‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ Do global nodes and global narratives foster conformity or aid us in revealing universal emotional truths?
The title quote comes from a Joan Didion essay that mocks its premise.
Didion wrote in the sixties. As a journalist and film critic as well as a screenwriter and novelist, Didion documented, criticized, and exploited the human addiction to narrative.
While much of Didion’s output implies a sort of exhausted resignation to the chaos of humanity and its environs, she also seems to delight in constructing and deconstructing how humans, who are not irrational creatures, rationalize the confusion in which we constantly find ourselves.
Didion postulates that our rationalizations, whether through human habit or preference, usually coalesce into some sort of narrative.
Didion notes narrative is the imperfect container — the flawed structure — within which we “freeze the phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
Basically, Didion suggests that any narrative is flawed by design because ‘narrative’ itself is conceptually deficient and anatomically awry.
Yet we humans persist in using narrative to codify our experiences anyway.
Why?
‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves…’
Human narrative is structurally misleading.
When we deploy our contemporary narrative structure, we confine our understanding of life to ‘the most workable of the multiple choices.’
These ‘multiple choices’ rarely conform to disparate individuals and their multifaceted encounters.
Yet narrative compels individuals to choose — in other words, to conform— to validated options, in, if not how they choose to live, then in how they choose to explain their choices in life.
‘I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package.’
I’ve been thinking about Didion’s bemused cynicism a lot as I review research related to data diversity, interpretation, and application in tech.
While it’s a lovely idea to inject diverse data into systems to counteract bias, while many of us are (hopefully) increasingly letting go of the idea of ‘objective’ as we come to understand that we live (and always have lived) in ‘nuanced’ times, intersectional tech researchers are quick to conjecture that we have and will continue to project our own interpretation of information into and onto any structure that spits out any data of any sort.
Whether shared via feeds, families, friends, or frenemies, we’re not likely to let any story breathe based on its own ‘merit,’ whatever that means. We know we’re being fed pre-chewed prerogatives, both implicit and explicit.
We also know, on some level, that we add our own interpretations to any version of whatever narrative we forward or efface because we instinctively understand there’s a farce built into the whole idea of ‘the narrative.’ We know stories, for all their appeal, are always incomplete tall tales.
Nobody gets that last word. The first word is long forgotten. The current narrator is forever fallible, as are we the audience.
We constantly (and reasonably) suspect we’re being told who we should be by a structure that has absolutely no interest in who we actually are.
So we know we’re being had.
We humans may not always know when we ourselves are telling stories, but we tend to know when someone who is not us is trying to tell our story.
As a former female colleague, eternally skeptical of anything ‘#MeToo’ often says, ‘it’s gender-neutral: screw or be screwed.’
This (strictly metaphorical, I hope) suspicion undermines any reliability that a perceived narrator, however accurate and factually relevant his narrative, aims to engender.
This doesn’t mean the narrative loses its legitimacy — like the Internal Revenue Service, a particularly dominant yet deliberately inclusive narrative can become an administrative burden with which we unwilling citizens must periodically contend or risk a painful reckoning.
A popular (some say calculated) strategy in such a situation is to not stick out. Pick a tax lane and coast; don’t pursue or acknowledge outlier status. Form yourself to fit the narrative that results in the most flattering option offered — manipulate yourself into the choiciest multiple choice perceived.
Avoid an audit at all costs.
A Bahamian political economist who is familiar with the recent Marvel heroes indicated as much when discussing representation in media. She summed up a discussion on the most recent US superhero franchise (I’m paraphrasing): While it’s great for my kids to see someone who resembles them in an entertaining movie, I want to caution that I’m not entirely comfortable being pigeonholed into what is ultimately a flawed narrative.
I guess she’s been watching Amazon’s ‘The Boys.’
‘Pigeonholed into a flawed structure.’
Just because I share a couple of characteristics with a story’s hero does not make the story mine. (The inverse is also true; I personally share an awful lot of common characteristics with popular villains…)
For example, I’ve worked in well-paid industries for decades. I’m all for making more money, yet the recent move to promote and praise women in leadership positions has left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
Women, in my experience and according to significant research, are regularly presented with tradeoffs related to their modern roles as caretakers and providers.
As a mother and wife, I’m constantly assessing whether I’m going to prioritize (unpaid) caretaking tasks or hire an (underpaid, most likely female) caretaker so I can make more money and accumulate more influence within my professional sphere.
Any perceived personal victory within such a structure feels more singular than structural and more private than public: I may get to lead but only at the expense of another woman’s exploitation.
Yay, progressive inclusivity?
My spouse understands but then doesn’t — if he did, he’d do more laundry.
But then I could be rationalizing to reinforce my version of our collaborative familial narrative within the larger cultural sphere.
After all, my husband lives in tandem with me, accumulating similar experiences and data, and yet he perceives alternative facts and tradeoffs.
He says if I understood him, I’d get to my f#cking point faster.
My point:
Even my husband feels pigeonholed into a flawed narrative structure.
We all adhere to structural narratives.
Didion treated narrative as structure — narrative structured how a character (real or imagined) presented circumstances, worldviews, and choices.
Didion’s criticism of narrative defied categories, as good narrative does.
Didion, a California native, treated politics, economics, entertainment, law, religion, activism, philosophy, etc. as narrative, as individuals adopting, adapting, rejecting, and collaborating to create the stories that determined options and rationalized positions at the moment.
Facts were fodder for contextual emotion mixed with pragmatism. Every story can be reinterpreted and reimagined or rejected for cause.
‘The imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images…’
To Didion, facts were stars in the sky: cold, indifferent, and possibly insubstantial— we Earthlings see but the residual of something that once was, and that never had anything to do with us.
Humans, seeking purpose or meaning or connection or desiring to just fill the time, draw lines between the lights in our heavens to build pictures in the darkness — and different humans draw different pictures.
If enough humans agree or don’t disagree — whether ‘(dis)agreement’ arises via force, interest, or indifference — the pictures become outlines for institutions that humans imbue with meaning through storytelling.
If I connect that group of stars, for example, to make two fish and call it Pisces, I can then subscribe to a story about Pisces, decide that I identify with the Pisces storyline and that I believe that I share certain traits with others who are somehow affiliated with or afflicted by Pisces.
We as an astral Pisces community now share a common (explicit and implicit) language and understanding (up to a point) with others who embrace similar starry sketches.
This mental construct is not that different from and in many ways very similar to the story that these oceans and this river and this mountain range define the country we now call the United States and within these boundaries, specific legal and economic systems apply and all individual stories that wish to be taken seriously right now must incorporate elements of these larger perceived group narratives.
Here, we’ll help you by crafting and sharing means of collaboration and participation and deviation like Congress, courts, political parties, banks, educational institutions, community centres, media outlets, etc. etc.
All ‘established’ institutions are for individual and/or group use up to a point, subject to immediate contexts, terms, and conditions.
Algorithms embody the latest form of bureaucracy.
‘The quintessential intellectual, hating all systems, whether on our side or theirs, with equal distaste.’
Switch stories and you switch identities, but many stories come bundled in a particular human body, a mixture of individual experiences and projected group expectations about what that body — that packaging of a human — ‘must’ mean within the larger group narratives running round our shared spaces right now. This body-based bundling allows or forces several identities to coexist inside a particular person.
Within each different bundle, specific identities become salient when certain (external and internal) circumstances collide.
For example, Amazon successfully treats every individual as a potential recurring source of revenue.
It has been argued that historically (…) medical science treats most mature female bodies as walking wombs.
Many US politicians have been known to treat complex humans with conflicting long and short-term needs as temporally distinctive votes for or against the politician’s immediate individual power grab.
Genetics says that we humans are 99% bonobos, but OMG, the variety we perceive and create within that remaining one percent!
We are fantastic narrative machines working within deceptively narrow margins.
No wonder Didion found most people’s stories to be fatuous bullsh!t exploited by external elites fertilizing diabolical dynamite.
‘I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.’
The circumstantial saliency of some or other identity is most obvious to me when I go online — I become a consumer seeking purchase, a professional in need of a tool or service, a parent who wants advice or justification, a person in need of escape.
But the online world is only a mirror of the offline world — a mirror that easily entices, entraps, and curates identities into mass narratives for purposes of exploitation and consolidation, but a mirror nonetheless.
Of course, the mirror can tell us (or let us project) quite a lot.
Not necessarily about the individuals we see (including ourselves) but about the systems in place that direct our individual expression — the containers via which we feel compelled to represent our ideas of ourselves to ourselves and others.
How do we link what we want them to know about us to what they are willing to hear and what they (and we) might understand?
Influential narratives deploy global variables.
I work a lot with econometricians, programmers, and physicists (not at the same time, thank the Zodiac.)
Let’s consider the first two first.
We’ll get to the third later.
Economic variables and their narratives.
Econometricians (TOTAL Aries, fiery pioneers with NO respect for deadlines) use statistics, data, and math to study, model, and predict economic principles and outcomes. Many of these econometricians are hugely invested in their variables and equations — they are mathematical storytellers institutionally ordained in the numerical system with which they investigate our most modern and impactful mutually shared myths.
Mysteriously to anyone but an Aries econometrician, every time they invent a new model explaining how the world works, they brag that they have cracked the code to human behavior in a particular sphere.
All hail the pugnacious ram’s assertive innovation!
Any flaw some insipid Virgo might detect in an econometrician’s gorgeous model is because the ‘laid-back’ (aka lazy) b!tch is overfitting.
The numerical fairy tales that these econometricians concoct are the reinterpretations of broader narratives around which we implicitly structure much of our contemporary distribution of power and wealth.
Of course, power and wealth are also human concoctions that often exploit culture and identity as useful facades in accumulating unrestricted legitimacy, much like Instagram models activate filters to increase followers and engagement.
When models break bad…
Culture and identity are porous (despite the body-bundling) until circumstances (or ‘variables’ if you are talking to an Aries) create a crisis that prioritizes a particular identity.
Then, like fingers closing into a fist, the aggrieved data points consolidate to create a compelling image with which to shield themselves — however they might decide to define their ‘selves’ for the time being.
Part of the narrative aspect of this systemic trigger is a clear characterization of who is a part of the picture and who is not; for example, who is a Pisces and who is a goddamn, wishy-washy Libra.
I believe econometricians call this scenario ‘game theory.’
Libras refer to it as the all-too-easily influenced Pisces unnecessarily picking sides. Libras are always going on about how fishy radicals give too much credence to fabricated ‘intuition.’
But Libras couldn’t make a firm decision if we pulled their airy little heads out of Mercury’s retrograde.
Meanwhile, the programmers with whom I have the dubious pleasure to dialogue are less interested in high-stakes games of metaphorical (but oh so real) chicken and more into nerdy nodes.
Programmers and their narratives and nerdy nodes.
Programmers are Cancers — crabby little hard-shelled vortexes of repressed emotion manifesting trust issues in indecipherable lines of esoteric code.
Yeah, I said it.
Scramble over it you delicious little crustaceans attempting to overcome childhood trauma. You’re not fooling anyone with your 01001001 00100111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01101000 01110101 01110010 01110100….
Programmers need open, empathetic, shieldless global nodes through which to blast their attempts at controlling the world with…well…
The world.
As Cancers, programmers instinctively build safe little hidden nests behind multiple firewalls to cut their crusty little selves off from any potential repercussions the apathetic world might send their way.
Cancers love to host from the comfort of their own little caves rather than venture out to mingle with anyone who might have cruel, cruel feedback on their periscopic vision of what (to them) is conclusively a Hobbesian society.
FYI: I’m married to a Cancer/programmer. Ten years and counting…
01001100 01001111 01010110 01000101 01101101 01100001 01110010 01110010 01101001 01100001 01100111 01100101 00001010 00001010
What is a global node to a Cancer (aka a programmer)?
Global nodes are, for example, public servers to which all computers accessing any internet outside of their own little dark shell must at some point connect.
However, these public servers — these ‘global nodes’— are of course openly flexible, aka vulnerable, to misuse, abuse, misinformation, disinformation, malware, cyberattacks, verbal attacks, visual attacks…
Global nodes can be Hobbesian.
They can also be wonderful opportunities to connect with the wider world and gain new experiences and perspectives.
But f#cking Cancers.
The internet does not work as advertised without global nodes, which provide the stars that our individual systems and our personal structural narratives can digitally draw upon to build and disseminate our online personas, computer-based communities, and numeric heritage.
Global nodes are the devices upon which many of shared plots turn — both online and off these days. The connected nodes where our disconnected stories clash, combine, interweave, interrupt, ignore, and divide.
Many of us know and use these global nodes as cultural touchstones that allegedly require no explanation while, like a funhouse mirror, they splinter our many attempts at aggregated comprehension.
To summarize, global nodes connect and confuse our computer-based communities.
‘Open the pod bay doors, please HAL.’
We often use the same global nodes a lot of the time to structure alternative narratives or eviscerate or gently confront or passive-aggressively gaslight narratives that others structure.
We’re data shards sharding data all over our digital devices, fragmenting the very numerical nature of our incredibly convoluted human congregation with the detritus of our own fragile insecurities.
We’re delicate snowflakes screaming in defiance as we liquefy into common dihydrogen oxide, drenched in indignation, blaming the ‘other’ as the evil (b)witch who actively pushed us into a vulnerable situation.
I know.
I’m pathetically poetic.
I should guest-blog for the Marginalian.
If the data does not fit, you must acquit.
In real life, whenever we humans are forced to contend with divergent data, an outlier, or just an uncomfortably familiar but slightly deviant story, we tend to get very uncomfortable. Such situations compel us to cope with differences and collaborate around collective action that we ourselves would not immediately choose given, well, almost any other option.
(This is why Cancers love the firewalls…nobody gets in unless invited….)
In such moments, we must publicly acknowledge doubt and ambiguity in ourselves and our ideas about the world.
To find a way out of this sort of crisis, we are forced to compromise while immobile edifices in our ‘narrative of self’ crumble.
Stars explode. Constellations shift.
It’s cosmicly grotesque.
We rarely put ourselves in such situations by choice.
When we humans finally realize that a constellation fixed in our firmament could be…perceived differently…or, worse, that the constellation may not exist — that it’s all a fabrication, a hangover with which we’ve been cursed or gifted by ancient, hypothetical predecessors, this realization too often arrives when all other options — fight, flight, freeze, and flatter — have been exhausted.
Our back is against the wall and the utter unreality of our reality has become so appallingly apparent that the most self-indulgent of denialists (aka nihilists) cannot escape an immediate impact.
This is the very definition of crisis — not a commercially or politically manufactured ‘crisis’ calling forth one of our many constructed identities but a crisis that negates the very presence of identity itself.
A crisis that makes us feel kinship and connection with those whom we so casually dismissed or ignored as the irrelevant ‘other’ mere moments ago.
A crisis that won’t let us remain captive to our preferred narrative.
‘Chemistry can be a good and bad thing. Chemistry is good when you make love with it. Chemistry is bad when you make crack with it.’
Didion and I occasionally diverge when we read the lines between the lights as manipulative or connective.
I see the line as the important issue while — periodically — Didion seems too busy evaluating the big picture to focus on each individual connection.
That’s not to denigrate her work. My sky would be a lot more empty if not for my exposure to Joan Didion and her circuitous, celestial navigations of humanity.
Plus, Didion’s not wrong.
‘Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.’
The big picture is shaped by characters with outsized power.
Individual narratives running counter to or just naive of these authorities struggle to achieve critical mass, many expiring before they manage to breathe.
In today’s world, for example, even so-called ‘virality’ is fully manufactured by resource-greedy corporate entities.
‘Viral’ outputs like ‘Gangnam Style,’ ‘Barbie: The Movie,’ ‘The Kardashians,’ and ‘Jada Pinkett Smith’ are expensive, man-made onslaughts initially launched from the computers of those ruling our cultural capitals.
Even the purported ‘organic’ virality in the early days of digital depended on who had the tools and the time to curate and communicate the culture.
(It’s white women, by the way — from the Beatles to Beanie Babies, it’s been us the whole time #ownyourprivilge #ownyourpower.)
Today’s overpriced cultural bombardments continue to pelt our digital devices with their costly content, ensuring we are all painfully aware of and thus begrudgingly engaged in some way with the underlying narrative.
Art is dead unless it can afford dissemination.
It’s a real slap in the face.
‘When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them. You’re meeting their representative.’
Putting aside uber-rich storytellers looking to filch yet another dollar from us lost souls aimlessly wandering along the digital divide, most of us humans tell stories not to exploit so much as to expose emotional truths.
We tell or participate in telling a story (mis)using facts because we want others to understand how we feel and what we are experiencing.
And when it comes to sharing emotional truths, the facts alone fail us.
Facts are too cold and too indifferent, too easy to correlate.
I think we humans crave long-form narratives that open up connection and understanding. Constellations and institutions — any mythologically rooted piece of art (and I categorize computer programs and econometric models as art with mythical undertones)— offer more widely shared short-hand hooks that allow us to quickly explain what we want or need using recognizable elements of established narratives to better define context.
This can be efficient and (arguably) necessary in what everyone insists on calling the ‘attention economy,’ but, as noted, it is misleading when applied to any one individual. Just because someone engages with an established institution does not imply that they accept or agree with said institution or its institutional mythology.
Just because I pay taxes doesn’t mean I agree with the modern tax regime.
If the best way for me to access decent healthcare is to hone my real or potential maternal status, I’ll at least appear to ascribe that narrative to gain admittance to the healthcare. If the only way I can earn my teenager’s affection is to pay her mensual phone bill, I’ll plan my favorite mother-daughter outings for the end of the month when her bill is due.
But to assume that I fully subscribe to the maternal healthcare narrative or that I or my kid endorse any dominant narrative structure as it applies to who we appear to be in our respective relationships is to flatten the multitude of moving data points each of us encompass to something simple and structurally astute — to pigeonhole one or both of us into a flawed structure guilty of, at a minimum, overfitting.
‘Do what I do. Hold tight and pretend it’s a plan!’
Here physics can offer additional insight.
It’s possible that our meta-narratives are neither random individual choices smashing into each other in a permanent pattern nor the manipulative flourishes of a Master Narrator’s huge pen shepherding the masses towards some selfish goal.
It’s possible that our meta-narratives emerge through our own singular-yet-shared chaotic need to commune with others.
‘I am too young to die and too old to eat off the kids’ menu! What a stupid age I am!’
Physicists are the most elusive of the astrological zodiacs: Capricorns.
There’s a good reason that the devil card in tarot represents their bleaty little asses: Capricorns are stellar little troublemakers.
Never satisfied with any status quo, physicists (and their sea goat ilk) go on and on about whether free will is ‘real’ or if everything in motion was preordained by that which began it all: the Big Bang or its Inflationary predecessor or the Matrix (Cancers!) or whatever.
Capricorns are not the best with commitment.
Like Saturn, their planetary ruler, Capricorns run rings around the ingrained gassy giants of our theoretical existence, their subversive questions constantly wounding our stable sense of self.
Capricorns live to remind the rest of us that there is no firm footing in the insubstantial realm of our unknown universe.
Is there a Standard Model? Are there multiple universes? How fundamental is fundamental? What can’t be crystallized? (Answer: Conceivably nothing.) How knowable is Maxwell? How solid is a liquid?
Relative to what? (That’s a physicist favorite…)
Physicists (aka Capricorns) will probably never get to the bottom of their bottomless curiosity. And they’ll take as many of us down with them as they can, the bully billies.
However, a framework a few of them have worked out fits perfectly into the discussion on global nodes and narratives.
Many physicists (and some of their frenemies, philosophers) note quantum mechanics shows that individual events are random and without cause.
Quantum mechanics proves there is no narrative at the particle level of existence — it’s all just chaotic kablooey (technical term.)
That said, when all that micro-level randomness is averaged out on some macro level, predictions can be made. Human ideas of narratives do form.
Now, these perceived and measurable physics-based narrative arcs are perchance pure macro-correlations (Keep it in your pants, Aries!)
These correlations don’t appear to have anything to do with the individual events that make them up other than that they can be bundled in the same diaphanous conglomeration to be consistently calculated and approximated as a group of some sort.
Or do they?
Particular physicists bring up emergent properties — properties that become apparent — that ‘emerge’ — only when connections occur.
Smaller parts (mostly made of hydrogen) join to create more complex systems and through increasingly intricate unions, the system as a whole gains characteristics that adapt to better survive and thrive in evolving circumstances — circumstances that are equally subject to particle-level randomness and macro-level complexity.
For example, hydrogen and oxygen by themselves possess no liquidity. Yet when molecules of the two merge into H20, liquidity emerges from the connection.
Another frequent example is how particular fireflies commune through simple on/off light patterns (think ‘0 1 0 1’ if you are a Cancer), starting with one or two bugs and crescendoing into a synchronized spatiotemporal flashing macro pattern that does not seem to have any single conductor but instead is a spontaneous outburst of beetle-mania (white women groupies not included, but I am working on it…)
As ‘emergent properties’ liquidity or the fireflies' luminous synchronicity is only possible thanks to the change wrought by connection — the links between the variables, the connections between the nodes.
The lines between the lights.
‘Once you wake up and smell the coffee, it’s hard to go back to sleep.’
Whatever the origin of shared human narratives, they do seem to be our constant companions, our organic onus and orgasmic group grandeur, an inescapable fact of humanity.
How do we construct our relationship to narrative without confining ourselves to ones that will inevitably bring us to crisis?
I propose a healthy diet of human-generated art and research.
Art and research are great — one provides purpose and the other reminds us how supremely unimportant we are in ‘the grand scheme of things.’
One gives us the means to explain ourselves and the other discloses that explanation for the unqualified nonsense that it is.
One gases us up and the other uncorks our fart (because we’re full of it.)
‘Understand more, so that we may fear less.’
Mae Martin, a Canadian comedian, makes a joke that humans are ‘experience junkies.’
Martin says we like to collect things that happen to us, little moments that feel emblematic of our identities that we then preserve in what Martin imagines to be snowglobes stored on the shelves of our brains.
Martin then goes on to demonstrate how when we share our experiences, we exhibit our respective snowglobes to each other.
Aside from breaking down how memes work, this is a pretty brilliant description of how data flattening works — and why data flattening, for all the statistical knowledge it brings us, also makes us dumber when it is practiced by pure programmers (Cancers) or econometricians (Aries.)
Data flattening inhibits the understanding of individuals. Data flattening turns constellations into stars. It dismantles people into parts. Data flattening summarizes a really great novel (and any novel however great is already a summary if you think about it.)
‘Fossils have richer stories to tell — about the lub-dub of dinosaur life — than we have been willing to listen to.’
Data flattening turns dinosaurs into fossils.
What do I mean?
Any research proposal asking for funding must communicate what the researcher plans to do and why this merits funding.
Econometricians and programmers are notoriously rotten at this part of a research proposal— they tend to select what, for them, encapsulates the true genius behind their research and exhibit it proudly in the first paragraph of the proposal, as though anything else is pure dross.
The problem with this approach is that funders, who are not always familiar with the area of research or programming or econometricity (how I rebrand econometrics), may not immediately grasp the brilliant thing.
Instead, perfectly reasonable non-expert funders may skim the brilliant thing in paragraph one, see an impenetrable block of granite, and drop the proposal in the dustbin without reading further.
“Not sure what THAT was about,” they’ll say, moving on to the next proposal.
The funders, like the vast majority of us humans should we stumble across a fossil, will immediately discard and discount a potentially transformative discovery as just another rock.
Only those with access and dedication to the proper knowledge and training will instantly recognize that a fossil is an incredibly informative piece of information about a long-extinct monster that roamed the earth for millennia long before (and for much longer than) we minor meaning-making monkey species.
Even with the necessary learned skills, highly educated paleontologists continue to express doubt about their own extremely expert conclusions when it comes to almost any fossil, which, most will admit, furnishes mere glimpses into the massive maw of Earth’s history.
Amongst themselves and their communities, paleontologists disdain and disagree with other paleontologists, or with geologists, prehistoric botanists, biologists, forensic scientists, cosmetologists (and, worse, cosmologists)…
While each of these profiles (and the humans that inhabit them) might conclusively acknowledge a rock to be a fossil, what that fossil presents varies based on each expert’s individual exposure, experience, and inevitable ignorance.
Fossils require context to be understood — especially by those who are unfamiliar with any of the science behind them — that’s why we non-experts find most of our fossils in museums. We wouldn’t identify them as fossils otherwise.
Unfortunately or fortunately for the curious, context is still extremely limited, even for those who spend their lives trying to reconstruct what context they can from what few clues they dissect.
Often, either to satisfy themselves or their funders, dinosaur experts invent stories about some aspect of their research, turning a fossil into a shared snow globe — a mini-museum of which any understanding is…questionable. Overfitting. Pigeonholed.
The goal of the story is not to get everything exactly right, it’s to forge a connection between the thing that was, the thing that remains, and something in the bodies of the audience.
Without that narrative arc and its connective artistry, without that shared understanding and fellowship, well…
We’re all going to forget the rock.
‘Bid for connection: Each of our daily interactions with another person.’
How do we build emotional truths into a shared story?
How can we make our knowledge and our truth sing a harmonious song of human connection in the vast and empty recesses of an insensible universe?
To answer this, let’s look at another area of research replete with profiles of the rebellious water-bearer, Aquarius. They may charge by the hour, but these airy aquatics don’t waste time.
They stubbornly dedicate themselves to constantly revolutionizing any sense of self so that no self makes the mistake of pretending it’s an island.
Aquarius psychologists hate small talk — they are here to form deep, emotional connections that break us down and build us up as self-sustaining members of a diverse and dynamic astrological community.
And their research notes that a lot of bids for connection are more about what we don’t do.
‘My silence spoke a thousand words, but you never heard them.’
Research in marital psychology, for example, notes that when we fail to validate the experiences and emotions of our partner, particularly in times of stress, we (intentionally or not) stonewall them.
Stonewalling is when we ignore, disparage, or dismiss another person’s emotional experience, and it’s very bad for any relationship.
To stonewall someone is to suggest that the someone is unworthy of acknowledgment, that t/s/he(y) merits no attention and lacks the inherent value and dignity that all humans possess simply because we are human.
Stonewalling is when we dismiss a person as a rock rather than recognize them as a fellow beautiful monster wandering the lonely heavens right along with us.
When we stonewall someone, especially a child (grown or not), we reinforce innate human insecurities that indicate the person being stonewalled is unimportant, irrelevant, innately unworthy; that they are a brief glitch in an infinite universe and their unique story never mattered.
This leads the stonewalled person to cut themselves off from connection and to resent further interaction.
During forced engagements, the victim of stonewalling may conform to expectations, but their heart won’t be in it — just an unwilling facade.
‘All is connected… no one thing can change by itself.’
If narratives are more about emotional truths than facts, ignore the facts in any story (at least initially) and try to understand and validate the emotions employing them.
Foster the underlying intent, which is connection, rather than the overt demand, which may be compliance.
An Aquarius accepts no ultimate authority — rejecting the ‘me’ for the ‘we.’
An Aquarius knows that we can understand without submitting. We can recognize hurt without endorsing it.
We can be kind and empathetic without agreeing or, worse, sympathizing.
Research indicates that sympathy is generally ineffective.
Instead, psychologists (aka Aquariuses) promote a deeper, more viscous property: empathy.
Like water, empathy is cohesive. Empathy helps individuals stick together and lift each other up.
Empathy prioritizes emotion over the immediate situation — respecting the deeper, soluble feeling rather than focusing on the surface tension. Where sympathy can come off as condescending (employing phrases like ‘at least’ or ‘why not’ or ‘somebody should’), empathy seeks shared wisdom from what’s universal in the experience of the so-called ‘other.’
This doesn’t mean to not look for solutions or to permanently mire oneself in the painful swamp of another individual, just that any real solution engages rather than instructs and accepts rather than directs.
Empathy enlightens and builds bridges where digging into a specific viewpoint, even one that is structurally similar, can throw up barriers.
Of course, it’s possible that, like any AI/administration, certain storytellers are absolutely fine eschewing bridges for barriers in their dominant narrative.
After all, barriers keep power players, master narrators, and their preferred narrative arcs, in place — as long as people are too tired or busy or distracted to deconstruct them for the fatuous bullsh!t that they are.
Honestly, if the American tax authorities just texted us citizens ‘amount owed’ plus a random number once a year, I wager most of us would happily pay without asking questions just to avoid further contact.
That’s some effective stonewalling.
‘Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.’
To conclude, let’s revisit Pisces.
Pisces make great sociologists.
Sociologists (Pisces) tend to be moody and introspective.
‘People gonna talk whether you doing bad or good.’
Like Aries econometricians, Pisces like models, but they see little concrete evidence that any model they might build has any object permanence because Pisces’s models are made up of mobile, capricious persons — and people are recognized shapeshifters who can take any concrete fact and spin it into a million different anecdotes.
Pisces (sociologists) spend a lot of time swimming in circles, chasing their twin’s tail, sometimes deliberately ignoring conflict as it blossoms and blooms right beside them.
To a Pisces, conflict is as inevitable as the tides. Pisces learn to ride out any hurricanes by moving to calmer waters until the storm passes — because the storm always passes eventually.
Sociologists (Pisces) periodically remain detached to the point of disaffection. They adapt to and yet dissociate from the water in which they swim. They ride the established currents without commitment, and read with bemused amusement the stories in which they find themselves participating because, ultimately, Pisces see inherent value in trying to understand human creativity.
Pisces recognize that most of what we experience in life is not personally directed at any real person. We direct actions at characters we humans perceive in ourselves and others, and at best those characters are ephemeral reflections, possibly rooted in people real or imagined, internal or external, but probably not.
Such actions feel personal, and the impact can be personal, but ultimately it is not about who we as individuals are, it’s about what we represent.
It’s about the groupthink, not the personal experience.
It’s about the shared narrative, not those acting it out.
‘Life’s too short. We have to love each other.’
Anyone who has ever been accosted by a stranger on the street for some minor misdemeanor knows this. The stranger witnessed a narrative enacted in front of him or her and decided to edit a character, not a person, and the naive individual thus accosted must suffer suggested revisions.
Conversely, we’ve all been in a situation — driving our car, for example, and royally pissed off by some idiot driver who forgot to signal —and we’ve become the accosting stranger. We write the idiot off in our heads, giving them with an unsympathetic backstory that merits outrage and ire.
Management consultants (Pisces who get paid) criticize this approach for its deceitful, one-sided simplicity and its inefficient and administratively unwieldy ineptitude. Their research notes that criticism enacted in this form squashes potential innovation and impoverishes organizations.
Effective individuals recognize that each person requires personalized interaction attuned to the person’s immediate story, interaction that treats the person being addressed as the main character of their own narrative.
Many well-paid Pisces avoid immediate criticism altogether and deploy what many management experts refer to today as the ‘Toyota Way.’
The ‘Toyota Way’ or ‘nunchi’ if we translate to Korean, does not center any one character or profile. In many classic Japanese paintings or Korean minhwas, the landscape eclipses all that is within it, showing how no one person is fully accountable to or for the big picture; it’s all an ecosystem shared by the many even when crystallized into experience by one artist.
Such Pisces see the story structure within which each individual is acting and direct criticism and change at the structure with the goal of skillfully empowering the individual to take as much control of the narrative as they can to rework it to better themselves and others.
Of course, complete control is impossible — we’re all subject to the ocean, the limitless universe, the indifferent stars.
We all fail in most of our attempts.
Recognizing that, however, we can understand how human manipulations are limited and absurd when they try to exert total control.
We can focus instead on building connection and collaborative action, taking into account that all of us remain captive to stories that speak to us not out of lack of humanity but because we are in fact all flawed humans working within flawed, human-made means of connection.
We humans all need to feel connected to something bigger, a larger narrative, and that’s as much a strength as a weakness.
We’re not the gassy members of some fixed zodiac but fireflies humming with desires for communion.
Quotes, in order of appearance:
Joan Didion, Shakespeare, Didion again, KE*, Didion, Prometheus Unbound, Arthur C Clarke, Dave, Adam Sandler, Jawaharlal Nehru, Chris Rock, Doctor Who (original), Jason (The Good Place), Fran Drescher, Marie Curie, Robert Bakker, John Gottman, Paul Hawken, Richard Russo, Rihanna Fenty, Drew Barrymore.
Read, watch, listen some more to smarter people:
