I recently watched Matrix: Resurrections with my wife. Why? I don’t know. Everyone said it was overarchitected nonsense, which in my experience means that either a thing is actually really good and the haters are fools, or that thing is actually nonsense. In this case, it was the latter.
I also saw (but didn’t hear) a few minutes of the Netflix show Bodkin, peeking over my wife’s shoulder on a plane.
Both of these pieces of art proclaimed a particular thesis, which I’ve seen many times before: that people are fundamentally stories. Maybe a collection of stories, maybe one specific story the self tells all the time, whatever. By nature this thesis is hypnotic, because it’s usually presented inside some literal story. It tends to go like:
We’re all stories. The story of where we come from. The story of where we’re trying to get. (music swells) The obstacles we overcame, the plot points that made us who we are. Buy a Honda.
Or whatever. Obviously, this framing is also common in advertisements. It’s a pretty good, ahem, story at ringing true within the context of passively consuming media, especially the first dozen or so times you hear it. But these days, I find it kind of sour.
The Structure of Scientific Personal Revolutions
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book by Thomas Kuhn. It’s probably one of the most influential philosophy books ever, but certainly of the last 100 years. In it, Kuhn argues, contra various other philosophers of science, that there is no neat and simple way to classify scientific progress. It isn’t purely about falsifiability, or building, from first principles, an ever-larger tower of truth. Instead, said Kuhn, science progresses through things called paradigms. (Fun fact, Kuhn’s use of “paradigm” is what moved that word into modern usage! And you thought philosophy never affected anything.)
What’s a paradigm? Basically, it’s a big picture story about how the world works. So Newtonian physics was a paradigm, as was, later, its Einsteinian successor. Paradigms provide boundaries within which to operate - rather than just randomly making guesses (the Earth is on the back of a giant black swan) we can place our guesses in context (we know the Earth is roughly spherical and orbiting the sun, but its orbit looks a little funny, which could be explained by a mystery planet we haven’t yet observed).
But the thing about paradigms is, they fall apart. Eventually, certain realities add up that the paradigm doesn’t account for yet. Here is where the “revolutions” part comes in. Eventually some totally new paradigm pops up, which successfully resolves the notorious glitches of the previous paradigm. It may take a while for people to get onboard with the new paradigm, but eventually it takes root and becomes orthodoxy.
I feel similarly about the “we’re stories” mentality. We certainly do tell ourselves stories, and embody stories told about us, and the world, by others. But the notion of “we’re just stories” is lazily reductive. Self-narrative (and other kinds of narrative) are the paradigm. But there’s some other thing, also crucially important, that interacts with the substrate of that narrative. And to say “we’re just stories” elides that aspect.
Lucy the Star Student
Let’s work through an example, which is to say, let’s tell a story.
When Lucy is 5 years old, she tests into a gifted and talented program. She did especially well on one of the sections of the test - or at least she remembers it that way. Technically her score was pretty marginal, but nobody ever told her that, and she definitely doesn’t remember the sections that she had a hard time on, or how she cried a little during one problem that she couldn’t solve.
As a certified gifted kid, Lucy is put into accelerated courses. She does well on basically every assignment. She doesn’t really notice that all her peers also do, that actively failing assignments is super rare. Her classes are advanced, and she does well in them, so she presumes that she’s very smart, and, in fact, that this is among the most important facts about her.
Eventually, Lucy gets into a pretty good college. Her grades were perfect, but her SAT scores weren’t quite good enough to stand a chance at the ivies, but she writes this off as standardized tests being bullshit or unfairly benefiting rich people (sure, her parents own three houses, but they’re not, like, rich) or something. Anyway, the college she gets into is perfectly good, and while there she continues to do well in all her classes, so her self image is intact.
Lucy’s parents are very supportive and worry about her little brother, who isn’t gifted, a lot more than they worry about her, so they kind of just figure she’ll turn out fine. So she has no particular career plans until pretty late in college, when she decides, following in the footsteps of a few other people she looks up to, that she’ll take a crack at law school. Her coursework is probably advanced enough, and she’s pretty sure she can get good letters of recommendation. But she finds studying for the LSAT extremely stressful. She doesn’t do that well on practice exams, and hires a tutor, but that doesn’t move the needle much either, and she can’t shake the impression that her tutor is looking down on her, or thinks she’s not too bright. When she finally does take the LSAT, her score isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great either.
A little shaken up, Lucy decides to look at some forums for fellow intended lawyers. What she sees horrifies her. Everyone keeps talking about a “bimodal distribution”, a term she has to look up and then kicks herself because obviously she knows what “mode” means in math, and she should have just figured it out. It turns out that with her LSAT score, she won’t stand a chance at the best law schools, and without going to one of the best law schools, her salary will almost certainly be at the low end, and she’ll end up with a mountain of debt. Also, she keeps seeing people on the forums talking about their amazing LSAT scores, and trying to decide which top 5 schools to go for, and she feels small and stupid and ashamed.
Up until this point, since the age of 5, Lucy’s story has been something like:
I’m a really smart person. I’m presented with difficult academic challenges, and I always rise to them. My friends and family are impressed with how smart and diligent I am, and based on my merits and hard work, I naturally find myself in good situations.
There have always been things this paradigm couldn’t account for. But only now, with Lucy trying to figure out her future, do they come to a head. The ones we’ve seen are:
Lucy did fine on her gifted assessment at 5, but not that well
Lucy didn’t do notably better than most of her classmates in gifted programs
Lucy didn’t do all that well on the SAT
Lucy didn’t do all that well on the LSAT
So what happens now? It could go a lot of different directions. But however Lucy ends up (she’ll probably be fine), one of the main “stories” that comprised her is going to have to change. And in choosing its successor, both consciously and unconsciously, she’s going to have to use analytical skills that aren’t merely narrative. For example:
Unconsciously, she’ll need to steer her way to a story that gets her social reward
Consciously, she’ll need to choose a story that fits her understanding of the facts
Both consciously and unconsciously, she’ll need to choose a story that doesn’t make her feel - or look - like a loser
This kind of crisis is difficult and painful, but it’s also a basic feature of human life. The hypnosis of “we are stories” feels good in a passive, media consumption context. And sure, stories form a sort of skeletal system for many of our activities, and provide a huge amount of meaning in our lives. But there necessarily also has to be a steering system that kicks in to prune or adjust stories when they degrade. And that steering system, which functions both consciously and unconsciously, isn’t itself a narrative. Which is part of why, I think, it can hurt so much.
Probably, if you’ve thought about this sort of thing at all, you can immediately imagine various stories Lucy might fall into. If you can only imagine one, whatever it might be, and are waiting, with bated breath, for me to describe it, I think your story about this sort of person is too simple, and you should expand it.
But as for how, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.