Story fields - the narrative shape of our lives and cultures

by Tom Atlee

When I step back and take a look at stories -- both narratives and lived stories -- I see that there are huge constellations of them that reinforce each other. Each of these groupings paints a particular whole picture of how life is or should be. These story-pictures seem to have a lot of power over people.

Consider an example. Many people around the world have a powerful (although not always articulated) sense of THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE. Probably the vast majority of Americans are actually motivated by that sense. We could describe it in terms of principles -- like freedom, individualism, patriotism, progress, mobility, property rights, the pursuit of happiness, and so on. But to fathom the compelling nature of The American Way of Life, we need to step into the stories that generate it. See what comes up for you when you consider the following evocative images: Pioneers. Cowboys. The Declaration of Independence. Manifest Destiny. Rags to Riches. Technological Progress. The World's Only Superpower. The Career. The Work Ethic. The Wise Investment. The Safety Net. Family Values. The Melting Pot. The American Dream. The War on Terror.

Each of these images and metaphors echoes with a thousand stories, myths, scenarios, visions, heroes, incidents, and so on, that show up over and over again in books, newspapers, TV programs, movies, songs, speeches, advertisements, conversations in bars and within families, and embodied in the streets, homes, policies and lives of America. This ubiquitous field of socio-psychological-narrative magnetism pulls on all of us to act, think, believe and see in particular ways -- and not in other ways. It takes immense effort to resist it or change it. To the extent any person, group or activity does not live within this story-sea and move with its currents, they don't seem quite American. They are suspect and often feel quite marginalized.

Take a moment right now to consider several stories you know (fiction, news, personal histories) that are connected with any one of the American Way of Life images mentioned above. Can you see how they reinforce each other? Have they affected your life or people you know?

If you are not an "American," you can either do this exercise as written or make a comparable list of images related to your home culture, and work with that list.

I call these complex story-pictures and their power "story fields" because they are fields of influence, analogous to magnetic fields. Story fields exert tremendous influence on us, driving us and limiting -- or enlarging -- our sense of reality and possibility. Story fields that are more co-intelligent -- that arise out of and serve "the whole" and are therefore more wise, more wholesome, and more consciously co-creative -- make possible lives and cultures that are more co-intelligent.

Dozens, or even thousands of story fields are all around us and within us. Story fields permeate and shape our thoughts, feelings, awareness, behavior, culture and many other dimensions of our lives. As part of their power, story fields tend to evoke new stories that replicate or complement the stories already generating that story field.

Even stories that react to or fight the story field can end up fueling it because they exist primarily in relationship to it, and thereby reinforce its existence. The anti-establishment, anti-adult rhetoric of many youth sub-cultures (hippies, punks) inspire the defenders of the status quo to oppose or co-opt them, thereby strengthening the dominant story field. Furthermore, when those sub-cultures have not provided truly viable alternatives, even their youthful advocates slowly drift into the once-despised mainstream as they come up against the demands of economic survival and parenthood.

Story fields do not have to be of human design, and some are contained within larger story fields. Immersed in nature, indigenous tribal cultures have been shaped by the story fields of the natural world or The Nature's-Way Story Field. The cycles of the seasons, the intricately interwoven lived stories of specific plants and animals around them, the great dances of the sky and the earth, the wind and the trees, the sun and the moon and the stars. Native Americans of the Great Plains called their Nature's-Way story field The Medicine Wheel, the wheel of life, the cyclic pattern that molded their thoughts, perceptions, language, behavior and entire culture in its image.

The Patriarchal-Femininity Story Field overlaps The-American-Way-of-Life (and the Way-of-Life in many other cultures). Decades after the modern feminist movement launched, we still find such mutually-reinforcing stories as (in the U.S.) Barbie Doll, Lose Weight, Wear Heels, Look-Good-Play-Dumb-and-Succeed, Breast Implants, Mom, The Good Girl, The Bad Girl, The Good Wife, A Woman Without A Man Is Lost, Virtuous Helplessness, Women's Work, and so on. Until recently, rare was the woman (or man) who simply built their life outside of it.

Think of some other story fields you live in. (If you can't, consider the consumer story field. Think of all the ads that have people buying things and creating stories about themselves and how they should be in their lives.)

Dealing effectively with story fields

The good news is that the inhabitants of such story fields are not helpless. A story field is co-generated by those who inhabit it, including past and present (and perhaps even future) inhabitants. The field, in turn, influences those who continually create it. So a story field can be changed by its inhabitants, just as a dance can be changed by the dancers, no matter the measure of the music or the commands of the choreography. Visionary leadership (from outside, from within, or from the fringes of a story field) can inspire those who are co-creating their story field to create new, more functional story fields within which to dance.

In the feminist movement of the 1970s for example, women got together in consciousness-raising groups and shared their stories -- narratives about what it was like to be a woman. As they did so, they noticed among themselves collectively certain experiences they had previously thought of as purely personal -- experiences that formed a consistent pattern, which they came to call patriarchy and sexism. Their personal story-sharing brought into consciousness the previously unconscious life-shaping power of the Patriarchy-Femininity story field, which they could then take action to change.

On the dark side, much of the conquest of cultures is carried on with story fields. Authors like Jerry Mander (In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, Sierra Club, 1991) and Helena Norberg-Hodge (Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, Sierra Club, 1991) have documented how the enticing story fields of mass-consumer culture are infecting and destroying some of the few remaining indigenous Nature's-Way cultures -- largely through the media of television, advertising and Western education, all of which glorify the American-Way-of-Life and its related story fields.

What is the source of a story field's power?

Story is natural to us, deeply engrained in our sense-making awareness. Story-perception, story-thinking, and story-response are hardwired into our relationship to life. This phenomenon is described more fully in "The Power of Story."

I believe we all live in stories (story realities, lived stories and story fields) much more -- and much more readily -- than we live in concepts. Stories (and even individual parts of stories) have a resonant, alchemical relationship with the way we experience life. A narrative or a role-model, for example, can act as a magnet aligning our awareness, beliefs or lives into congruence with its pattern.

When Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, he reportedly greeted her with, "So here's the little woman who started the big war." Millions of people changed overnight as they entered her narrative about the lives of slaves. Her contemporaries felt that they had experienced, through her work, what slavery was like from the inside. Similarly, billions of people have been transformed, mobilized and shaped by the stories (the visions, myths, and heroes, more than the concepts and facts) of Christianity, Democracy, Socialism, Capitalism, Hinduism and even Progress.

At the societal level, a story field can seem almost synonymous with culture. Actually it is the narrative dimension of culture. Just as there are sub-cultures, youth cultures, and organizational cultures, all contained (more or less) within a larger national culture, so our national story field contains thousands of overlapping story fields, some of which reinforce the national one and some of which attempt to replace it.

Creating alternative story fields

Every emerging culture or movement for social transformation gains its power, above all, through a compelling story field of its own. However, as mentioned above, insofar as the alternative story field is created against the dominant story field, it tends to lend power to the field it is resisting.

Compelling, viable alternatives must grow naturally from an inner logic of their own. They can't be sustained by oppositional energy alone. As long as the status quo stands, the opposition feeds it power; when it falls, the opposition falls with it. When the communist establishment collapsed in Czechoslovakia, the grassroots anti-communist movement fell into fractious disarray. To the extent they could be united, they rallied around their most visionary leader, Vaclav Havel, the dissident prisoner who became president. But they didn't have a story field strong enough to withstand the onslaught of the global consumerist story field that took over.

When social change movements arise from a truly positive vision, they stand in contrast to but not primarily in opposition to the status quo. Thus they do little to empower that status quo, while at the same time inviting those who are ready for change, into the new story field.

The question that remains for any movement is how to translate its positive visions into positive story fields capable of shaping a new culture. Among the strategies available are:

• Imagineering which uses imaginative narrative to realize, create, or catalyze in real life the potentials we are imagining -- especially applying it as a networking and organizing tool.

• Multiple-viewpoint and multiple-option story collaborations in which particular social possibilities are explored in an agreed-upon futurist setting in richer, broader, and more diverse detail than is possible in a single utopian novel

• Possibility Journalism that explores the creative edge of society where experiments and visionaries abound, reporting on people's active inquiries and possibilities and the energies and motivations that exist on the ever-emerging verge.

• Networking like-minded people, organizations, activities, and resources to deepen and spread the emerging worldview

• Cross-fertilizing journalism, fiction, academia, activism, the arts, entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and social networks -- all within an overall vision and emerging worldview. One such example would be a well-financed contest for the most collaboratively created, compelling integration of novel, movie, and video game about a positive future which includes in its business plan the active engagement of people acting towards that future.

• Engaging ordinary people and targeted populations in telling their stories and visions in an effort to understand how their individual experiences and dreams reflect larger social issues, dynamics and possibilities -- in ways that empower them to actively engage with those issues, dynamics and possibilities

• Story field conferences and networks to weave all this together, engaging an adequately broad spectrum of story professionals and visionaries in self-organized, coordinated, and complementary efforts

Tom Atlee is a social visionary, the author of The Tao of Democracy and one of the founders of The Story Field Conference August 26-31, 2007 at the Shambhala Mountain Center, CO. For information storyfieldconference.com