The Barrier – A Short Story

This is a work of fiction. Characters, events, locales, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The Barrier

by Christian Horst

At the end of a canyon lies a town, and all who live there share in abundance and joy. There is no way to the town but through a canyon, and the canyon walls cannot be climbed. My tribe has journeyed far to reach the town, as have many others from all over the land.

Before us stands a great vertical surface, stretching from wall to wall and high into the air. It is transparent like tinted glass, darkening the view of the other side. I wonder about it, but no one else seems to mind, walking through it as if it isn’t there. When I reach it I pause in curiosity. What is this boundary, and why is it here? I reach out my hand and touch it, and find it solid as a wall of plastic.

“Hey.” One of the elders of the tribe calls my name. “You going to stand there all day? Come on.” He passes by me and walks through the barrier.

Confused, I feel around on the area of barrier he just walked through. It is as solid as the rest.

He turns around. “Why are you just standing there? Get a move on.”

I raise my eyebrows and knock on the barrier. The hollow sound echoes through the canyon.

The elder steps toward me and says my name. “Don’t be difficult.”

I throw up my hands. “What am I supposed to do?”

He looks at me for a long moment, and then turns around and says, “If you won’t come, then we’ll move on without you.”

He steps forward, and the rest of the tribe follows, walking around me, passing through the barrier as if it doesn’t exist. I stare after them, tongue-tied at the elder’s casual cruelty, and the ease at which the other tribe members follow his lead. The last member passes by, looks at me, and keeps walking forward. I am left standing alone.

“Hey,” a woman’s voice says. I turn to see a beautiful woman standing nearby, a stranger, smiling at me. She holds out her hand and introduces herself. I shake it and give her my name in turn. “I’m going to the town,” she says. “Want to walk together?”

“I’d love to,” I reply, “but I’m having trouble getting through here.”

“What do you mean?” She asks.

I pat the barrier. She continues to look at me with questioning eyes. “I mean I can’t get through,” I say slowly. “I don’t understand what’s confusing about that.”

“Well,” she says, “I guess if you’re not going, then it was nice to meet you.” She walks through the barrier.

“Wait,” I say, “I’m going, I just can’t get through the barrier.”

She turns around and looks at me. “What barrier?”

I narrow my eyes at her. “What do you mean, what barrier?” I say, hitting it several times with my hand. “The one you just walked through? The one that’s about as easy to miss as the color of the sky?”

She frowns at me. “Look, maybe we’ll meet again in town.” She turns and walks away.

“Wh—” I say, holding up a hand. But she recedes into the distance without looking back.

It suddenly dawns on me what the difficulties I’m having with communication must be. Not only are other people unhindered by the barrier, but they can also neither see nor hear it. It appears that this barrier, as incredible as it may be, only exists for me.

Determined to find a way through, I search the barrier from one wall of the canyon to the other, from the ground to as high as I can reach. Every inch feels as solid as the rest. After a second time through, and a third, I sit down on the ground, exhausted. All around me, strangers continue to walk through the barrier, completely unaware of its existence.

I fall asleep on the grass. When I awaken the next morning, I lie there, staring at the barrier, trying and failing to think of any options for attempting to get past it.

In the corner of my eye, I see a man walking by wearing a psychologist’s uniform. With a spark of hope, I sit up and call out to him. “Hey, can I ask for your help?”

The man sees me and smiles. “Sure,” he says, “what can I do for you?”

“There’s this barrier preventing me from going forward,” I say. “No one else seems to be able to see it.” I tell him about what happened to me yesterday.

“I see,” the psychologist says. “It sounds like you’ve had some failures, and you’re discouraged by them.”

I look down for a moment, thinking. “Yeah,” I say, meeting his eyes again. “I guess that’s true.”

“Well then, if you’re willing to work with me, I’ll have you back on your way toward town in no time.”

I smile and stand up. “All right!” I say. “What do I have to do?”

The psychologist beams. “Great job! That’s the first step down with flying colors! Now, repeat after me. ‘I am not a failure.’”

“I am not a failure,” I say.

“Good. Now say, ‘I have what it takes to succeed.’”

“I have what it takes to succeed.”

“Head high, back straight! ‘I am worthy of success.’”

Enthusiasm boils up within me. “I am worthy of success.”

“‘I am worthy of esteem.’”

“I am worthy of esteem.”

I continue repeating after him, saying things like, “People like to be around me,” and, “I belong in town.” By the time we finish, I am full of vigor, shouting the lines with all the energy I have.

“Awesome!” the man says, clapping me on the back. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? I’ll see you in town.” And without another word, he strolls off.

I hold out my hand, pressing on the barrier. “B-but . . .” He is too far away and doesn’t hear me. I mutter, “But what about the barrier?”

I rap my knuckles against the barrier. It’s still as solid as ever. I wrack my brain, trying to think of where I went wrong, of what I could have said to make the psychologist understand my problem instead of assuming it was in my head.

Maybe he did understand it. Since nobody else can see the barrier, maybe it really is in my head after all. Maybe all I need to do to get it to stop blocking my path is to stop letting it. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. There is no barrier. I am just like everyone else. On my way to town, where there is food and celebration and friendship. There is nothing in my way. I confidently start forward on my journey.

Pain explodes through my nose and forehead, and then my rear. In a daze, I open my eyes to find myself sitting on the ground, the barrier looming above me, dark and solid as ever.

Reality is a bitch. I groan through gritted teeth, and sorely lift myself back to my feet.

Several voices call my name. I turn around to see around ten of my friends coming my way. I sigh, and smile at them. They approach me. “We’re going to town. Come with us!”

“I would like to more than anything,” I say, “but there is a barrier preventing me from moving forward. It seems to only affect me. Look.” I lean against the barrier in such a way that without it, gravity would pull me to the ground.

“Huh,” one of the men says. “That’s weird.”

A woman points and says, “Have you tried going that way?”

I follow her finger to a path in the side of the canyon. Its entrance is on the other side of the barrier. I shake my head. “I can’t reach it.”

“Oh.”

They stay with me for a while, talking and laughing. For a time, I can forget the barrier and the town, and enjoy the company of these wonderful people. But eventually things start to wind down, and they decide to move on.

“We hope you can join us in town soon,” one of them says.

“If it takes a long time, we’ll come visit,” another says. “And you can give us a call anytime you need someone to talk to.” She points to a phone on a small table . . . which is on the other side of the barrier. “See you.” They turn and leave.

I smile sadly and wave. “Bye.”

Others pass me as the days go by. Most ignore me. Some give me dirty looks or shake their heads while pretending not to notice me. Some are kind and believe me, and I can see in the eyes of a few that they have barriers of their own. But I can’t see theirs, and none of them can see mine. Some come back from town to visit me from time to time. They brainstorm ideas with me, or talk about the joys and struggles of town life. I treasure their support. But I learn that I am the only one who can understand my barrier. I am the only one who has a chance at finding a way through.

There is one thing that gives me hope. When I press my thumb hard into the barrier, so much that it starts to hurt, it leaves an indent, which takes about a minute to smooth over again. With no other options, I press hard. Then, I push on the lip of the indent, widening it.

It is a long, tedious task. I have to keep applying pressure to the whole area, lest it rebound and force me to start over from the beginning. I keep pressing until the skin of my thumbs is raw and I start to bleed from beneath my nails. Then I switch over to my knuckles and push with them until they are skinned and my joints throb. Still I keep pushing, hoping that if I push enough, the barrier will tear and I will be able to open a hole big enough to crawl through. I don’t know if that is possible, but there is nothing I can do but try.

People continue to pass by me. Most don’t understand. They don’t see the effort I’m making. A few call me lazy, and tell me that if I refuse to move forward, I don’t deserve to live in the town. I ignore them and keep pushing. They were lucky enough not to have barriers, and because of that, they have the luxury to believe that the world is fair.

As I lean my shoulder to rest against the area I have been pushing on, I notice that others are struggling too. Some lean forward, as if pushed back by a strong wind. Some lift their feet with effort, as if crushed under a great weight. And I realize there is so much more going on, a whole world of struggles and barriers that most people never notice.

At the moment, I don’t have energy to put into anything but my own efforts to get to the town. But somewhere in the back of my mind, a seed is planted, and I think that maybe, once I reach the town, I might devote a portion of the happiness and energy I receive there to helping others through their invisible barriers.

Symbolic Cognition

For years, I’ve been grappling with a question: Why do we expect life to make sense like a story? Why do we try to piece together the events of history and our lives in ways that make narrative sense, rather than logical sense?

I have a hypothesis about this, which I call symbolic cognition. When we see something or think of a concept, we don’t just see it as it is, but also with layers of symbolism. Today, we are going to discuss symbolic cognition through four types of associations: aesthetics and metaphors, memorization, objects with morality, and facts with meaning.

Before we move on, I want to take a moment to talk about the term, symbolic cognition. While contemplating the ways we construct our views of the world through symbols, I searched for an official field of science devoted to it. The closest I could find is a sociological theory called “symbolic interactionism.” However, as far as I could tell, symbolic interactionism is specifically focused on how we view our identities through our relationships with others, whereas symbolic cognition is a framework by which to analyze one of the ways we construct our knowledge and worldviews. If there is an official term for symbolic cognition, or if symbolic interactionism does indeed cover it, I apologize.

Aesthetics and Metaphors

What is it like to hear the murmuring of a crowd? Is it soothing like a babbling brook? Eerie like a flock of squawking crows? Perhaps it’s full of energy, all the people as busy as bees. But a crowd is not bees or crows or a brook, it’s people. The comparisons come to mind because they stimulate our aesthetic senses in similar ways.

When we bite into a strawberry, we sometimes describe it as an explosion of flavor. Why an explosion? It’s because the flavor of a good strawberry can be as intense to our sense of taste as an explosion is to our senses of sight, sound, and touch. Few people are confused when we describe it this way.

When we think and experience concepts and sensations, the information gets all mixed up in our brains. As a result, our entire conceptualization of the world is a web of connections, many of which are not logical, but a this-is-like-that relationship. This is why abstract art and music without lyrics can be so powerful to us. The associations between the colors and the strokes of the brush evoke within us the same emotions as a sunset or a beautiful day in the city. Our unconscious minds make the connections, even if our conscious minds don’t understand it.

Associative Memorization

Our ability to associate logically disconnected concepts gives us an ability for memorization so incredible it might as well be a superpower. Let’s consider the strawberry we mentioned in the previous section. When we bite into the strawberry and experience its explosion of flavor, we see a firetruck drive by, its sirens blaring. This reminds us of a time we were walking by the river and a firetruck drove by, rudely interrupting our peaceful contemplation. Looking at the ripples on the river, we think of mountains being formed and crumbling from the long-term forces of plate tectonics in the Earth’s crust. With this sequence of associations, we can remember the list, “strawberry,” “fire truck,” “river,” “Earth’s crust,” despite the fact that these items have no logical connection with each other.

With practice and creativity, we can remember lists of hundreds or even thousands of items for long periods of time. A great technique for this is to use a memory palace, a place or object we are familiar with enough that we can see it vividly in our mind’s eye. This could be our house or a walk around our neighborhood, or even something like a statue we can hold in our hands. When we want to memorize something, we walk through this palace, associating every item with something we see.

For instance, the hallway leading out of my apartment has five doors. I could mentally walk past each of the doors, assigning something I want to memorize with each of them. Then, when I want to recall that list, I could mentally walk through again, picking up each item from its assigned door. If I want to memorize more than five things, I could open the doors and assign items to the features inside. For another example, my stove has four dials, each with twelve settings: OFF, LO, 1-9, and HI. With these four dials alone, I could memorize 48 things by assigning them to the positions of the dials and associating them with the items on either side.

Associations can also be made by a process called operant conditioning. When we are presented two things together enough times, we tend to associate them with one another. This is most often discussed in the context of creating a physiological reaction by an association, such as a dog salivating to the sound of a bell after being presented with food accompanied by a bell ringing enough times.

Advertisers take advantage of operant conditioning in us. For example, they condition us to see cars as sexy by repeatedly showing us car ads with attractive women in them, and they condition us to see beer as manly by repeatedly showing us ads of beer being enjoyed by strong, bearded men.

Perceiving Objects as Symbols of Morality

Picture the Holy Grail, the Cup of Christ, be it a jeweled golden chalice in your minds eye or a wooden carpenter’s mug. Now push that image aside and imagine you pick up a piece of furniture to find mold growing in a big stain where the carpet meets the wall. Most likely you saw the cup as good and the mold as bad. Not only do we associate concepts with one another, we also associate concepts with value. We feel like objects can be good or bad.

Moral symbolism can be beneficial when it helps us make healthy choices, but it can be bad when we make moral associations with types of people, forming stereotypes. For example, if you perceive smoking as bad, and you see a lot of tattooed people smoking, you might come to see tattooed people as bad by association. You then might go on to see someone with a tattoo as bad, even if you know that this person does not smoke. Moral stereotyping is, unfortunately, something we humans do very naturally, and we must work hard to train ourselves out of it.

Religions utilize moral symbolism with concepts of the sacred and the profane, worthiness and unworthiness. In the best cases, this can lead us toward fulfilling, positive lives, but it can also be used by religious authorities as a means of control.

Perceiving Facts as Symbols of Meaning

How many constellations are there? What message does a rainbow send? What is the meaning of the existence of natural evil? These questions do not have real answers. Constellations are made up. A rainbow is what happens when water droplets refract sunlight like a prism. And natural evil is just things happening naturally that result in people being harmed. There is no meaning inherent in these things, at least not when there isn’t someone causing them on purpose. But out minds imbue them with meaning by treating them as symbols.

There are a few ways in which facts mean something. If someone organizes things, such as words in a book, with the intention of conveying a message, then the objects used for communication carry the meaning of the communication. Also, we can find logical meaning in an object or place by observing and investigating it, which can tell us about what happened there in the past. However, we have a tendency to see symbolic meaning in things when it isn’t there.

For example, the idea that Earth is the center of the universe feels right, and the idea that there is no center of the universe can make us feel sad. The idea that our ancestors were crafted by the loving hands of God can make us feel much happier than the idea that we evolved from common ancestors with monkeys and apes. Yet we have no reason to feel this way. We are what we are regardless of how our ancestors came to be, and the Earth is our home whether it’s at the center of the universe or somewhere else.

This tendency to see facts as symbols with meaning has an upside: it can make stories more compelling. An author, songwriter, or poet can put objects and imagery into their stories with the intent that they be interpreted to have meaning, and that meaning contribute to the themes and aesthetics of the story.

The dark side of this is, unfortunately, very dark. When bad things happen to us, or we are confronted with the human condition, we tend to assume there must be some meaning in our suffering. We convince ourselves that without this suffering, something essential to the enjoyment of life will be lost.

If there truly is nothing we can do about it, this can be comforting and help us cope with our circumstances. However, if things change and it becomes possible to work toward changing our circumstances and getting rid of our suffering, then the story we tell ourselves of the meaning in that suffering can hold us back. We might remain chained to our suffering, even when the opportunity to get rid of it presents itself. Even worse, we might fight against those who try to move forward and make things better.

Final Thoughts

It is likely that we are not blank slates, that we are born with predispositions for certain associations given to us by evolutionary psychology. Things such as character archetypes, hero stories, and dragons, which have been found all over the world in completely disconnected cultures. On top of these templates, we build our models of the world, both symbolic and logical. Being common to all of humanity does not make them objective to the fabric of reality, but they do give us something by which we can all relate to one another.

Symbolic cognition can make it hard to learn true things, because in each instance there may be something we must first unlearn. On the other hand, symbolic cognition gives us the ability to appreciate a rich banquet of stories, arts, music, and philosophy. The symbolic meanings we see in nature may not be real, but properly cultivated, symbolic cognition itself can be a source for the meaning we seek.

Beware the Scapegoat Mentality

In the world today, there are a lot of negative feelings going around. People feel uneasy and resentful, and they don’t know why. It is as if there is some unseen hand quietly out to get them from the shadows. So when someone stands up, points a finger, and says, “those people are the reason you feel this way,” they are met with praise and adoration, because now the people have a name and a face to blame for their unhappiness.

The person or people at whom the fingers point is called a scapegoat. Perhaps they or a person from their group have done something awful, but it is more likely that their public actions are looked over with a fine-toothed comb for one little speck of dirt that people can use to justify believing that they are a bad person. Scapegoating is a tragedy, because at best it takes the reputations of innocent people and drags them through the mud, and at worst it results in a witch hunt. It is the easy way out, a simple solution that requires no thought. It does not solve the problem, only gives people a sense of self-righteousness and retribution.

Don’t fall prey to those who would create a scapegoat. And don’t scapegoat those who scapegoat others; that’s still scapegoating.

Immigrants. Atheists. Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The President or other national leader, current or past. Liberals, progressives, and Democrats. Conservatives and Republicans. The media. Drugs. Guns. Capitalism. Socialism. Postmodernism. The Patriarchy. These are all used as scapegoats, and while you may be able to find fault with any of them, none of them are the real problem.

So what do real problems look like? Because they are real, they behave like reality, with a well-defined mechanism in which every part fits logically with every other. To find them, it takes a willingness to put in the work, and a commitment to truth, no matter what it turns out to be. Focusing on who is to blame doesn’t solve anything, so let’s put our anger and discomfort aside, and look for the real problem and real ways to solve it.

What is Knowledge?

What does it mean to know something? We have this thing in our head called knowledge, which is a collection of notions about the world and how it works, and which helps us to act in ways that make sense. But we know that it is possible to be wrong, and wrong knowledge is not knowledge at all, but false belief. At this point in history, when we are waking up from our intellectual bubbles and seeing all the different views people have, many of which seem to go against common sense, it seems like a good idea to take a look at knowledge and find out what it is and how it works.

When we are children, knowledge is simple. Our parents and other people we trust tell us things, and we believe them. For the purpose of this discussion, I will call this method radical credulity. Of course, now that we are older, we understand that this way of thinking lets incorrect ideas in just as easily as correct ones. This is one reason we keep our kids in safe environments with trustworthy people.

A simple method to filter out ideas that are probably incorrect from ideas that are probably correct is to believe things that are reliably useful. This is called pragmatism. How do we know the Earth is more sphere-like than flat? Because treating the Earth as a sphere gets our airplanes to their destinations, while treating it as flat does not. The pragmatist view is that we believe things that let us reliably predict the consequences of our actions, so that we can effectively do what we are trying to do. It’s as the old defense of the scientific method says: we believe it because it works.

But pragmatism has its shortcomings. For example, most of the time, we live as if the Earth is flat, so there is not usually any problem with believing it to be so. However, there are circumstances where this belief could be catastrophic. Of course the pragmatist will say that we should treat the Earth as flat or round depending on the situation, and the real truth of its shape doesn’t matter. However, for many of us, it isn’t good enough to believe things because they are useful; we want to believe things because they are justifiably true, and pragmatism does not do this for us.

In the middle of the last century, psychologist Jean Piaget came up with a theory of knowledge called constructivism, which says we don’t simply acquire knowledge, we create it as a logical network. When we hear a new claim, we evaluate it by how well it fits with what we already know, and if we find no contradictions, we add it to the network. If we do find a contradiction, we either toss it out or reevaluate the belief that it conflicts with. Right away, we see something in constructivism that was missing from radical credulity and pragmatism: logic. The beliefs we hold are connected to each other by threads of non-contradiction.

However, as we all know, it is possible to have beliefs that are false. Adding a new belief that doesn’t conflict with a false belief doesn’t help us come to the truth. One way to attempt to rectify this is to take the beliefs that we are most confident and passionate about as an immutable foundation, and build our knowledge of the world around them. In philosophy lingo, these beliefs are called basic beliefs.

Of course, if people just take whatever they please as basic beliefs, we will find people with all kinds of beliefs that contradict each other’s, and they’ll stubbornly yell at each other until they’re blue in the face. Faced with this problem philosophers sought what could be called properly basic beliefs, truths which are so obvious and undeniable that it is impossible for them to be false. DesCartes famously took his own existence to be properly basic, and the philosophy of empiricism holds the validity of logic, mathematics, and observation as such.

Unfortunately, we run into another problem: we cannot agree on what beliefs should count as properly basic! Take any belief that is proposed as properly basic, and you will be able to find people who doubt it. Mathematics? Can be doubted. Objective reality? Can be doubted. “I think, therefore I am”? Can be doubted! What’s more, since properly basic beliefs are supposed to be the foundation upon which all other knowledge is constructed, the only argument that can be made for a belief to be properly basic is, “can’t you see it’s obvious?” Not exactly up to academic standards!

In the absence of anything that could justifiably be called properly basic, we might, with heavy heart, be tempted to conclude that knowledge is, in fact, impossible, and that everything is just mights and maybes. This is a pessimistic outlook, and not one most of us are comfortable with. In order to avoid it, we might choose a basic belief on radical credulity, usually called “faith” in this context. Or we might revert to pragmatism, and choose a belief that has proved reliable time and again as our basic belief.

I, however, subscribe to a third option, and that is to view knowledge in terms of probabilities instead of just yes or no. Although it may be impossible to know anything with a justified certainty of 100% with an infinite number of decimal places, we can be justifiably 90% certain, or 99.999% certain. We may not be able to calculate the numbers, but with practice we can guess the ballpark.

How is the level of certainty of a belief determined? By how well it connects into the knowledge network. Reality itself is one giant network where everything connects to everything else, so the larger a person’s knowledge network and the more interconnected it is, the more likely the beliefs in the network are to be true. To understand why, the jigsaw puzzle analogy is apt. When building a puzzle, there is a small chance that two pieces will fit, even though they don’t actually go together. But the chance that the same piece will fit incorrectly on two sides is much smaller. So to be sure you have the right piece, you want to try to connect it to the picture by more than one side. The chance of it being the right piece is even higher if there is a fourth piece connecting the two connecting pieces together, so that you have a square of four pieces. And the more pieces that can be added on to the connecting pieces, the higher the chance of each of them being the right piece.

Knowledge is like that, except there are plenty of extra pieces that don’t go to the puzzle, the chance of an incorrect connection is much higher, and the pieces can hook on to an arbitrarily large number of other pieces, which don’t have to be right next to each other. The knowledge puzzle also gets scaled up to more complex levels. With knowledge, you can have two packages of tightly-knit beliefs, but these packages only have a few connections between them. Imagine two balls of string connected to each other by three threads. Each ball is tightly connected, so they each individually have a high chance of being true, but their connection to each other is tenuous. If you discover that the two packages of beliefs contradict each other, either by learning something new or by thinking about them both in new ways, then you might have to make the tough decision to let one of them go.

When a contradiction is found between two sets of beliefs that one has, it is called cognitive dissonance, and depending on the complexity of the beliefs in question, as well as how attached we are to them, it can manifest as a physical headache. We instinctively want to get rid of the cognitive dissonance as quickly as possible. There are two ways to do this. The first, is to commit to whichever beliefs are most important to you, taking them, at least temporarily, as basic beliefs. The second takes longer, but it leaves you in a more stable place, and that is to take apart each package of beliefs and reevaluate them in the broader context of your total knowledge network, and by learning about the relevant topics from a variety of external sources.

A mind well-practiced in the art of knowledge construction will take time every so often to reevaluate the pieces of their knowledge network, to make sure it all fits together properly. There are many techniques to this, which we explore on this blog in the “Toolbelt of Knowledge” series.

There is still one teeny tiny issue with constructivism without basic beliefs, which you may have picked up on. Constructivism itself is a model, a sub-network of nodes within the larger network of a person’s knowledge. In particular, the belief that “the more solidly integrated a belief is within the network, the more likely it is to be true,” is itself a node in the network. This means that it must be subject to the same reevaluation process as everything else, or be taken as properly basic on faith.

But we don’t do that kind of faith here at SciFic. As you know if you’ve read “The Limit of Philosophy,” we prefer to race headlong into the trippy world of metalogic. So what happens when we allow ourselves to doubt the very method we use to determine what is true? Well, we just do the same thing we do with everything else: evaluate it. If it does not measure up to its own standards, then we get rid of it. If it is self-consistent, and we don’t have any alternative methods that are more self-consistent than this one, then we might as well use it. But one last question: why should we use self-consistency as a measure for whether a method of determining truth is valid? Because, as human beings, we are psychologically driven toward consistency. Of course, that’s not a logical reason, but remember, the most fundamental question is not “what is true?” but “what should we do?” and our action is driven by our unconscious psychology rather than logic.

As children, we are told all kinds of claims, which we accept on radical credulity. Then, we evaluate new things by a combination of how useful they are and how well they integrate into our networks of knowledge. A mature, practiced thinker will not take any claim as foundational, but evaluate and reevaluate every part of their network by how well it connects with the rest. That is knowledge.

Tapping the Unconscious – The Secret to a Great Story

Meaning and Purpose:

Jungian Archetypes

The Most Important Question

Fact and Meaning

A good story requires good writing. That’s a given. But even with good writing, some stories are amazing, and some are just okay. This means that there must be something else at play, but what? The answer lies in how writing transports us into other worlds, stimulating our imaginations to take us somewhere else so vividly that we can forget where we are.

When it comes to perception, our mental wires are tangled up in a messy web. Colors feel warm or cold. Musical tones feel like emotions. Shapes will make us wary or put us at ease. Everything we sense or experience is connected with all kinds of other things, most of which have no connection in the outside world. This is how metaphors work. If a writer says the sky is smooth as glass, it creates a picture in your mind of cloudless blue, even though the sky and glass have nothing in common.

Can you guess which of these shapes is called a "kiki" and which is called a "bouba"? Around 90% of people choose the same thing, regardless of native language.

The best stories are those that resonate with us, tickling these crossed wires so that we get to things that are deep and meaningful. It is one thing to talk about human nature analytically, and another entirely to learn about it through the guided experience of an artist’s hand.

Back in the early days of psychology, Sigmund Freud modeled the mind as three layers, the conscious, which is where our thinking and perceiving and everything that we are aware of takes place, the unconscious, a vast ocean of ideas, beliefs, and calculations we are completely unaware of, and the subconscious, which lies between the others, and takes things from the unconscious and brings them to the conscious.

Freud’s contemporary, Carl Jung, added to this with the idea of the collective unconscious, a commonality of the unconscious minds of all of humanity. He came to this idea by looking at mythical archetypes, characters, events, settings, etc., that appear in stories all over the world. For instance, there is the hero, who does grand and difficult things for the good of their community; the mentor, who helps the hero reach their potential; the trickster, who manipulates everyone for their own ends; and many more. It is a common misconception to think that Jung meant everyone’s minds are connected. What he really meant is that humans have a lot of the same stuff in our unconsciouses, just like we all have two hands and two eyes.

Influenced by Freud and Jung, mythologist Joseph Campbell came up with the idea of the monomyth, also called the Hero’s Journey, which is a structure that the most powerful stories in human history, the ancient myths from all over the world that have survived until today, adhere to. The monomyth has several stages, including the call to adventure, crossing the threshold, death of the mentor, figurative or literal death and rebirth of the hero, ultimate triumph, returning home with the prize, and others. Few stories have all of the monomyth’s elements, but most of the great ones have some. It is also worth mentioning that there are other story formats that resonate besides the monomyth.

Star Wars: A New Hope is often hailed as the modern representation of the monomyth.

The fact that tales from all over the world follow this structure suggests that the secret ingredient that makes stories great is when they resonate with the collective unconscious. You may have heard writers say that the story already exists, and they are just putting it to words. Back in the day, there was an idea of a personal genius, a spirit that gave creative people inspiration for their work. It turns out this is not merely superstition; the subconscious mind functions just like a personal genius, bringing forth the best ideas from the reservoir of the unconscious. When creators follow the guiding of their genius, it is an expression of the unconscious, and when this expression resonates with lots of people’s unconsciouses, it is a great story. True art appears when the artist looks inward and lets their heart guide them.