The Story of Your Life

By Steve Madison

And so the time has come for you to tell the story of your life. How will you do it? A straightforward, linear narrative? Perhaps you will adopt an experimental approach. Do you aim to produce something of great artistic merit? Will you tell the story simply, or do you want to convey something complex and beguiling? Will you be scrupulously truthful, or do you intend to embroider the facts and events? Perhaps you want to present a fantasy version of your life rather than the real thing.

Perhaps you want others to admire you and respect you, so you will censor all the unsavory and disreputable things you did. You definitely won’t be presenting a “warts and all” account. Or maybe you want people to know exactly who you are, so you will tell it exactly as it is. You will show the world your true self and they can take it or leave it.

What kind of audience do you want? Do you seek people of refinement and the highest taste, or are you eager for the masses to crowd in to hear your tale? Are you an elitist or a populist? Do you want to have as large an audience as possible or as select an audience as you can find? Is quality better than quantity? Will you produce a crowd-pleasing thriller, or a high-minded meditation? Perhaps a horror story captures the essence of your life, or a sci-fi, or a western, or a rom-com. It is more tragedy than comedy, or did the laughs and fun times flow thick and fast?

There are so many factors to consider. A life is not an easy thing, and its telling is even harder.

Come inside and learn how to tell the story of your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 12, 2020
• ISBN: 9781716514593

Steve Madison

Steve Madison investigates all the mysteries of mind and soul.

Book preview

The Story of Your Life

Steve Madison

Copyright © Steve Madison 2020

All rights reserved.

978-1-71651-459-3

Imprint: Lulu.com

Table of Contents

The Story of Your Life

Lights, Cameras, Actions

Story People

The Attention Sellers

The Hero’s Defects

Story Mistakes

The Clans

The God in the Machine

The Little Mermaid – 21st Century

Glamor

The Star

Searching for Yourself

The Ministry?

A Poem and a Mistake

Apep

Pandora

Marketing

The Complexes

The Coming Race

The Breach

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Subscribers

Above and Below

The Hateful Ones

Race

Island Life

The Trump Plague

In Their Face

Conclusion

Lights, Cameras, Actions

And so the time has come for you to tell the story of your life. How will you do it? A straightforward, linear narrative? Perhaps you will adopt an experimental approach. Do you aim to produce something of great artistic merit? Will you tell the story simply, or do you want to convey something complex and beguiling? Will you be scrupulously truthful, or do you intend to embroider the facts and events? Perhaps you want to present a fantasy version of your life rather than the real thing. Perhaps you want others to admire you and respect you, so you will censor all the unsavory and disreputable things you did. You definitely won’t be presenting a warts and all account. Or maybe you want people to know exactly who you are, so you will tell it exactly as it is. You will show the world your true self and they can take it or leave it.

What kind of audience do you want? Do you seek people of refinement and the highest taste, or are you eager for the masses to crowd in to hear your tale? Are you an elitist or a populist? Do you want to have as large an audience as possible or as select an audience as you can find? Is quality better than quantity? Will you produce a crowd-pleasing thriller, or a high-minded meditation? Perhaps a horror story captures the essence of your life, or a sci-fi, or a western, or a rom-com. It is more tragedy than comedy, or did the laughs and fun times flow thick and fast?

There are so many factors to consider. A life is not an easy thing, and its telling is even harder.

Story People

We are all story people. Why? Because we use manmade languages that are designed for telling stories, designed to put each of us at the center of our own story, and our nation’s story at the heart of our understanding of the world’s story.

We all have a readymade protagonist – the Ego, I. We follow ourselves around all day long, narrating our own adventures, and often telling them to others. We don’t go to bars to do science, mathematics and philosophy. We go to bars to sit down with our friends, have a drink and tell each other stories. We might discuss our adventures at work, or on vacation, or during play, or dredge our past for highlights, for flashbulb memories. We all have our funny and weird anecdotes stored away for use as the alcohol flows. The stronger the alcohol, and the more of it we drink, the more lurid and exaggerated our tales become – to the great amusement of our friends. The more candid we are, the better our friends like us.

We might discuss the political stories of the day, or what’s on the TV. We might discuss the new box sets, the big movie releases, the latest songs, the newest celebrities. It’s one story after another. In fact, it’s nothing but stories. All through society, the same question is asked, What’s the story?

Everything has to be turned into a narrative to create understanding. Why are science, mathematics and philosophy so hard for most people? It’s because they can’t be converted into stories. They lack story structure and logic. They don’t engage the emotions. They don’t rely on faith and mysticism. They aren’t about fables and parables and allegories and metaphors.

Humans understand the world via stories. What are myths, legends and religions if not stories? Jesus Christ told stories. He certainly didn’t write mathematical equations. Mohammed, an illiterate, dictated a book of stories. He didn’t teach science. Moses went up a mountain and brought back a tablet of ten commandments, not a book of Leibnizian and Hegelian philosophy. He didn’t mention quantum mechanics.

Stories shape us as individuals. They also shape societies and nations. Every nation has its national myths that define the national character. What is the American Dream? It’s the defining driver of America. The American Dream isn’t a dream of becoming a nation of geniuses, a people of the highest quality. It isn’t about making America Ground Zero of science, mathematics and philosophy. The American Dream is about the individual becoming stinking rich and living in unparalleled luxury; obscene wealth apparently being a sure sign of divine favor. It’s the dream of predatory capitalism, the economic system that defines the entire American psyche.

Stories structure both the private and public domains. People succeed when they reflect the stories of their society. Only very rarely can people insert new stories. People want the same old story … the same but different (very slightly different).

Stories are humanity’s most potent force, more powerful than any weapon. They are the true weapon of mass destruction. More people have died because of the stories they believed, or didn’t believe, than any weapons ever killed. Weapons are wielded in the name of stories. That’s what justifies their use. Weapons are used in the service of stories, not the other way around.

Humans are hardwired for story logic. That’s why it’s so hard for them to grasp mathematical and philosophical conceptual logic. Scientific logic, such as it is, is easier to swallow because it is linked to human observation and for so many people seeing is believing (which is itself a simple story for simple-minded people).

Average humans are picture-thinkers. They need something to look at. They need sensory things. Average humans are also emotion-thinkers. They are preoccupied with thinking about emotional things, not non-emotional things. They find non-emotion boring and unengaging, which is why science, mathematics and philosophy have failed to make much of a cultural impression on the world, and are mostly ignored by average people.

Story is ubiquitous in human society. It’s impossible to imagine human beings as non-storytellers. Intelligent machines, which had no interest in stories, would be incomprehensible to humanity.

Why do severe autistics struggle to fit in? It’s because their storytelling abilities are radically defective. If you can’t tell stories in a society that’s all about storytelling, how will you fare? Not well! Non-storytellers can’t function in a storytelling society and don’t understand society.

Stories produce religions. Without stories, humanity would be free of the world’s major religions. Religions are ultra stories, which purport to explain, in story form, the whole of reality. Just look at the Book of Genesis.

People can literally believe in stories and worship story characters as deities. That’s the sheer power of story.

Stories are a kind of virus. They colonize people’s minds and make them serve the story’s agenda. Stories can go viral. In essence, it’s stories that decide what people believe and feel. Stories shape their opinions and aspirations. Remove stories and human civilization would collapse. A world without stories is an anarchy. It’s the jungle. It’s the world of libertarians who think only of themselves. Stories are always about relations between people. They presuppose others. There are precious few stories about men living alone on desert islands, and such stories are interesting only because of their rarity and remoteness from normal life.

Robert Anton Wilson said, Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies, etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.

Stories are the primary way of blocking intelligence. Stupidity flows directly from the stories – the absurdities – people are prepared to, and eager, to believe. Story logic based on emotion makes it impossible for average people to understand analytic logic, based on reason. Analytic argument belongs to a different category from story logic, but story people always commit the category error of trying to argue against analytic logic using story logic, by quoting the Bible, Torah, Koran, the teachings of the Buddha, or whatever. Idiots always think that stories trump reason and logic, that a good story is superior to science, philosophy and mathematics. The human brain is structured for story, not for analysis. The central reason for that is that story is hardwired to the emotional centers of the brain while analysis is disconnected from emotion. Analysis belongs to the neocortex, while stories gain their energy and power from the limbic system, the central processor of emotion, and the brain stem, the center of primitive will, appetite and desire.

Advertising – abbreviated, concentrated, short storytelling – always targets the limbic system and brain stem, and never the neocortex. You don’t persuade people by giving them reason and logic, cold facts and difficult analytic arguments.

Wittgenstein said, If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. We could never understand any species that told drastically different stories from ourselves. We can’t even understand different human tribes that subscribe to different stories. Politics in the USA is fantastically polarized because the conservative story is completely different from the liberal story.

The conservative rabble rouser Andrew Breitbart said, Politics is downstream of culture. The Christian right has eagerly seized on this. Their task is to win the culture war, and then politics will reflect their victorious culture. Donald Trump continuously plays to right-wing, and alt-right (far right) story tropes and culture. In fact, that was exactly why he proved so successful when running to be the Republican presidential candidate, and then running for the presidency itself. He turned politics into right-wing culture. That’s why he’s also the most loathed American president in history, apart from Abraham Lincoln, who was murderously detested by the whole of the right-wing, fascist South.

If aliens came to this world, they would not understand humans. The aliens would have different stories. Ours would make no sense to them.

If ants or bees – collectivist creatures, obsessed with the colony – came to consciousness, would they tell completely different stories from individualistic humans? What about predators such as sharks, tigers or hawks? Their stories would all be about lone predators, and herds and flocks of prey.

Would it be possible for any being to come to consciousness and to think mathematically, scientifically and philosophically rather than in terms of emotive stories? That’s a key question. Or does story logic always dialectically precede analytic logic? Does the empirical logic of science always have to be explored before a species can arrive at the rational logic of mathematics?

In human societies, everyone is competing to get their story across, their version of events, their agenda, whatever serves their needs. All of history is just one vast, ever-mutating story.

Darwinian evolution, in cultural terms, is story evolution. It’s stories that are subject to random mutation and natural selection. Actually, there’s nothing random going on. Instead, the Hegelian dialectic applies. Stories change according to the definite iterative process of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The process ends when the Absolute Story is attained – the perfect story that explains all other stories, the story to which nothing else can be added or subtracted, and nothing can be changed.

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Humans are bread and circuses creatures, i.e. eat and be entertained (while you’re stuffing your face)! The Roman plebs loved nothing more than to watch Christians being eaten by lions while they ate ye olde popcorn … eating and entertainment combined in one happy package.

Entertainment is all about exciting stories. The most popular stories are those where the stakes are highest, where the drama is most intense.

Why is sport so popular? It’s because every sporting contest is a story that has to be settled in a vast arena, in front of a huge crowd, in a given, short time. As the clock ticks down, and the result gets closer, the drama ratchets up.

The most