What is reality? This remains a central question in philosophy. Some argue that reality is objective, while others contend that reality is constructed by the perceiver. However, when human perception is examined, we find that our minds tend to paint over bare reality. In a 1944 study of apparent behaviour, Heider and Simmel showed participants a two-minute animation of a triangle, circle, and rectangle moving in a specific pattern. However, almost none of the participants saw merely that. Instead, in their descriptions, the large triangle was a bully, the circle and the small triangle were friends, one a victim and the other a hero, and the rectangle was a house. This demonstrated that the human brain is hardwired to infer intentions, emotions, and social stories.
Why is our brain wired this way? Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman proposes that our perception evolved not for objective appraisal of reality, but to register stimuli relevant to survival. This may explain why, among the myriad of life experiences, we remember only a few, often emotionally potent events. In addition to this selective tending to events, our brain seeks meaningful patterns within them, organising complex information into coherent themes or narratives. The result is the creation of stories, a feature central to human history.
What makes stories so compelling to the human mind? You may find it hard to believe that our minds could lean so intensely toward stories, seemingly frivolous, when most would like to believe they prefer facts over fiction. Yet, neuroscience suggests that a well-told story engages the brain more intensely than mere data. They trigger the release of neurotransmitters like oxytocin, which fosters empathy and trust, and dopamine, which regulates pleasure, increases motivation, and action.
Historically, stories have served human development in various ways. Joseph Carroll argued that stories provided a shared psychological map that enabled large-scale cooperation and conferred an evolutionary advantage. Pioneering psychoanalyst Carl Jung viewed storytelling as vital to human existence, connecting individuals to universal patterns termed archetypes, through which they can understand their lives, psyche, and achieve psychological wholeness.
Stories are the culmination of what we deem relevant and assign meaning to. Built on this basis, narrative therapy argues that the stories we tell ourselves are never a direct reflection of reality, but a version constructed by our minds, filtered through cognitive biases, fallacies, and efforts to accommodate pre-existing stories. Holding this constructivist view, narrative therapy asks this central question: what stories do we tell ourselves that no longer serve us, and how can we rewrite them to be helpful? We have stories about ourselves, other people, and the world around us, all existing to serve a larger purpose.
While our ability to comprehend abstract concepts, create stories, and share complex information allowed evolutionary success, how does this primal nature for storytelling shape our world today? The dominant stories in society are there by virtue of the function they serve. Thus, as narrative therapy asks the individual, so can the collective be asked: are these stories helpful, for whom and how?
In examining some of the most prominent social systems, we find many, often flawed stories that keep them in place despite being riddled with so much suffering. Colonialism has documented links to exploitation, totalitarian control, cultural and ideological domination, and institutionalised racism. However, for long, colonialism was considered normal and even necessary. Scholars have traced this in part to the colonial narratives of the coloniser who takes upon himself the task to civilise people of other lands, deemed savage and barbaric. This exact paternalistic myth was immortalised by Rudyard Kipling’s as ‘The White Man’s Burden’, where the coloniser is cast as the fulfiller of a moral obligation to elevate indigenous people while forcing adherence to their supposedly superior culture.
On further examination, it is easy to see how stories served as dangerous distortions of reality that justified colonialism. The civilising mission; a cover-up for a brutal desire for wealth and power. The deeming of different cultures as barbaric; a means of organising reality around the pre-existing story of the desirability of one's own culture.
The more recent system of capitalism, for instance, has been linked to extreme wealth inequality, exploitation of labour, environmental degradation and the commodification of basic needs. Capitalism tells the story of meritocracy, wherein advancement is said to be based on merit earned by individual ability and effort, thereby painting the picture of a level playing field. In stark contrast is reality, where people rarely have the same starting lines, as the wealth and status acquired at birth determine access to quality education, healthcare, resources, and networking opportunities. These then determine the extent to which talents and efforts can be realised. Thus, giving the wealthy a competitive advantage, whereas the less privileged must face the resulting systemic obstacles.
Hence, the story of meritocracy may create a false sense that winners deserve their success, while losers simply failed to try hard enough. This is rooted in the just-world fallacy, which falsely equates success with goodness and failure with badness. This image of deservedness allows for ignoring systemic injustice instead of implementing corrective policies.
Perhaps the most pervasive story underlying such systems is that of the inevitability of it all; suffering, discrimination and injustice as the natural order of things, the necessary price of progress, or divine law. This story, more than any other, produces helplessness by asking us to accept as given, what is in fact constructed. It keeps us from recognising ourselves as active agents of change, and that injustice is far from inevitable happenstance beyond our control, but rather the byproduct of systems that take advantage of the disadvantaged.
Thus, stories can uphold even the most harmful systems, as the primary vehicle through which consent, compliance and control are manufactured. The nature of stories, however, is that they can be questioned and rewritten. To deconstruct those that no longer serve us can prove to be an essential skill in a world that will inevitably always be run by stories.
Aashia Shefi
