The Power of Shared Narratives

The fog of collective resignation we are stumbling through has changed the stories we tell. As we perceive, with increasingly painful clarity, that our society cannot resolve the catastrophes it produces, we enter an era of aimless narrative drift. Atmospheric carbon dioxide accumulates in proportion to Mission Impossible sequels. Stories are losing their vitality because, no matter how many cars explode in them, they fail to describe a path away from our depression, disconnection, precariousness, and loss of shared meaning. In this episode, we ask whether a new mythology might arise from our current mire, and what its characteristics might be. Along the way, we examine the human penchant for hallucinating and dreaming about insects that control reality, the psychology of the outsider, the cross-species biology of adolescent dispersal from the birth group, why there are so few movies about healing from trauma, how embodied experience generates insights independent of any information it provides, and the 19th century Russian novel that arguably created more revolutionaries than any non-fiction.