The Creature that Tells Stories

Language has made our species strange. So long as you accept as fact that mankind is somehow divinely created (and we all know atheists who think as much), our ability to tell stories doesn't seem so strange. When you think about evolution though; holy cow that's weird. Here we've managed to become capable of creating a complex language; not just body signals or the ability to emote, but a way to convey abstract ideas. Now, why would we really need those? Well, I don't know; you can't exactly explain everything away with evolution, ya know, and who'd want to anyway?

The stories we tell aren't just communications..."I found food over by that river, but watch out for the piranha"...we convey more than just facts, we convey value.

A pack of wolves, a group of chimps, what's important to them? Who's the boss. Who has the power. That's what. Now, if I'm a bottom rung chimp, and I find that I don't get the food that's coming to me, because the head chimp is a bully, hardly a leader at all, maybe I will get so pissed off that I'll go ape shit on him. But probably not; probably I'll just yield because that's the way we're built. He's at the top; he calls the shots.

Really, that's not so different than a lot of people, I think. They seem to relish in giving more and more to people who already have power over them. Don't ask me why, because it seems to fly in the face of story telling, because the root of every good story is an appeal to justice. And don't we spend an inordinate amount of time discussing justice? Everything we talk about has to do with whether I got what is coming to me or whether some undeserving jackass is causing me grief. No matter how banal it might be, that's the story we tell.

How about this. Those chimps and wolves relationships are all about power relations. Well, our stories allow us to lie about power relations...to ourselves. Why be racist? What does that do for us? Its a lie, for power. Even if my life is crap, I can lie to myself; I'm not inferior (even if I am) because I belong to a superior race. Why do you think the Nazis were successful?