When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

Neil Postman

The recent flap over Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a timely reminder that stories and how we tell them still matter. After all, human beings are social primates, evolved over millions of years to be even more highly tuned to intersocial signals and cues than we are to the rest of the physical environment. Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary psychologist, has estimated that we spend around 65% of our conversation time just, well, gossiping.

We’ve all felt the discomfort and awkwardness when going to a partner’s work gathering or school reunion, where the lion’s share of the talk revolves around, especially when the drinks start flowing, juicy stories, salacious rumors, and other flirtations, sleights, and outrages that make up the stuff of a shared history and/or a tight-knit group.

We also should all be aware by now that our “news” outlets feast on this human proclivity to fall in love with drama, and the more highly-charged and theatrical, the better. “If it bleeds it leads” might be a tired cliche, but it’s still true, and the hunger for the dramatic has fully leeched into areas of our public discourse that really should be immune to gossipy tale-telling.

This limitation of the human primate brain, the desire for stories and more stories, is starting to do incredible damage to our ability to understand exactly what the hell is going on. When a society’s only lens on the world follows the styles of conflict, triumph, failure, battle, redemption, salvation, jubilation, and other social threads of interpersonal relation, then a view to the actual forces that most deeply shape our lives is lost.

This is currently most evident in the US with the rise of Trumpism and its companion, full-spectrum cultural and political polarization. Trump himself is the most dramatic president we have ever had in this country — and it’s not close. Everything in orange-hued Trumpworld is an emotionally charged yarn, a thrilling tale of triumph or betrayal, conquest or defeat, flag-hugging jubilation or hand-wringing dread over pizza shop cannibals and creeping Sharia Law. There is no boring, neutral territory any more. What should be the most bland, straightforward things, like medical advice, educational standards, locally-administered elections, and egghead economic indicators, are now full-fledged battlegrounds of righteousness vs. wickedness, arenas of endless and exciting purges, which are needed to rid the world of devious enemies like labor economists, reflecting-pool vandals, sub sandwich throwers, and most evil of all, trans high-school athletes.

It’s not a big secret that Trump himself has an unquenchable thirst for The Story. He can’t stay awake in those boring cabinet meetings, until, I would imagine, someone brings up some conflict or betrayal that needs immediate, dramatic tweeting in response. And there is no question that the actions of Trump and his stubbled, bleached, and balding minions can absolutely create heart-wrenching tales of suffering, persecution, despair, and death. Unserious people find it very easy to inflict serious carnage, especially when justified by kindergarten-level morality tales.

The temptation when confronting the power theater of Trumpism is to respond in kind, embracing the dramatic narrative of conflict between two metaphysically and morally distinct cultural armies. As is often heard in Democratic circles, “We need fighters, people who will stand up to Trump!” It’s an alluring thought, seemingly a no-brainer. But it’s akin to a Chinese finger trap, or struggling while in a boa’s grasp — more effort seems to tighten the grip.

While it’s not exactly what Hannah Arendt meant by the “banality of evil” (she was talking about regular, middle-class Germans being passively coopted by the bureaucracy of despotism), the ascendence of The Story to the top of the political and cultural heap is itself a retreat into the comfortable straitjacket of the past, where superstition and supernatural idiocy stalked the land, turning every rock, tree, and wave into demons and angels, works of the devil or of God.

In a sense, we can view the primacy of the story as a brilliant primate’s feeble attempt to control an indifferent ecological reality by forcing it into a anthropomorphic, social template, giving the aloof universe a fake dramatic arc. We’re treading on that idea of cyclical history vs. the linear history created by ancient Jewish and Zoroastrian thinkers, the latter of which gets passed on to Christianity, which then recasts the earth as a single, arid story about disobedience, sin, death, redemption, and eternal life.

We’ll leave my atheist take on all that stuff for another time. Suffice it to say, I don’t find religious worldviews particularly persuasive or even that interesting, but I understand the dearth of meaning in the world that drives people to the solutions offered by faith. I just think we need better life structures in place, so that a different and compelling narrative can emerge on non-religious grounds. But that’s for a future post.

For now, let’s just stick to our current poly-crisis, where our primate desire to fit everything into dramatic terms of cosmic conflict is now killing us. Stories, it must be said, are NOT the story. The Great Man view of history is bunk. Our present problems, and reality itself, are driven by material and pan-social forces, long-duration algorithms of technology, production, consumption, population trends, energy systems, transportation, settlement patterns, housing and industry footprints, food system dynamics, etc. These are the boring topics of science, which is the most decidedly NON-dramatic way of knowing things that humans have yet created. These are the tedious ways of thinking through which we must operate, in order to truly understand our universe and our place in it.

Trumpism can be seen as one huge attempt to crush any kind of scientific knowledge that cannot be subsumed under, and coopted by, the master template of dramatic conflict. Anything that doesn’t fit into the exciting Us-vs-Them story, like commonsense vaccine policies, or settled but uncomfortable matters of historical fact, or unconditional access to reproductive rights and healthcare in general, must be sacrificed on the altar of The Story. Anything that cannot be run through the template of interpersonal or ideological war must be brought to heel or destroyed.

As is my habit, I want to bring this back to the idea of Bigger Home Bases, the larger household groups of 125-150 people that I believe must be our future social format if we are to survive and then embark on a sacred mission to rehabilitate the planet. I see the BHB project (see many earlier posts for deets) as a recapturing of the interpersonal at appropriate scale, INSIDE the household itself, where it belongs. If the drama that has been illegitimately projected onto our political and cultural systems can be tamed and put back where it belongs, at the appropriate level of the BHBs, then people could then bring the government to heel by bleeding the misplaced drama out of it.

In other words, the BHBs themselves would be a new National Story, but a kind of non-story where all the primate desires for drama would be put back into a concrete, traditional tribal format, where it makes sense. The government could then be transformed into a “banality of good,” boringly providing the conditions — Universal Basic Income, free MMT-based federal spending, and logistical support for BHBs — for people to thrive again, where they can live those positively dramatic lives in real time and real space, instead of giving their energy to the threadbare stories of theocracy and nationalism, which have always been used to control and impoverish the masses.