The Story of Stories:
To seek justification for their frantic temporality in impossibleness of this universe, humans have, since the cognitive revolution, identified themselves and united under the uniqueness of their stories. Regardless of their nature and time, imagined realities, philosophical constructs, dogmatic and artistic expressions have clustered humans into tribes, cultures, and empires. Prophets and philosophers defined the underlying metaphysics of stories, jurists and artists embellished and expanded the episteme of stories; kings, generals, and politicians added power and structures, ultimately transforming stories into meta-narratives—the foundational geneses of complex human civilizations
Consider the tales of Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Aztec gods; The Odyssey, Mahabharata, and the Epic of Gilgamesh; I Ching, Analects, and The Mandate of Heavens assigned to ancient China, Korea, and Japan’s celestial kingdoms; Abrahamic scriptures of monotheism and primordial theology of heavens and hell. Modern political stories include Britain single-handedly saving the world from German Nazis; Kim Jong-un leading North Korea’s liberation struggle against Japan; America’s Pilgrim Fathers as faultless saints; legends of Napoleon, Churchill, Bolivar, Mandela, Gandhi, Jinnah, and Nobunga’s unsurpassable heroisms.
The interrelationship between stories and systems has been consequential and complex. Humans carved out both order and chaos from their stories. For instance, Mongol cavalries’ belief in Tengri’s “mandate for conquest” drove their victories from Poland to the Sea of Japan. Alongside public executions, Mongols brought enforced peace, Pax-Mongolica, which pacified the Silk Road trade route and made possible an enormous East-West exchange of riches, enabling the Doges of Venice, the Medici of Florence, and the Dukes of Milan to fund the Renaissance aesthetic projects.
The Blend of Reason:
Throughout history, humans rationalized their stories’ paranormality. Examples include: Socratic rational intervention in Homer’s moral matrix; Al-Kindi, Avicenna, and Averroes’ logical contributions to Islamic theological orthodoxy; Thomas Aquinas’ Aristotelian Christianity; Copernican heliocentrism; Newton’s Gravity and his conception of space and time as sensorium of God; Descartes’ rationalism and Bacon’s empiricism; Shakespeare’s aesthetic bridge between the divine and the mundane transformed Greek tragedy’s mysteries and moralities, once populated by allegorical heroes, cults of gods, devils and demons, into the richness of human experience, pain, romance, ambition and power; Social contract theories of Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau; Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; Marx’s Communist Manifesto; Darwin’s Evolution and Einstein’s Relativity. These interventions humanized human stories by merging science, logic, freedom, secularism, and democracy.
Metanarratives:
The 20th century saw geopolitical manifestations of metanarratives like Liberalism, Fascism, and Communism, forged by centuries of stories’ analytical and metaphysical strands. Liberalism’s triumph lies in embracing human souls’ opportunism for better condition and ideas. By guaranteeing metaphysical and corporeal freedoms—including worship, association, speech, property, and self-governance— liberalism accepted human stories’ complexity, whereas Fascism and Communism collapsed due to rational inconsistencies. Hegelian dialectics aspirants like Francis Fukuyama described Cold War’s dramatic end and supremacy of Liberalism as humanity’s final socio-political order.
However, this description overlooked societies’ resilience in preserving civilizational stories, particularly Russia’s, rooted in Eastern Orthodox sacraments and literary traditionalism. Iconic stories–Eugene Onegin, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, The Captain’s Daughter, Crime and Punishment– enduringly shaped the country’s social consciousness. With wounded pride, Russia found intellectual refuge in Alexander Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory, a theory rebranding Eurasian identity using collective anthropology, deconstructing modern definitions of freedom and human rights, and rejecting liberal democracy’s universal application. Notably, in his book ‘The Foundation of Geopolitics’, published 1997, assigned reading in the Russian Military General Staff Academy, he posits “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning”. Russian strategic mindset is shaped by the interplay of Alexander Dugin’s philosophical framework and its geographical realities, described by Robert-.D Kaplan as ‘the Curse of Geography’–the vast ocean of land with expansive borders and harsh climate. Conversely, libertarians vehemently criticize Dugin, labeling him ‘the most dangerous philosopher’ and his theory as neofascism’.
Meanwhile, China’s rise has revitalized Eurasian geopolitics. By carefully examining the Soviets’ mistakes, China reimagined a fusion of ancient Tianxia (All-Under-Heavens), reformed socialism, and economic pragmatism, creating a transcontinental economic push in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Some other authoritarian countries, North Korea, Iran and Turkey, also subscribe to the Eurasian narrative. Therefore, the great powers’ play on geo-strategic stage transcend territorial disputes and resource competition. It is also a contest of legacy stories, values, worldviews, that define their places in the future global order.
Moreover, the importance of stories is evident from the havocking geopolitics around Jerusalem. Instead of tourists strolling along cobblestone streets, absorbing metaphysical reveries, snapping selfies, and savoring olive-rich, exotic Maftoul in café afternoons with live Arabic music, the stories of holy rocks, temples, mosques, prophets, saints and angels, provoke rockets, riots, and airstrikes, rendering this city the most contested real-estate on the planet. Despite sufficient land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River to build homes, schools and hospitals for Muslims and Jews, Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh rightly notes, in the context of the Temple Mount and Dom of the Rock dispute, ‘Jews and Muslims, armed with nuclear weapons, are about to commit one of the worst massacres of human beings, ever, while fighting over a rock’.
Systematizers:
In conclusion, humanity’s intricate web of stories is inescapable. Contrary to Albert Camus’ assertion, our collective failure lies not in crafting a universally accepted story but in failing to establish a harmonious coexistence of diverse stories. Who does not want such a system in place, and why? Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism in Twilight of Idols provides the answer: “Systematizers.”
Systematizers are the exploiters grabbing profit and power from stories. They degenerate and exploit humans’ unique capacity for metaphysical and creative expression. Whether the beneficiaries of dogmatic or traditional authoritarianism in Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran and its proxies; or China’s economic pragmatism, which may mask a pursuit of strategic hegemony through debt-driven soft power in poor countries; or corporate power manipulators, weapon-makers, and evangelical extremists in Western liberal democracies; or far-right fundamentalists in Israel, relentlessly pursuing the revival of a 3000-year-old Kingdom of David through illegal settlements, forced migrations, and indiscriminate bombings – all such forms of systematization must be mistrusted. It is the oppression a system-giving philosophy imposes on the freedom of human instinctive judgment. Systematizers enforce tyrannical subscription to stories, sowing hysteria in religionists, prejudice in nationalists, and dictatorship in socialists; ultimately, they glorify sociopolitical monopoly, undermining individual intuition, objectivity, and human becomingness – the dynamic, universal process of self-actualization and transformation. Let us recognize the urgent need to mistrust systematizers and foster an inclusive, liberated approach to storytelling, embracing the rich tapestry of human experience.
—The Author is a columnist and member of UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy in the National Defence University of Pakistan.
