CHAPTER 18
CHANGE THE STORY, CHANGE THE FUTURE

Whoever tells the stories of a nation need not care who makes its laws.

ATTRIBUTED TO ANDREW FLETCHER, SCOTTISH PATRIOT (1653–1716)

The greatest barrier to the economic transformation we seek is not corrupt politicians, greedy CEOs, or even the destructive institutions discussed in previous pages. It is a flawed cultural story that misinforms our collective understanding of our nature and possibilities as humans and of the world we inhabit.

STORY POWER

Some years ago the Filipino activist-philosopher Nicanor Perlas shared with me the insight that each of the three primary institutional sectors has a distinctive competence in institutional power. The distinctive power of government is coercion. The distinctive power of business is financial. The distinctive power of civil society is cultural.

As a civil society, we lack the police and military powers of the state and the financial power of business. Our advantage lies with the power of authentic moral values communicated through authentic cultural stories.

This simple frame helped me see the extent to which the global citizen resistance against the use of multilateral trade agreements centered on a contest between competing stories. According to the story fabricated and promoted as the prevailing conventional wisdom by Wall Street interests:

The elimination of barriers to the free flow of trade and investment through multilateral trade agreements is bringing universal peace, prosperity, and democracy to all the world’s peoples and nations.

Wow, that sounds wonderful. But something was amiss on the ground.

An initially small group of citizen activists from around the world began meeting to share their experiences with the actual outcomes of these agreements. They found a consistent pattern of results wholly contrary to the corporate story. They organized to break the silence and spread the real story:

Multilateral trade agreements are freeing global corporations from restrictions on their ability to exploit workers, ignore community interests, circumvent democracy, pollute the environment, and expropriate the resources of poor countries, with devastating consequences for people, community, democracy, and nature.

The civil society story trumped the corporate story, even though corporations controlled the money and the media, for the simple reason that it was true. This awareness changed the political context of corporate-sponsored international trade negotiations and brought them to a near standstill.

That insight regarding the pivotal nature of framing stories led me to see the much larger story at stake in the struggle between global people power and the axis of Wall Street’s financial power and Washington’s coercive power. Here is one version:

Competition is a law of nature, the foundation of all progress, and has been the key to human success since the beginning of time. Consistent with nature’s way, it is our human nature to be violent, greedy, and individualistic competitors. It is all to the good, and there is no alternative.

The invisible hand of the unregulated free market channels our competitive energy in ways that increase efficiency, drive innovation, and optimize the allocation of resources to maximize society’s wealth and thereby the well-being of all. We have two civic duties: to consume and to seek the maximum financial return on our investment as our contribution to maximizing the growth of the economy, which is the measure of our progress and prosperity as a society.

Beware of socialists who want to strip away your freedoms and kill the engine of prosperity by taxing your income and requiring corporations to sacrifice a margin of their profit in the name of some supposed higher public purpose, such as a more equitable distribution of wealth. The only public interest is the aggregation of private interests. You are the best judge of how to spend your money to your greatest private benefit.

Far from being a problem, inequality is essential to social order and prosperity. It creates wealthy individuals who are able to bear the risks of investing in the creation of jobs and a working class motivated by economic insecurity to work hard at those jobs at a globally competitive wage — thus creating the rising tide that lifts all boats. If a few get rich, instead of condemning them out of envy, celebrate their good fortune, because as the rich get richer, wealth trickles down and we all get richer. In America, anyone can succeed who applies himself. Failure is a sign of incompetence or a flawed character.

We hear elements of this story so often they run through our heads as a constant refrain telling us that the world of our dreams isn’t possible.

The genius of this debilitating story is that it becomes self-affirming. Our media bombard us with stories of violence, greed, and individualism promoted and rewarded by corrupt economic institutions. These institutions appoint power-driven personalities to their highest positions and then celebrate their political and financial success, promoting them to society as role models. When this perversion goes unchallenged in public forums, most people simply accept at face value the message that such individuals do indeed represent the best of our human nature, instead of recognizing them as pathological exceptions to the healthier human norm.

We humans can be conditioned to believe some weird things. To understand how this happens and to resist such manipulation, it is helpful to understand the nature and role of culture in social organization.

CULTURE AS A FOUNDATION OF COMMUNITY LIFE AND SOCIAL CONTROL

Culture is the system of beliefs, values, perceptions, and social relations that encodes the shared learning of a particular human group that is essential to its orderly social function. As a culture’s defining stories change through shared learning, its collective behavior realigns accordingly — the subject of the next chapter.

The processes by which culture shapes our perceptions and behavior occur mostly at an unconscious level. It rarely occurs to us to ask whether the reality we perceive through the lens of the culture within which we grow up is the “true” reality. We take for granted that it is.

For five thousand years, successful imperial rulers have recognized that their power rests on their ability to fabricate cultural stories that evoke fear, alienation, learned helplessness, and the individual’s dependence on the imperial power of a strong ruler.

The falsified culture induces a kind of cultural trance in which we are conditioned to deny our inherent human capacity for responsible self-direction, sharing, and cooperation that is an essential foundation of democratic self-rule. The falsified stories create an emotional bond between the ruled and their rulers while alienating the ruled from one another and the living Earth, eroding relations of mutual self-help, and reducing the ruled to a state of resigned dependence.

Corporate advertisers and public relations propagandists have mastered and professionalized the arts of such cultural manipulation, particularly through corporate-controlled mass media. They would have us base our individual identity on the corporate logos we wear, the branded products we consume, the corporation for which we work, and the Wall Street–funded political party to which we belong.

Awakening Cultural Consciousness

Cultural manipulation becomes less effective as an instrument of social control as more of us become familiar with cultures distinctly different from our own. Such experiences awake our consciousness to the reality that culture is a social construct subject to choice and falsification.

In the United States, the process of awakening received a significant boost from the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s as millions of people awakened to the reality that relations between races are defined by cultural codes that have little to do with reality.

After people learned to recognize the difference between reality and an unexamined belief system in reference to race relations, it became easier to see similar distortions in the cultural codes that defined the relations between men and women, people and the environment, heterosexuals and homosexuals, and people and corporations.¹ The civil rights movement thus prepared the way for the social movements that followed.

A COUNCIL OF STORYTELLERS

One of the most important contributions one can make to movement building is to organize forums in which small groups of people regularly gather to share their stories and build the relationships of mutual trust and understanding that make effective teamwork possible even in times of extreme stress.

Much of my appreciation for the power of such spaces comes from my participation in the formation and early work of the International Forum on Globalization. The IFG grew out of a meeting in 1994 of a few dozen of the world’s most dedicated activists engaged in one way or another with what Wall Street interests were calling “globalization.”

We came from many different countries with widely different experiences, talents, and takes on what globalization meant. Through the sharing of our respective experiences and insights, we were able to discern the big-picture story of what the globalization that Wall Street corporations had in mind was really about, and we crafted a common language for communicating it beyond our circle.

Globally, a rapid increase in international travel, exchange, and communication has exposed millions of people to sometimes unsettling, usually enriching encounters with cultures that initially seem exotic and perhaps uncomfortable but quickly come to seem normal and natural.

That experience has enabled many of us to see our own culture and the larger world in a new light. The experience of cultural awakening has become a contagious, liberating process on a global scale that involves hundreds of millions of people and transcends the barriers of race, class, and religion.

Through our sharing, we developed genuine affection for one another and came to know, respect, and trust our differences, which allowed us to work in common cause across great geographic distances with brief e-mails as our only form of communication between face-to-face meetings.

Sometimes we acted as a group to hold teach-ins, issue joint statements, or coauthor papers and books. Smaller clusters shared resources to advance particular campaigns. Mostly we worked with and through our respective back-home constituencies, communicating our particular take on the big-picture story in meetings and through public presentations, publications, and media interviews.

Individual seeds of a new understanding were planted in many places. They germinated, took root, and grew to produce new seeds that multiplied with extraordinary speed. Within a few years, a powerful global social force was unleashed in an effective challenge to one of Wall Street’s most destructive agendas.

The awakened consciousness is relatively immune to the distorted cultural conditioning promoted by corporate media, advertising, and political demagogues. For those who share this experience, racism, sexism, homophobia, and consumerism are more easily seen for what they are — a justification for domination, exploitation, and violence against life.

As the awakening spreads, so too does the potential for rapid social learning based on the conscious examination and revision of prevailing cultural stories.

Story Power Trumps the Power of Guns and Money

Just as fabricated stories are an instrument of social control, so authentic stories are an instrument of liberation. As the fabricated story that there is no alternative to the capitalist system is replaced by the New Economy story that it is possible to create a world of strong communities and living economies, people begin organizing to make the new story a reality in the places where they live.

Corporations command the power of money. Governments command the coercive power of the police and military. The power of civil society is the power of authentic values and aspirations communicated through stories of possibility.

At first blush, pitting mere stories against the financial power of Wall Street’s modern robber barons and the police and military power of the state would seem to be the fantasy of would-be martyrs. It is not, however, so naive as it might at first sound.

Despite appearances, civil society holds the upper hand against Empire. The power of authentic stories ultimately trumps all other forms of power, because these other forms of power depend on the stories that lend them a patina of legitimacy. Unlike the fabricated stories of Empire, the stories of authentic values and lessons of authentic cultures resonate with what we know in our being to be true.

The New Economy story that we humans are capable of creating a vibrant, peaceful, cooperative world bursting with life resonates deep within most people. Once that connection is made, the trance is broken and we are free to find a path to reclaim control of our lives and get on with living a beautiful world into being.

HOW STORIES CHANGE

Every great social movement begins with a set of ideas validated, internalized, and then shared and amplified through media, grassroots organizations, and thousands, even millions, of conversations. Those for whom a truth strikes a resonant chord, and who hear it acknowledged by others, share it with their own circles. The new story spreads out in ever-widening circles that connect and intermingle. A story of unrealized possibility gradually replaces the falsified story that there is no alternative to the status quo. The prevailing culture begins to shift, and the collective behavior of the society changes with it.

For the civil rights and women’s movements, the old story said: Women and people of color have no soul. Less than human, they have no natural rights. They can find fulfillment only through faithful service to their white male masters. For the environmental movement, one version of the old story said: Nature was given to man by God to do with as man pleases. A secular version says: Nature has no value beyond its market price and is properly used for whatever purpose generates the greatest financial return.

A profound cultural shift took root in the decades between 1950 and 1980. It was an epic period of cultural awakening and social restructuring that began with the civil rights movement, which was born in part from the words and writing of W. E. B. DuBois, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and was carried forward by others such as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Communicated through books, periodicals, and speeches, the ideas of these and other leaders inspired and shaped countless conversations, particularly in black churches, about race and the possibilities of integration based on a full recognition of the inherent humanity of people of all races.

The vision of possibility gave birth to social and political upheavals in the American South during the 1950s and ’60s. Thinkers, writers, and activists who embraced the idea of integration engaged in verbal combat with those who defended the status quo as legitimated by the old story. As the story of possibility gained currency, proponents engaged in non-violent civil disobedience in the form of sit-ins in segregated facilities, which began to create a new reality and set the stage for political demands to replace laws that institutionalized the old story with laws that institutionalized the new.

In 1963, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, calling attention to a vague dissatisfaction plaguing housewives. It touched a deep chord and became the focus of thousands of living room conversations in which women shared their own stories. These women had been raised on the story that the key to a woman’s happiness was to find the right man, marry him, and devote her life to his service.

Prior to these conversations, the woman whose experience failed to conform to the prevailing cultural story was culturally conditioned to believe the failure was due to a flaw in her character that she should strive to correct. As women gathered and shared their personal stories, they affirmed the idea put forward by Friedan that the story was working for few, if any, women. This meant that the flaw lay not with themselves but with a false story. Those whom these discussions initially liberated lent their voices to a growing chorus telling a story of women’s rights and abilities. Millions of women were soon spreading a new gender story that has unleashed the feminine as a powerful force for global transformation.

Many trace the origin of the modern environmental movement to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962. It, too, stimulated countless conversations about the human relationship to nature that began to challenge the old stories and build the foundation of a new social consensus. The challenge spread through media and academic programs.

The modern voluntary simplicity movement, which presents a frontal challenge to the story that material consumption is the key to personal happiness, represents an important thread in the emerging New Economy movement. It received early impetus from Duane Elgin’s influential book, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, first published in 1981. His ideas struck an immediate chord with people who shared their stories in countless conversations that affirmed the ancient religious teaching that we truly come alive as we moderate material consumption and gain control of our time to devote more of our lives to the things that bring true happiness, like nurturing the relationships of caring families and communities. Millions of people were liberated from the trance induced by corporate advertisers and were inspired to restructure their lives.

Our New Economy messages and conversations challenge a number of defining cultural stories, including those that would have us believe:

• The myth that it is our inherent human nature to be individualistic, materialistic, greedy, competitive, and violent

• The illusion that we live on an open frontier of endless resources that are free for the taking to grow the economy

• The belief that money is wealth, money defines the value of life, making money is our highest human calling, and everything related to money is best left to the market

Previous chapters have pointed out that in fact:

• The human brain is wired to support creativity, cooperation, and life in community. That is our nature. The prevalence of materialism, greed, competition, and violence common in modern society is a symptom of severe cultural and institutional dysfunction

• We humans inhabit a wondrous but finite living planet with a self-organizing biosphere to which we must adapt our lives and economies

• Money, unrelated to the creation of anything of real value, is phantom wealth, an accounting chit that has no intrinsic value, indeed no existence outside the human mind. In a mature belief system, life is the true measure of value and money’s only legitimate use is in life’s service. An obsession with making money is a sign of psychological and social dysfunction. With proper rules, the market is an essential and beneficial partner of an active civil society and democratic government — each in its appropriate role. Absent proper rules it becomes a capitalist weapon of mass destruction

The human brain processes the massive flow of data from our senses through an interpretive lens by which it distinguishes the significant from the inconsequential and draws out its meaning, which in turn shapes our behavioral response. “This plant will kill you. That one is food.”

The lens reflects both the individual learning of personal experience and the shared learning of the tribe communicated through its framing cultural stories. These stories, which the tribe’s storytellers pass from generation to generation, shape our collective identity and allow us to act coherently as a group in the interest of all. “This is who we are, what we value, and how we behave.”

The work of professional propagandists and advertisers is to use the mass media to displace the tribe’s authentic cultural stories with fabricated stories that support behavior that serves the interests of their clients, whether it be to vote for a particular political candidate or to buy a particular product. They succeed by playing to raw, animal emotions of fear and anger that activate our brain’s primitive reptilian core, unhampered by the conscious mind. This is the source of the demagogue’s power.

The power of civil society is the power of authentic stories that appeal to the higher-order emotions of love and caring. These stories awaken our capacity for conscious, reasoned choice and are the basis of our human capacity for responsibility and cooperation in the interest of the whole. Authentic stories liberate the human consciousness, build immunity to cultural manipulation, and give us the courage and insight to see the future that is the objective of our voyage in search of ecological balance, equitable distribution, and living democracy.