It seems that a lot of people want to pitch me a narrative.
From Nautil.us, April 8:
Klaus Schwab & Thierry Malleret
Global solutions, like the greening of the world’s financial system, begin with the right story.
What future do we face? What future do we want? What must we do to get there?
These three questions preoccupy us all. We can’t predict the future. However, we can imagine it and even design it; no outcome is predetermined and, as cognitive human beings, we retain the agency to shape the world we want. Perhaps most critically, we can also prepare for the future, by confronting both the risks that we can mitigate and the things that will surprise us. As the most effective conduits for ideas, narratives have the unique power to help us determine what’s going on, what lies ahead, and what needs to be done.
Defined in the simplest possible terms, a narrative is a story about something. Stories are essential to us because as human beings and social animals, we are storytelling creatures. In his 1938 novel Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it.” Robert Shiller, the “father” of narrative economics, goes one step further, linking narratives to the decisions we make: “The human brain has always been highly tuned towards narratives, whether factual or not, to justify ongoing actions.”
The rich scholarly literature about narratives makes it clear that we think, act, and communicate in terms of narratives, and each interpretation, understanding, or model of how the world operates begins with a story. Narratives provide the context in which the facts we observe can be interpreted, understood, and acted upon. In that sense, they equate to much more than the stories we tell, write, or illustrate figuratively; they end up being the truths, or the ideas we accept as truths, that underpin the perceptions that shape our “realities” and in the process form our cultures and societies. Through narratives, we explain how we see things, how these things work, how we make decisions and justify them, how we understand our place in the world and how we try to persuade others to embrace our beliefs and values. Narratives shape our perceptions, which in turn form our realities and end up influencing our choices and actions. They are how we find meaning in life.....
....MUCH MORE
Hey, that's pretty slick. See how smoothly they slip into their narrative about narratives!It's akin to Johnny Carson's rule on setting up an audience for a joke:
