3.2 Answering tribal story with personal story
Since we first became human…
Stories have been a necessary part of our tribal life.
Each tribe…
Expressed its unique identity through the stories it told and retold.
Including stories about…
The nature and personality of its god, who chose this one tribe among all others to be his favorite.
Ancestors who were larger than life and who serve as role models in the present.
And the everyday behavior expected of the ideal tribe member.
Each tribe…
Perpetuated its identity through the stories it told to its children.
Except tribes didn’t just tell stories…
They lived inside those stories.
And…
Incarnated them in daily life.
They didn’t teach the young how to be a member of the tribe by giving them a list of traits to memorize.
They passed their culture down through the generations by…
Direct transmission.
They wanted young people to embody their tribal identity.
They wanted to make sure that every child would grow up to give his or her life over to the welfare of the tribe.
So tribal stories were not just entertainments told around the campfire at the end of a long day…
They were survival stories.
They taught everyone how to make togetherness work. They unified the tribe, and fiercely so, in its competition against every other tribe.
On YouTube you can find hundreds of speakers singing the praises of story. There are TED talks explaining how stories teach us empathy, and seminars on using storytelling in the classroom to deepen learning, and workshops on how to tell your own story in such a way that people feel more compassion for you.
But this deluge is one-sided and the romanticization of story is misleading. Yes, there are many happy benefits of story. But tribal stories are a special case, because…
Tribal stories are the nuclear power of the human psyche.
And…
This makes them dangerous.
My guess is that our ancestors started off telling small snatches of stories, little incidents, where two or three things happen in sequence. But then they learned over time how to tell long–form tales, taking listeners from inciting incidents through a series of conflicts into a satisfying resolution.
They learned how to work with character arc…
“He was a rowdy and unruly child, but we took him in hand and over time he became one of our best hunters and a credit to the tribe.”
These stories, recounting the lives of real people, taught moral lessons and thus improved the quality and resilience of relationships within the tribe.
At some point, though, we humans took the fateful step beyond talking about real people and actual events, and…
We began to make stuff up.
That’s when we became a fictional species, or rather the fictional species, since we’re the only one.
Inventing stories about made–up people, helped us imagine our way into the hearts and minds of others. And as we deepened our empathy for fictional people, we deepened our ability to care about real people. This made our relationships richer and more robust. It made us more committed to each other. And it strengthened our group when we had to fight our enemies.
Tribal stories taught us empathy, but they also taught us that…
Empathy could be dangerous.
What if we tuned in too deeply to the needs, wants, feelings, and fears of people from other tribes? What if we saw ourselves reflected in them? What if we wanted to include those folks in our circle of care and concern?
That could put our tribal way of life in jeopardy, because tribalism demands fierce boundaries. We have to be prepared to kill outsiders as necessary. If we dissolved our tribal boundaries and turned ourselves into a homogenous global mass of trans–tribal humans, we’d have no idea how to make such a society work, so we’d be putting ourselves out of business.
From evolution’s point of view, the only value of empathic spillover into other tribes is for times when we want to build an alliance with another tribe to benefit ourselves. But even then we can’t allow ourselves to get too free with our empathy, because we need to be able to rein it in and switch back to attack mode in an instant when the alliance no longer works for us.
So…
As we ramped up empathy, we had to ramp up antipathy.
To defend our boundaries, as we increased our powers of internal togetherness, we also had to increase our powers of external againstness in equal measure. We used our fictional ability not just to pull our own tribe together, but to set it apart from other tribes.
The stories we told about ourselves and then about those other tribes became…
Our social reality.
And as a social–group species we lived inside that reality.
But still there was…
Real reality.
It didn’t go away.
So now we lived in two realities at once. For survival’s sake…
We needed them to work in partnership.
It didn’t matter if our origin stories were fantastical or if the gods we made up were bizarre, it didn’t matter how crazy we got around the edges, as long as we could manage to stay in touch with real reality enough to practice our core discipline of survival, we were okay.
But what if a tribe allowed fiction to invade that core and corrupt it? What if people got the idea into their heads that nutritious roots and berries were invented by the devil and should be shunned, or that poisonous plants had magic powers and were good to eat? That tribe would be gone overnight.
Or what if elders started teaching children unreal lessons? What if they threw away their fire-starting tools, their bows and drills, and taught that fire could only be started with a mystical incantation and only when the gods were happy with us? That tribe would regress into the rigors of a pre–fire life. And once you deleted such hard–won knowledge from group memory, it might take generations for the group to rediscover how to manage fire, if they ever did.
As we got good at establishing our own identity in contrast to the identities of other tribes, we turned that contrast into a value judgment…
Now we weren’t just different from those outsiders, we were better.
And…
We turned us into good people and them into bad people.
Even though in reality we were all just basic humans running on the same operating system.
But when we imagined that we were better than everyone else, and told stories to that effect, we felt more deserving, which gave us a big ego boost and made us feel more motivated to fight for our tribe.
Edward Evans–Pritchard, a British anthropologist, described this dynamic in a comment he made about the Nuer people he lived with in the southern part of Sudan in 1930…
“That each Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbor is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which indeed they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society but only equals who consider themselves God’s noblest creation. Their respect for one another contrasts with their contempt for all other peoples.”
From value judgments, we went on to take the next big step in the arms race of tribal stories. We invented sacredness…
We decided we weren’t just better, we were holy.
We weren’t just good people, we were demigods. Our enemies weren’t just bad people, they were demons.
And just that quickly we opened the door to unrestrained slaughter.
We were now prepared to go nuclear on other tribes, because if our enemies were less than us, if they were actually less than human, and worse, if they were dangerously demonic, that made them an existential threat, and so if we engaged in no–limit violence against them, even pre–emptively, that counted as righteous action.
And the consequence was terrible, because in the very moment we turned our enemies into imagined demons…
We turned ourselves demonic for real.
As bloody as our tribal way of life has been, if we focus only on the quantitative bottom line, namely the total number of humans populating the earth, it’s been a grand success.
But not only have our numbers increased, they’ve mushroomed out of control, changing the rules of the game we’re in. Actually reversing the rules.
What we’ve done in the past is exactly the wrong thing to do going forward. From now on…
We need to identify with our species first, not our tribe.
We need to be trans–tribal. That’s what we need, but what have we got?
Paranoia.
If we believe that we can only really trust the people in our own tribe, this means…
Every other person in every other tribe is to be feared.
That was bad enough in our hunter–gatherer days when our worlds were smaller and we were only in contact with a limited number of tribes. But now we’re in contact with a global population of billions.
If, apart from our own group, however we define that, everybody else on the face of the earth is our enemy, either currently or potentially in the future, that’s a whole hell of a lot of people.
And…
If enemies and potential enemies make up the great, great majority of our species, why would we fight to save it?
We need to flip our script and take a revolutionary leap forward and become species-oriented. But instead, what’s the strategy we’re following?
Regression.
When we feel threatened, our first impulse is to retreat even deeper into our tribal fiction, because…
It feels like security, it feels like home.
The idea of a trans–tribal society is a pale, intellectual vision, while tribalism is a vivid, visceral compulsion rooted deep in our genes. Which means…
We’ll never fight for our species in the same fiercely instinctive way we fight for our tribes.
And regression answers the puzzle of why large numbers of people are able to vote against their own best interests, and eagerly so. And why they’ll stick with a political leader who pushes policies that make them poorer and make their lives harder. And why they remain desperately loyal to leaders who hurt them. It’s not stupidity. There’s a simple rule at play…
When you get scared, go more tribal.
Obey the ancient drive to belong no matter what you have to sacrifice to do that.
So we’re set up for defeat. And by what?
A paradox.
Belonging to our tribe is more important to us than survival, because for most of our history…
Tribal belonging has been the first requirement for survival.
What feels best to us is now what’s worst for us. If we indulge ourselves in unrestrained tribalism, which is built into our DNA, and which has been the key to our survival, our species will die—and every last one of our tribes with it.
The pain of facing our impending extinction is too much for most people, so it’s no wonder our mass societies are slipping their moorings from real reality to an astonishing degree. Our tribal psyches, despite the hopeful brilliance of our big brains, are quite capable of trapping us inside a dumbed–down, dangerously explosive, self–defeating fiction.
Our tribal psyches are capable of walling us off from the truth, and doing so with the kind of denial that’s so adamantine it can withstand pretty much any attempt by anybody to break through.
Maybe it feels like we’ve only recently made a sudden shift into a post–fact, truth–denying, delusional era, but…
Our tribes have been living inside fictions for millennia.
And it’s long been the case in human society that…
A lie counts as the truth if we need it to make our tribal story work.
It doesn’t matter if we know we’re telling ourselves a lie. It doesn’t matter if our whole story is a lie. It doesn’t matter if that story is self–destructive. If we believe we need it, if we believe it to be our salvation, we’ll grab it and hold onto it, ardently, doggedly, grimly, until it kills us.
And so it’s come to this: Our tribal stories now have the power to incinerate our species…
A species we all belong to but have never really bonded with.
The history of tribal stories is a depressing tale. And once I understood it, all I could say is…
I want out!
Out of the tribal trap.
I needed some way to respond.
What about obdurate denial? Maybe I should just forget everything I’d learned about the evolution of our tribal way of life. Blank it out and think about other things instead.
Except…
I couldn’t unsee what I had seen.
The history of tribal stories was burnt into my brain. I couldn’t go back to unconsciousness.
What about giving myself pep talks? Like…
It’s not really as bad as I imagine. Just have faith. Things will get better somehow.
Except I didn’t trust pep.
What about how–tos? For every problem, there are dozens of gurus with their proprietary solutions. Just sign up for one of their programs and your worries will be taken care of. Except none of those programs are a match for the bludgeoning power of hard–core tribal stories.
Then I realized there was one other possibility…
Answer story with story.
Which means…
Answer tribal story with personal story.
Responding to force with force.
I decided I needed to make my personal story, the story of upgrading love, as powerful as I could possibly make it. So I called on core story principles, because…
Story has a passion to it that how-tos just don’t.
And it’s got creativity. And a depth of moral imagination.
As part of our journey to upgrade love, we get to become…
Story artists.
And then instead of living a how-to life, we get to live…
A story life.
A story of our own making. Which is way more challenging than sticking to how–tos, but if you ask me, way more fun.
There are writers who will tell you that when they create stories they’re…
Using words to say more than words can say.
They’re creating a whole that is more than the sum of the parts. A whole that transcends the parts.
Whenever people asked Flannery O’Connor to tell them the theme of one of her stories, she’d say…
The theme of the story is every single word in the story.
And this makes sense because why go to all the trouble to write a story if you could say the same thing in a simple sentence? The best stories are designed to take us deep into experience, to take us on an emotional ride, not just to impart an intellectual insight.
We say that poetry is different than prose. Technically stories are classified as prose, but I like to think of them as a category like poetry. Because they have the power of transcendence. They touch us so much more deeply than a prosaic statement, especially when that statement is filled with abstract nouns and a dispassionate conclusion. Even if the conclusion, the insight purveyed, might be useful.
The story of an upgrade life is…
A whole that’s more than the sum of the incidents of that life.
Every event, every mood, every nuance contributes to the bigger meaning that sustains us.
There are core principles of storytelling which have held true generation after generation. There’s remarkable agreement about these principles among a wide variety of screenwriters and novelists, and the people who teach those skills. Especially when it comes to stories that challenge the status quo.
And we who are upgrading love and therefore, along with it, the human story, get to adopt these principles and customize them so we can use them for our purpose.
And we upgraders have some advantages that come with our mission, as you can see in these five core principles…
1. You need a proactive protagonist.
A passive hero is no hero at all. A protagonist who’s unhappy, but does nothing about it, doesn’t make for an engaging story. Nobody wants to see that.
A protagonist who’s unhappy and does everything in his power to make things better but in the end fails, still makes for a good story. That’s what we call a tragedy. And well written tragedies are emotionally satisfying.
When it comes to us upgraders, we’ve got this principle handled, because we’re nothing if not proactive….
We feel for ourselves, then fight for ourselves.
We’re not just saying no to our tribal past, we’re saying yes to something new: upgraded love. And…
We’re putting our lives into this yes.
We want a better kind of love and we want it badly and we’re not going to let anything stop us from going after it. And this makes us interesting.
The most common question aspiring writers ask experienced authors is, “Where do you get your ideas?” So where do we upgraders get our ideas? We have a serious advantage here. To explain, let me say something about backstory.
Most writing teachers say it’s a good idea to write out the backstory for your protagonist so you can know as much as possible about what happened in her life before the story you’re writing actually starts. They advise that you figure out all the demographic details like age, race, religion. And physical characteristics, like height and weight. And psychological make up, like introversion or extraversion.
But there are some teachers, a minority, who recommend doing backstory in a different way—by using the power of story. Instead of listing cold facts about the character, imagine stories about their earlier life to create a deeper relationship between you and your character, and to discover nuances and flavors and dimensions that plain facts won’t give you.
So for example…
You might write out the story of your character’s first love. Or an interaction with her father that captures their relationship. Or a typical day in high school. Or who she had for friends and what they did together. Or who she wished she had for friends. Or what kind of trouble she got into when she got into trouble. Or her biggest disappointment. Or her happiest surprise.
Where do we upgraders get our ideas for our life stories? That’s easy, because we’ve got something better than ideas. And we don’t have to invent stuff because…
We’ve got our fight stories.
Our upgrade life emerges from those events—our deep well—which makes our life story deeply personal. And takes us out of the tribal realm.
2. You need a determined, sustaining, steadfast desire.
A desire which has a do–or–die quality to it keeps your protagonist proactive even when the odds are against him and there’s every reason for him to give up.
We upgraders, once we begin to experience the blessings of our mission become committed. Our self–love deepens, our relationships deepen, and we’re not going to give this up for anything, not anything at all. We don’t care what odds we have to face. This mission is us. We can’t be ourselves without it. Talk about desire. This is just the best.
3. You need stakes that matter.
We could write a story where the protagonist decides he wants pistachio ice cream for dessert, and has to fight traffic for twenty minutes to get to the store and back with his frozen quart of yum.
And maybe you’ve lived a story like this and it mattered to you in the moment, but it’s not going to matter to the rest of us. And Hollywood would never consider this idea for a two–hour movie.
A story, especially if it’s about something small, has to matter, first to your protagonist, and then to your audience.
So let’s make an amendment…
Say your protagonist suddenly wanted pistachio ice cream because it reminded him of a day when his family was happy, the day before his father died and his family began falling apart. Now, that seemingly small desire has big meaning. It matters to the character so it matters to us.
But we upgraders don’t need to worry about meaning, because…
What has bigger meaning than upgrading human love?
And doing it not just for ourselves, but on behalf of our species.
We don’t have to struggle to find meaning that we can insert into our story…
We’re immersed in meaning. We’re alive with it. We’re blessed with it.
Tribal stories are just about that one tribe doing better. But our upgrade stories, the life stories which we upgraders create for ourselves, are about…
Our species doing better.
4. You need compelling conflict.
Without conflict, without opposition, without an antagonist or antagonistic forces, the protagonist would just drift along, no need to make a change, and this would be so boring, it wouldn’t be a story worth telling.
Conflict builds tension. It keeps the narrative drive going, which is what holds people’s attention.
What about us upgraders and conflict? We’re going up against the human operating system. Which means we’re going up against our society which runs on that system. So our upgrade stories, as positive as they are at heart, are from the point of view of society, oppositional and dark and dangerous.
So yes, we’ve got conflict. And it’s big. And it’s built in.
Writing teachers say the best, most compelling conflict is internal, within the character. Well, we’ve got that, too. Because what we’re opposing is the human operating system, and that’s within each of us, and it runs us. Which means in carrying out our upgrade mission…
We’re wrestling with a complex, maddening, and painful conflict that lives inside us.
5. You need a satisfying resolution.
The most popular stories feature protagonists who want something, go after it and keep going after it even though they fail and fail and fail until they hit a point where they’re in despair and things seem hopeless.
But that’s when…
They finally reach deep into themselves and make an internal change, and find their fiercest fight, which carries them through to victory.
So the story ends with a happy resolution and the audience leaves the theater satisfied.
These are called stories of transformation. Because the character has gone through serious internal change, and now her life is going to be different going forward.
And we upgraders are in the transformation business, too. When we talk about upgrading love, we’re talking about transforming it. And transforming ourselves in the process.
But for this story principle, I like to use the word development. If we say at the end of the story the character is transformed, there’s a finality to that, a completion that doesn’t match the upgrade story, because…
The upgrade story keeps going.
So I like to say that we are developmental beings, and in this upgrade story we are developing ourselves and developing love, and this never stops, because there is no final end point.
We will hit moments of victory along the way, but this story is our life and it’s not over until our life is over.
In a time when so many people are living lives of quiet desperation, or boring routine, or noisy distraction, or disabling fear, we can, using just these five principles, turn our upgrade journey, into…
A rich and compelling story.
And…
The adventure of a lifetime.
Throughout human history, progress was collective. The tribe moved forward together. There was no place for individuals taking deep dives into their individual psyches, because it was the tribal psyche which was the foundation of survival.
But in our current era, that’s changed…
The path to upgrading love begins with our personal psyche and desire and will.
And if we were to have a chance to save ourselves, the path to salvation would begin in the same way, not with the tribal part of ourselves but with the most personal part.
But we don’t go inside and then stay there in our own solipsistic bubble isolated from the world. We become robust, fully-formed, flourishing, mature individuals, but we don’t become individualistic.
We go inside in order to come back out and…
Use our upgraded love to make a new, upgraded human togetherness.
Personally I find a special kind of beauty in upgraded love, because of…
How nurturing it is,
How it brings healing,
How it can sustain us against the odds in a dangerous time, and
How just in itself it’s a joy.
Tribal fundamentalism has brought our species blessings, but at the same time it’s generated millennia of terrible evil. Which has been brutal and in that brutality, ugly.
Upgraded love, by contrast, doesn’t carry such a burden. Yes, there is sorrow that comes with it, but even in this sorrow I find a comforting beauty.
And I believe that if you decide to take the upgrade journey, you will discover as you move forward day by day, the innate beauty of upgraded love, and it will get inside you and settle there, and quite probably…
Add a touch of radiance to your personal presence.
And it’s my wish that there will be people who will see this in you and…
Be drawn to you because of it.
