Billions of humans instantly recognize an old jolly fat man with a white beard, a red suit, and a bag full of toys. We can do so even if we’ve never met the man, even if we no longer believe in him. Santa’s image alone recalls his story’s vivid details into our imagination. Santa isn’t part of our objective reality — the physical characteristics of our world. And while recalling Santa can bring us pleasure, he is also not part of our subjective reality — the emotions and feelings we experience inside.

Santa is something else. He is a story that we share and retell generation after generation. He exists in intersubjective reality, this world of shared stories and ideas. Intersubjective reality also contains ideas like currency, and nations, and laws, and justice, 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. Many animals also have a sense of ownership — don’t try to take a bone from a dog — so humans aren’t the only ones to experience intersubjective reality, but we developed the cognitive ability to really build upon it. And that changed everything!

I suppose that somewhere, deep in our evolutionary history, our forebears acquired imaginations that gave them the ability to tell each other stories about the world and themselves. This ability may have been central to their capacity to band together into groups larger than their immediate family. In a small clan, members know each other intimately. They know someone objectively: she exists. And subjectively: she is clever and makes me feel good about myself. But also intersubjectively: she has personal knowledge of gods and what they want, and she can ask them to intercede to insure a safe hunt. This intersubjective reality is the story that clan members tell each other. It can be passed on not only inside the group, but also to outsiders. Maybe she becomes famous. Hunters from distant bands of humans, who never met this woman personally or have any direct feeling for her, might want to obtain favorable conditions for their hunts, thus sharing mythology for taking down big game which becomes part of their beliefs. This intersubjective reality is the glue that binds peoples who have never met each other but still share common stories. Stories are one of the links, together with technology and trade, that helped build large human networks.

Language allowed us to learn from people we’ve never met, to hear about events that happened far away in both time and space. Maybe we felt empathy for the suffering those strangers experience. Maybe we can learn from each other’s laws. We can recognize a nation and decide whether we like one ruled by a dictator or king or one ruled by a democracy. All of that is based on the stories we tell each other. Stories made us human. Writing those stories down expanded that capacity exponentially.

We tell stories of American Exceptionalism — that our country is better than all the rest. Others believe that their rulers were chosen by God and possess divinity. White nationalists believe themselves to be part of a superior race of humanity which entitles them to treat everyone else badly. Some humans believe that our world is at the center of the universe and it’s flat. Others worry that if intelligent extraterrestrial life is discovered, humanity wouldn’t survive because it would no longer be special. There are those who wait for The Rapture, while others find that belief ridiculous. These are all stories that we tell; those stories that we believe define which groups we belong to. For example, religions used their stories to bind together early groups of believers into communities.

Recently, mass media — radio and television — formed a type of community not based on belief but rather on shared experience. Everyone listened to The Shadow or watched the I Love Lucy, or waited to find out what happened on the latest episode of Dallas, and consumed the same news programs night after night. Those stories formed a kind of shared reality. Some believe that television, as a mass distributor of shared narratives, bonded us into a cohesive nation. But now, with a new mass distributor of information, the Internet, that’s been fractured. We no longer consume the same stories, and social bonds with our neighbors have weakened as a result.

My first book, Suddenly, Paris, was partly about the breakdown of social order after a core social belief was shattered. Once people stopped believing themselves to be people, they stopped caring about others, society, and even personal survival. Their world literally fell apart. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, make us us. In Suddenly, Paris, when the story became toxic, people broke. This was a breakdown of intersubjective reality. Learning the truth resulted in the complete dissolution of the social order, followed by total civilization collapse. Intersubjective reality led to death. Suddenly, Paris, explored artificial realities and meanings. Fortunately, most of that collapse and death happens early in the book and far away from Earth, so it’s not as grim as you might think! And most of us enjoy a good monster story.

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!