories about other people? We are fascinated by the moral progressions of others, by their obstacles and how they cope. We compare our progress to theirs and learn from their experiences.

We also see our own lives in story format because we live as characters in a story. Every action we take is part of a moral progression. Every action we take, consciously, at least, has a moral quality. We do what at that moment, overall, seems like the right thing to do. The action seems right because it demonstrates a moral we believe to be true. We may have thoughts later that we knew it was the wrong thing to do. This is indicative of a split between what we think our moral priorities should be and what they actually are, or that some of our morals contradict each other.

Our need for moral progression forces our action throughout life. Our lives are a series of questions that challenge our moral package, which evolves as we deal with life. Story structure permeates our understanding of our own lives and how we relate to the world.

Story Logic
Reasoning has a strong base in story structure, but story logic is not the same as rational logic. Stories are about the consequences of actions taken by characters. These consequences are a demonstration of some larger moral point. For that demonstration to be significant, there must be an assumption of repeatability. That is, if action A precedes consequence B in the story, then we are led to believe that in similar circumstances action A can be relied upon to precede consequence B, that A causes B, and the moral point holds. Our need for story structure leads us to believe in repeatability and causality, even when true repeatability and causality may be absent. Superstition is made out of this.

Here is another way story logic differs from rational logic. Even though a story is arbitrary, we will accept a moral on the basis of a good moral demonstration. Why did the plot demonstrate the moral? Because the moral was part of the background reality of the story situation in the mind of the storyteller. We enter into circular reasoning, an error in rational logic, but common in story logic. The plot demonstrates the moral because the moral determines the plot. Each creates the other.

Similarly, if we have a moral we need to believe, we will seek out actions that we can interpret as its demonstration. We convince ourselves that the moral is true in all similar cases even as we ignore counter-demonstrations and contradictory interpretations. Thus our moral package is never an accurate picture of reality or even our experience but instead is biased toward making our world as we need it to be.

Proverbs are an example of our irrational use of story logic. A man trying to reach a goal causes some damage along the way. He answers objections to his methods with “In order to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.” That one-sentence story about omelette creation is told to give a moral demonstration that it is necessary and permissible to cause destruction on the way to a desirable end. The proverb is told to counter objections to the harm he has caused. Even though what the man has been doing has nothing to do with eggs or omelettes and the objections have merit, the man will very likely silence his critics through story logic rather than through any rational discussion of the real situation. Such is the power of moral demonstration.

Stories are about the actions of characters. Action arises from a moral position and has moral consequences. Why did the character do a particular deed?

On one level, the answer is because the storyteller needed that action to happen to make the moral demonstration. On another level, the action is the result of the character’s moral package being challenged by an obstacle.

If you take the religious position that all of reality is a story told by God in which we each play a part, then the answer to any question why becomes “because God said so.”

A different point of view, that of free will, sees us all as semi-independent sources of action. “Why did you do it and what does it mean?” becomes a question most of us can answer, but never completely, because unlike characters, our moral packages are vast, extending farther than we can know.

Real life is not straightforward, but we want to see it that way. We want to be clear about the moral ground from which action arises into the world and the moral consequences it leaves in its wake. Seeing people and other sources of action as characters helps us do that. Characters have limited moral packages. Simple moral packages mean there are fewer morals to consider. By seeing people as characters we can convince ourselves that reality is simpler than it actually is, allowing us to easily assume we understand the whole situation when in fact we do not.

What is the moral of rainfall? Weather is an extremely complex physical system with a great variety of causal factors producing wildly varying meteorological effects. You get rained on or you don’t. It is not clear just why we got the rain and you did not. Yet we say “This year God has blessed our crops with rain.” There you have it-an incredibly complicated system reduced to one action (by a character!) and an implied moral demonstration (the virtuous get the rain they need)—story structure.

We are biased towards perceiving reality in simple terms, in repeatable terms, and in moral terms. Stories deliver on all three counts. The edited world of stories clears away most of life’s complexity leaving an easily grasped situation. Simple situations let us give life’s questions the short answers we crave. We want to apply those answers over and over as dependable explanations of reality, which is what we believe morals to be, and stories give us access to morals. To help us extrapolate known morals to new situations, we sort and classify everything into categories with common attributes as we search for patterns and rhythms. If we see a parallel between the new situation and a familiar one explained by our moral package, we like to assume understanding of the new by expanding the scope of a known moral to include it. The parallel is often not causally related to the moral, but even so, we typically need several counter-demonstrations of our old moral before we are ready to observe the situation carefully and accept the new moral it demonstrates.

We will further explore the logic of stories in the Mythic Logic chapter.

Story structure helps us but also limits us. What does it take for us to see a man for who he is rather than the character he represents? What actions might we take if we did them for their own sake rather than also for how they confirm our moral package?

Nevertheless, our use of story serves us well. We gain a lot of knowledge through stories. But is that the only way to think? What is it to think in a non-story way?

Beyond Story?
To do that would require an awareness without character, action, and moral demonstration. Pure perception will be aware of action, but not character or moral demonstration. But is that thinking? Perception lets you be aware you see something, but once you identify that something as, say, a chair, moral implications begin to arise, and the morals symbolized by the chair start turning it into an allegorical character whose presence causes action through the changes arising in your mind when you see it. Our minds create characters for our stories at every opportunity.

What about pure logic, as in mathematics? Let’s start with a simple example—two plus three equals five. There is action—two and three are combined. Is there moral demonstration? Yes, there is. With a few exceptions, the physical world obeys the laws of arithmetic. Add two apples and three oranges and you get five pieces of fruit every time.

How about character? Can numbers be characters? Inherently they are not. But we can turn anything into a character. Have you ever begged your computer program not to crash? The program cannot make the choice to crash or not, nor can it hear us beg, but we act as if it can. Similarly, any time we do arithmetic we have some anxiety about whether or not the numbers will behave. The worse our arithmetic skills, the more numbers seem to take on a life of their own, giving us different answers every time, being to us more character-like.

But two plus three equals five is easy for most of us. We can dependably get it right every time. The more routine the arithmetic is, the less the numbers are characters and the less the arithmetic is an obstacle. But it is still a story. Numbers are deeply symbolic. Like almost everything else, numbers carry emotional implications for us, so our attention on them causes emotional moral demonstrations that affect our feelings and thus our relation to reality. One immediately suggests unity. Two makes us think of opposing forces of duality—day and night, good and evil, yin and yang. Three implies Trinity. Four reminds us of stability, of north, south, east, and west, of the square and how that shape organizes space, and so on for other numbers, each with its moral package. We turn numbers into characters. Beyond that, you are part of the process. Numbers do not add themselves, and you are definitely a character.

Similarly, if you purely perceive with no further thought, you might not be thinking a story, but your act of perceiving is a story, so any self-awareness at that point puts your mind back into story.

Meditation puts the story on hold for a while, but to consciously meditate is a story in itself. Perhaps we escape from story when we drop into a meditative state without realizing it. What about when we are completely at one with what we are doing, so the action is just the action, with no larger meaning? Is there no moral demonstration?

Whatever you are doing, you are making some kind of choices arising from the interaction of your moral package and the situation. You may not be aware of the decision process and it is not necessarily verbal. It could be kinesthetic visual, as in hand-eye coordination. But whatever you are doing, unless it is pure reflex, as your brain makes the decisions that guide your actions, it is in a story, for as your conception of reality reflected in your moral package guides what you do, your actions are moral demonstrations.

It looks like it is essentially impossible for us to think outside of story. Therefore, we can conclude that stories are the basic framework our minds use to organize and process information.

Why Stories Matter
Our two greatest survival skills are our superior mental abilities and our faculty for uniting into an effective social group and coordinating our individual actions for the benefit of the group. A lone, ignorant human has poor odds of survival.

Stories are how we structure and make sense of information. The assumptions of causality and repeatability behind our perception of moral demonstration allow us to learn from the past. Our ability to use those morals to imagine new stories leads us to invent new skills, strategies, and tools that solve problems, overcoming obstacles to our survival.

Stories are also the basis for social organization and the common knowledge, agreements, and beliefs that underpin human culture. The group’s existence is the playing out of a story in which we each are a character and in which we all are supposed to act to demonstrate the morals of the group. We need others so we may survive and story lets us know what to do with each other to make that happen. Stories are essential to the continued existence of the human race. Without stories, we would not be here.

We will always be in a story, but we need not be constrained by the apparent limits of the particular story we are in. Our natural tendency is to flow along with the ongoing plot but we have the power to change its direction at any time.

This concludes our discussion of the inner workings of stories. You should now be able to look at a story, take it apart, see how each piece works, and how they all work together. If you have difficulty, you need practice. Reread these last two chapters while keeping in mind a story, any story, that you know well. As each story element is mentioned in the text, find one or more examples of it in your story. Repeat as necessary with different stories until you can do this quickly and easily. Turn to Appendix D, Paths to Discovery, and use the entries for the first three chapters to help you along.

Now when you go to a movie or read a book, you can let yourself be swept along with the story or you can sit there and take it apart and watch the storyteller’s craft in action. Later, when you discuss the story with your friends, you can tell them why the good parts worked and the bad parts did not and what should have been done to fix them.

Stories are basic to human experience. They shape our entertainment, our knowledge, our culture, our meaning, our thoughts and our lives. Now that you know stories from the outside in, we shall explore how we live in story structure.