Billions of humans can instantly recognize a man with a white beard, a red suite, and a bag full of toys as Santa. We can do so even if we never met the man, even if we no longer believe in him. Just Santa’s image alone can bring his story in vivid details in our imagination. Santa, of course, doesn’t represent objective reality — stones, grass, mountains, sun, and other physical characteristics of the world we live in. And while the story of Santa can bring us pleasure and make us smile, he also is not really part of our subjective reality — the emotions and feelings we experience inside. Love is part of subjective reality. We are aware of it, but we can’t point at it as we can at a particular tree. Santa though is something else. He is a fictional character, a story that we share and tell and retell each other, generation after generation. He exists in this world of stories and ideas — intersubjective reality. This reality also hosts things like money, and nations, and laws, and ownership. We can’t touch ownership, but we know what it is and the laws that bind it and the money that’s required to acquire it. While many animals on Earth experience objective and subjective realities. Humans might be, as far as we know, the only species that developed the cognitive ability to inhabit intersubjective reality. And that changed everything!

Language allowed us to meet people we never came face to face with, to learn about events that happened far away in time and space. Written stories expanded that capacity exponentially. Stories made us human.

Somewhere, deep in our evolutionary history, homo sapiens acquired imaginations and with that the ability to tell each other stories about the world and themselves. This ability was perhaps central to our capacity to band together into groups far larger than our immediate family or clan. In a small band, members know each other. Not only objectively — this person exists. And subjectively — she is nice and makes me feel good about myself. But also intersubjectively — this woman is the leader of our group and she has personal knowledge of gods and what they want to insure a safe hunt. This intersubjective reality is the story that band members tell each other and that can be passed on not only inside the group, but also to outsiders. Hunters from distant bands of humans, who never met this woman personally or have any feeling for her, might want to get information about favorable conditions for their hunts, thus sharing mythology about the opportune times and arrangements for taking down big game in their environment. This intersubjective reality becomes the glue that binds peoples who never met each other but still share common beliefs, common stories. Stories are thus the links that help form large human networks.

Stories allow people who never met and don’t know each other (so no common direct subjective or objective realities) to still not only understand each other’s lives but to feel empathy for the suffering those strangers might experience and feel. But not only that. We can learn each other’s laws and figure out how foreign currency work. We can recognize a nation and decide that it is a democratic one or one ruled by a dictator and make decisions based on that. But all of that is nothing but the stories we tell each other.

We tell stories of American Exceptionalism. Others believe that their rulers were placed on their thrones by gods and possess divinity. White nationalists believe in the existence of a super race and them being part of that race. Humans spent millennia believing our world to be the center of the universe. And some still believe it to be flat. There is a large contingent of humanity that worries about what would happen if there is other intelligent life in the universe — how would we survive if we are no longer special? There are those who wait for rapture and others that find it ridiculous. But of these are stories that we tell and that define which group we belong to.

Before the advent of television and, prior to that, books, and even earlier stories as told by songs, paintings, and poems, it was very hard to bind communities of humans beyond family members. Religion changed that — it formed a community out of believers via the stories it told. And then mass media, starting with television, changed the scope of our ability to connect even more. Everyone watched the Brady Bunch, waited on the latest episode of Dallas, and consumed the same news night after night. We consumed stories that formed our shared reality. Television as a mass distributor of shared narratives bonded us onto a cohesive nation. But we no longer consume the same stories, and so our social bonds with our neighbors have weakened.

My first book, Suddenly, Paris, was partly about the breakdown of social order after the core social belief was broken. Once people stoped believing themselves to be people, they stopped caring about others, society, and even life. Their world literally fell apart. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are are what makes us us. When the story became toxic, it broke people. This was the breakdown of intersubjective reality. In Suddenly, Paris, learning the truth resulted in the complete dissolution of social order followed by total collapse civilization and then the world. Intersubjective reality led to death. That was the main point of Suddenly, Paris, a book that explored artificial realities and meanings.

So grab a good story. It might be the link you need to find your people!

I’m making both Suddenly, Paris and its sequel Coding Peter available free for download with this newsletter. There are bunch of other stories that are worth the look! Happy reading!