Our Stories

June 19th, 2008 Posted in The People, Biography

First there are the whole lives of each of us from birth to death, minute by minute, some parts of which we record for ourselves in memory. We narrate to others snippets very much like the geneticist takes out clipped elements of DNA from an entire strand. These are our stories: partial, selected, even edited, enhanced, and distorted.

Such sequences are prominent during political elections. The persona each candidate presents is made up of a collection of significant stories. (The look, the rhetorical style, the manner, the acts and commitments, the judgment and such complete the portrait.) Through emphasis, shading, omissions and exaggerations these stories are stretched into myths that sometimes approximate reality. Through the story we think we know the person.

But opposing politicos search out and publicize events and interpretations that alter the image of the other. So each person’s myth has many possible faces: the multi-sources of information, the multi-perceptions with which the audience takes it up. The myth-image can become fuzzy but it still makes a definite set of probability patterns: Is this war hero a teller of tall tales? Is this scholar a dummy? Is this husband or wife a philanderer? Does this reformer consort with inside operators–the dreaded lobbyists? Does a mind change too readily or is it too rigid?

Beyond politics and elections we, the people, have our own stories and it is only by passing these myths of the politicians through the prisms of our experiences of real face-to-face others that we can bring the candidates’ larger than life, movie screen, overpowering advertising impact down to human scale. If we appreciate our interconnectedness, we will not fall into the cult of the personality or the cult of the demon. Our leaders and our cadres, we must remind ourselves, are real people just like ourselves. To know that is a step toward liberation.

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These stories are interlocked and take us in their infinite detail back to the underbelly of our society, to the bottom up sociology of the people. If alive at the time, every American has a 9/11/01 story, a World War II story and so on. Theoretically there is an interlock here, the many stories of the people and the sovereign story of the collective’s cadre but one sometimes feels that the path through is missing, that you can’t get there from here.

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Every story refers back and refers forward and refers to the sides and even up and down. The parents and the children. The friends, associates, kinsmen. The spouses, companions and comrades. The before and the after. The parallel. Each of us is ego central, the main character in our own stories, yet all those who have parts in our stories are ego central in their own. From story to story we step to stage center or back toward the wing or down to be members of the audience whose part is to hear the tale. Who each of us is depends on who (plus where and when) is narrating.

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This is the first link: the cross participation in the stories of each other as main character, important figure, bit player, witness, or part of the audience to the telling. This pushes toward the concrete–below the myth to the event itself, the who, what, when, where questions that investigative journalists, detectives and historians track. The connects we want are real.

Another link, the sharing of the formal pattern of the event. Each event and its myth is unique but it fits into an abstract form with others where there is a similarity. So we can all see the abstract connect in the break-up of intimate pairs. Death, divorce, separation, end dating and relating. The pattern is frequently built into the understanding within the culture and social order, but it may also be an invention or speculation of the sociologist. So the break-up of a business firm and the dispersion of its owners and employees, the end of a limited task for which a special company has been formed like the group that makes a stage play or movie or raises a barn or gathers a farm crop, the demobilized military unit, and so on–all fit this split and scatter pattern. The same end of relationship is visible. Whether this form will lead to a useful analysis or insight is another question. That is the challenge and the risk.

We could go on to the story-myth contexts of institutions, cultural segments, social organizations, types of action (ie. competition, conflict, cooperation or escape, encounter) and so on, but we have framed the topic of the political condidates’ stories back to a sociology of the people. And since this is a blog, not a book, our take on this story is done.