The Greatest Meta-Story Ever Told
People need to live stories.
The number of possible stories we can live is infinite, but their range is not boundless. Not every story that can be thought up is a satisfying one. Stories need to make sense at multiple levels; a story which is too obviously contradicted by the facts of the world invites cognitive dissonance and will eventually be discarded.
A story can make sense intellectually but still leave us unsatisfied. Reason has important input into what story we can live, but not a final veto. Atheists can’t understand how people still convert to ancient religions that have had their cosmologies extensively falsified. Religious people can’t understand how atheists continue to live in such a disenchanted, nihilistic world.
Haha, intuition goes ‘brr!’
People who value intellectual consistency are constantly smug and dismayed at the stories normies live in.
For example, some people look obsessively for consistency in ethics. They might try on virtue ethics, deontology, or consequentialism, trying to manage the classic ethical trade-off of repugnance versus consistency.
Most people seem to get by just fine applying deontological principles where it seems appropriate or consequentialism or virtue ethics where it seems appropriate. If you demand a meta-theory from them about when to apply each one, they are like to shrug and say something that amounts to: “moral intuitions go brr!”
We have some input into the stories we live in, but in many ways, they choose us. Another way to say this is that we choose them by criteria that are mostly unconscious to us. For example, we can’t simply say “I wish to be happy, therefore I will adopt a story that says hydrogen maximization in the universe is the highest good and we therefore live in the best of all possible worlds.” It doesn’t work like that.
Religion
One of the enduring appeals of religious stories are the presence of “polyvalent symbols.” These are the symbols that attract multiple projections and interpretations and seem great at spawning new ones. The Fall from the Garden is one of these. Polyvalent symbols invite us to find meaning in them but are coy about what that meaning is.
A huge source of anxiety now is that the materialist worldview seems intellectually unassailable, but also deeply anemic and undernourished. The religious worldview, on the other hand, is emotionally, aesthetically and spiritually more fulfilling but also seems implausible in light of our current knowledge. Finding a synthesis of these two that allows us to have meaningful agency and a sense of enchantment in the world, while also engaging in an open-ended search for truth, is one of the great spiritual and philosophical challenges of our time.
What do we want in a story anyways?
In an epistemic search for truth, unfalsifiability is usually a bad thing. In constructing a story of the world, it may be a good thing! Stories blend the normative and descriptive. They aren’t just truth claims about the world as it is, but stances on what the appropriate interpretation of things and how to relate to them. If your story is unfalsifiable, you can stop worrying about whether it is “true” and instead worry about other questions: does this story offer a satisfying way to live? Will it provide direction and comfort in moments of great stress and crisis?
Our stories can break down for any number of reasons. Cognitive dissonance is just one of those reasons. Other ones may be that the story isn’t satisfying social, emotional or spiritual needs. Another may be that it is preserving deeply dysfunctional patterns of behavior and thought that stunt our growth and poison our happiness. Meditation, psychedelics, and therapy all seem to be ways that people break down the stories they are living in. The time immediately after we lose our story is often a very difficult one! But it is also an invitation to construct a new and better story. It can mean moving from a hovel to a palace, or from a wasteland to a lush garden.
We live in shared and overlapping stories all the time. This is because we share important characteristics with each other and because we need to co-operate to secure our survival, growth and happiness. Unfortunately, there is probably not a single story that is satisfying for everyone.