https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FA_7bWqL3wQ
Welcome back. What I’ve been thinking about sharing with you today is the ideas of story, narrative, and archetype. And there’s a way to understand these so we don’t misuse them, I think. And I’d like to share with you how I’ve been thinking of them and why I think it’s important to have good, solid understandings of these concepts that we can grasp onto. Because I think by understanding the difference between story, narrative, and archetype and having a framework for using them, it will help you to create better models in the world. Why am I making this distinction? And how are these things sort of attached? The way I conceive of story is a specific instance in time, or an example, a concrete example of a thing that happened. I’m going to use happened in quotes in this case because what I’m pointing at here is a story doesn’t have to be accurate to be true. So accuracy is a scientific measure, but truth is not a scientific measure. Truth is not something that can be measured by science. Science is supposed to get, quote, closer to the truth, but it doesn’t have a definition of truth. So you can tell one story in many different ways to bring out different pieces of information. The different ways of telling the story aren’t accurate necessarily. I mean, they might be, but they might not be. But because they’re highlighting different aspects of the instantiation of what may or may not even have happened, that gives gives them different messages. So stories are out there to give us messages about something. The accuracy of those messages may be high or or or the accuracy of the story may be high or low. Right. But the important part is the message that the communication that’s happening and why this matters is because the instantiation in time gives you a setting for the story that allows you to understand sequence as such. So there’s a sequence within the story and there’s a sequence that the story is set in and setting the story in a particular time helps to give it the cultural relevance. Right. Or the cultural understanding. And so the way you would tell one story in, say, the Middle Ages about what happened to somebody would be different from the way that same event would be told today. Why? We have more information. We have different words. We have different words. We have a different cultural context for events. And so if you want to make a story about scary monsters, the idea of what is a monster has changed throughout time. And so you may retell that story in a modern context by having the same basic framework, but using different components of equal, roughly speaking, value. And when you do that, you’re following a narrative form. So if you want to translate a story from, say, the Middle Ages into modern times using modern language and modern cultural relevance, what you’re doing is extracting the narrative pattern or template from the instantiation, the story. And you’re creating a new story using that narrative template. And the relevant parts, the messages in the story that points to archetypal, either archetypal story, story arcs or archetypal characters or archetypal types. And the archetypes are the ideals. So you’ve got the story that’s the instantiation, the narrative that is the template or the pattern of a given story. And then you’ve got the ideals, which are the things that that keep the story relevant both in the time it was created or told originally and into current time. Now, obviously, not all stories are pointing to archetypal things. Some stories are just sort of throw away like a lot of the 50s comics that kind of copied the comic style. But they weren’t really narrative in nature. They were more to be funny or to highlight one particular aspect of dating or something that’s no longer applicable because maybe we don’t date the same way because we don’t meet at the place that has car hops because they don’t do that much anymore except it’s sonic. Bad food, but fun. So understanding the difference, the stories, the instantiation, the specific instance, the specific telling some in some cases, and the narrative is the thing that makes the story graspable by people because it has the the archetypal elements and it has that structure that’s also archetypal in nature. What this helps us to understand is that when we tell a story, the way to tell it correctly is to make sure those archetypal elements are communicated and that archetypal story arc is intact. If you don’t do that, you end up with a bad story or story that people can’t understand. When you tell a story, what people are hearing is not necessarily what you’re saying, because there’s all this translation in communication. What they’re hearing is some connection, right? Some pattern set of patterns from the instantiation through their narrative understanding, which is roughly going to fit one of the narrative templates that they know of in their head or they’re going to create a new one for the story if it’s unique to them over to the archetypes. And this is important. This is important because it tells you why people may not understand what you’re saying when you’re telling a story. It also helps you understand what you’re saying when you’re trying to tell a story. What’s the communication that you’re trying to get across by telling the story? Because story is the best way to communicate with people because it makes a lot of connections for them. And so story is something like the art of making connections between you, the listener, and the thing you have in common. And what you should be having in common are those archetypal things. And then there’s a bunch of things that connect those in common, whether it’s cultural references or it’s a shared personal reference. Right. So a lot of people when they’re telling a story, they’ll be like, yeah, you know, my friend, Andy. And Andy’s a lot like your brother. Right. It’s like, oh, right. Ah, I got it. Right. Or Andy’s a lot like that guy down the street, Steve. Right. It’s like, oh, OK. So now you understand my relationship with Andy, even though you’ve never met Andy. It’s like, oh, right. These are connections that you make as part of storytelling to get the narrative flavor across to communicate the message that of whatever commonality you’re trying to communicate, whether it’s archetypal or not, basically. Although I would argue most most good stories that people understand are archetypal. Right. So that’s really important. You’ve got the common element components going backwards effectively from the top. The common elements, the common components are archetypes. They’re the ideals. And I won’t speak to the realness of archetypes. I don’t think that’s particularly helpful, but they’re common. Architects are definitionally common to multiple people. And then you’ve got the structural archetypal components. Right. And then you’ve got to glue that together to the narrative frame. You’ve got references that are common, which may which aren’t necessarily archetypal. So there’s the common archetypal. There’s the common that you may have either culturally or you may have as the result of, we’ll say, other stories that have filled in cultural relevance for you. A lot of people play on this. So you’ll see a movie come out like like Dutton Die Hard came out. It was a groundbreaking movie. And then a bunch of people copied it. Right. They copied some of the elements of the movie. Why? Because you’re familiar with them. Right. The Matrix comes out. It’s groundbreaking movie. What happens? They copy the camera work. Why? Because that mode of storytelling is familiar to you all of a sudden. Right. It has extra flavor because you’ve never seen the Matrix. Probably heard about it. Right. If you’ve seen Die Hard, you probably heard about it or at least heard about the common parts. And so doing this is important because this is how we’re linking things together. And in that narrative pattern that we’re sensing as a result of these commonalities, whether they be archetypes or common story elements or whatever, that’s what you’re carrying with you. That’s the template that you’re creating. It’s getting created in your head as a result of the instantiation, the specific instance being talked about. And so one way you can see this is you can look at something like Grimm’s fairy tales, where there’s multiple versions of the fairy tales and you can look at different versions of the same fairy tale and see, you know, they’re not exactly the same obviously different. Right. But you can see the narrative elements. You can see the archetypal elements being pointed to and they won’t all be the same, but they’ll have a lot of overlap between the different tellings. And that happened for many reasons. When you get it specific instance, it should have more relevance to you as a listener. Right. If not also a storyteller, but to you as a listener, it should have that relevance. And that’s why we have multiple storytellings. Right. To get at that, that template, that narrative pattern, that’s what it’s for. Now, the reason why this is important as well is not just to understand, you know, story provides a sequence, provides these connections, right, that point to this narrative template, this way of making connections. It’s a little bit more generic that you might be able to apply in other situations with other characters. Right. Can swap characters in and out of the story. But the narrative narrative structures and components, archetypal components are still there. That all points to the ideal. And the ideal isn’t necessarily a positive. Right. The ideal can be like the ideal tyrannical king. There is one could be a negative, a negative thing you want to avoid or the ideal predator that wants to eat you. You might that might be a dragon in the narrative pattern. Right. Or a snake in the narrative pattern. But it’s something that sometimes you need to avoid. Sometimes not. It all depends. Sometimes the snake is sort of a positive, a positive symbol. And so there are all these examples and sort of the one that triggered this for me recently was, you know, we were talking about the significance of Moses throwing down his staff and it turning into a snake. And of course, you know, there’s lots of ways to sort of parse this. And one way is, well, the snake was the thing that sort of caused the fall of man or whatever. Right. In the Bible, in Genesis. And then what happens is Moses can now command the snake. He can take the snake from a staff, make it into a snake, pick it up by the tail and the staff again. So he’s mastered in some sense, the thing that created the fall of man. It’s like, well, that’s interesting. But the snake pattern can be used even though it’s snake as an ideal. It’s got negative and positive aspects because ideals have negative and positive aspects. It can be used either way. One story, the fall, very negative snake. The other story, Moses with the staff, very positive snake. Snake actually eats the other snakes. Good snake. Under control of man suddenly. So these these patterns, these these templates, this narrative stuff is very powerful because what we do with narrative templates is we use them to execute things in our lives in real time. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that once you start telling yourself a story and placing yourself or others in that story, this is the method by which you use to predict their behavior or your or execute your own behavior. So we play out narratives all the time. Why? Why would we do this? Why would we do this, Mark? This sounds completely crazy. I’m sure I don’t do this. Yeah, I do. The problem is distributed cognition and the fact of combinatorial explosion. So we need to use distributed cognition because the world is much larger than we are. Now, you may say, ha, you can’t prove that. I’m like, yeah, look around. Everything’s bigger than you that you’re in, right? You’re in something. The thing you’re in is bigger than you definitionally. Yeah, yeah, but I can understand those things. Yeah, no, you can’t. You can understand maybe what you need to, but you can’t understand the whole thing. And so and Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot, right? You know, your car, you know what your car is when it’s working. But when your car is broken, you have no idea what your car is. Is it a large repair bill? Is it a quick call to a friend who can come out and help you and get you back, you know, back to the car being a car? Right. Is it the end of your life because you no longer have transportation via car? Could be a bunch of things, at least in the moment. You don’t really know. You’ve lost some predictive power. Once the car becomes more complicated than the device that gets me from point A to point B, you’ve lost intelligibility in the world. Like now you don’t know what the world is to a great degree. And so in order to know what things are, we have these narratives in our heads and in order to be able to predict, we have these narratives. So we outsource a lot of our thinking. We take our thinking. We go, OK, thinking, we’re not going to think about that. I’m going to use a narrative template and I’m just going to play that through so that I understand what my interaction, my role is or what somebody else’s role is going to be in this system. Fair enough. We have to do that. The world is combinatorial explosive. We can’t get it in our heads. So we do that through narrative. We do that through the template, not the story, not the story. We do that from the stuff we extract from the story, the abstractions in the story, the narrative template. We play through these narratives, right? And the narratives are affected. They’re not always the same thing. They’re just templates. So there’s a lot of wiggle room in a narrative. So one one one way to think about how we play through narrative is to say, you know, what’s my role at the doctor’s office? Right. Well, your role is to make an appointment to engage with the doctor narrative. Right. Go to your appointment. Sit in the waiting room. Right. And then you’ll get called and then something will happen. May or may not be tests. Right. There there may or may not be extra visits scheduled. You may just get some information right then and there. Right. You may get a test there and then have to wait for the results and come back, you know, wait outside and then come back or wait longer. Right. You never know how long you’re going to be at the doctor. At least I never knew how long I was going to be at the doctor’s. And all of these things are part of the narrative of going to the doctor. But they change. The details change. It can change quite a bit. But we use that template to know what’s going on. Now, if we go to the doctor and they’ve lost our appointment, that’s never happened to me, not at the doctor’s. It’s happened elsewhere. Then all of a sudden that narrative is broken and we don’t know what’s going to do. We don’t know what’s going to happen. And so a quick visit somewhere to the doctor or something can turn into an all day affair of untangling what happened because we thought we had a narrative. We’re going to the doctor and suddenly things didn’t go right. And we get very upset about these things. We tend to like freak out like what happened? I don’t understand. Where did everything go? Why am I not able to do the thing that I came to do? And that can be, you know, really jarring to people. And it should be, you know, it’s a big problem. So we use these narratives when they get violated. We get kind of ruffled. But we don’t realize we’re using them with no idea how many narratives are playing out because we need to use narratives for so many things just to get around. We use narratives when we go to the store, when we interact with a coffee shop, you know, when we’re walking down the street, right? We meet somebody. We know what the narrative is. If they smile, you smile back. If they say hello, you say hello back. These are all little narrative templates running in our heads. So we know what we’re doing. And the narratives change based on the values we’re applying to them. And so as the values that are sort of front and center and our attention change, those values alter the narrative and or they switch the narrative completely or any interruption to the narrative can switch our narrative from one thing to another. That’s why people go from very calm to like angry right away. Once the narrative has been broken, people tend to get angry. Because their prediction breaks down. And when your prediction breaks down, anger is a is a common response. May not be a correct response, but it’s a common response. And that’s why a lot of these tricks around take a breath, right? Because you’re what you’re doing is you’re reducing your stress in the moment from having a broken narrative and allowing your brain time to figure out, oh, wait, the narrative is broken. I need new narrative. Right. How do I do this new interaction? Instead of staying in broken narrative state where you’re just angry or upset or not feeling well or whatever. So that’s why these psychological tricks work, because we’re playing these narratives in our head. And so we’ve got a bunch of narratives. We’ve got a bunch of values. The values in the narratives interact to form many different patterns from the same template, we’ll say. And then the objects that are in that narrative template also alter. Right. They’re also important. And then that is what ties us together in in our behavior and sets our our attention in the future and our predictive rating. But it also sets our feelings and emotions, because if you can control how much the narrative affects you, then you can control your response. And that’s what’s really important. And it’s also important to understand what narrative other people are running. So basically, I’ve talked before about the police and what you can do in interacting with the police. Right. When you interact with the policeman as a person, you can get out of a ticket. That’s the thing that people do. Some people are really good at this. Some people are not so good at this. But it’s the key of not just playing out the narrative of sitting there and getting a ticket. They can make it more likely that you’ll get out of a ticket or that you’ll get out of some other kind of trouble. Right. If you don’t act within the narrative or you act beyond the narrative, that can be very helpful. And understanding other people’s narrative and what that’s supposed to look like so that they have a stress free time. That can be very helpful. So one of the things that I do that I started doing a few years ago, quite a few years ago now, is when I get pulled over, I typically shut the radio off, roll down my windows. I’ll usually open my reach over and open my glove box real quickly. Sometimes I don’t. I put my hands on the steering wheel. I keep my hands on the steering wheel. I put my hands on the steering wheel. I put my hands on the steering wheel. I keep my hands on the steering wheel. I keep my hands on the steering wheel. Right. And I wait until the officer gets to the window and then I greet the officer. And when they ask me for stuff, I say that’s in my wallet, which is in my left pocket. Do I have your permission to get it? And they say yes. And then I slowly, slowly is important. Grab my wallet. If they look for my registration, I say that’s in my glove box. Can I get it? They say yes. I reach to get it. Why? Because I’m trying to calm them down and let them know that I’m not a threat. Right. And they appreciate that. And that’s why I haven’t gotten a ticket since I’ve been doing that, by the way. Only warnings. Just saying. Because I’m understanding their narrative and what they have to be aware of are people that go into the glove box, grab a gun. That happens. It doesn’t happen very often, but it only has to happen once to die. So it’s at the front of their minds. And it should be. It should be. Good for them. Right. And I usually end, no matter what the outcome, like even if they write me a ticket, with you know, you stay safe out there or something similar to that effect because that’s how I feel, first of all. It’s good to be authentic and truthful and honest. And I do feel that way. I feel very badly for the police officers because they have a very dangerous job, even when they’re jerks, which has happened to me more than once. I’ve been pulled over a number of times for absolutely no reason. I’ve been given tickets when I wasn’t doing anything at all. You know, you were speeding. Yeah, no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t even coming close to speeding. You can’t convince people of that when they’re ready to give you a ticket. They’re going to give you a ticket. So, you know, I always try to end it well because I think that’s important. And you want to bring down their stress for the next person. Right. And I do that by understanding their narrative. What part do they have to play at the point at which they’re pulling me over? These are the certain things they have to do that they’re likely to do. And, you know, it’s always worked for me to understand and bring my own sense down because I get very nervous when things like sirens go off that really triggers me. And so understanding their narrative helps me interacting with their narrative to make the situation as calm as it can be because it’s important to make the situation calm. If you just get upset when things go wrong, and I used to do that better than you, I guarantee it, things will go less well. But if you can remain calm and understand the role the person’s playing and the role you need to play and when to break that role or when to make exception to it, then things will go better for you. And you should watch when you’re playing out a narrative. Right. And when other people are playing out narratives, you should look for these patterns and see what’s going on. It was very interesting. Somebody told me a while back one of the problems with the post-COVID world was safety is the highest value. It’s like, oh, when I make safety is the highest value, how does that change all the narratives? Because it does. It changes all the narratives. It changes all the ways people are interacting with you. So safety is the highest value. Right. It might change the store to put a sign on the front that says, please wear a mask. Not you have to wear a mask. Please wear a mask. Giving you the option. Right. But that puts a burden on you. Do I wear a mask? Do I not wear a mask? Right. And so there’s these little subtle changes to the way you do things based on safety as the highest value. And it’s very interesting to ponder. And, you know, understanding how that relates to the archetypal patterns is much more difficult. So I don’t want to I’m not going to go into that now. And maybe it’s not necessary. Right. You just have to know they’re there, that they’re common. Right. That there’s something common that you’re responding to that they’re responding to or should be responding to. Right. And this is the way to find broken narratives when you’re they’re no longer upholding your values. Or when the values being upheld have become corrupted. Right. So if your highest value is safety, that’s probably bad. Safety is hard to define. Safety means different things to different people. Even when it’s defined, there’s no such thing as common safety because some people need more protection than others. And so using that as a criteria for narrative is a dangerous thing. And narratives usually break the safety paradigm pretty nicely by making people safe and unsafe in the same instant. Right. So when you listen to a story that has a safety component like Little Red Riding Hood, right. Safe, happy life, dangerous. Right. And then back to safety in some sense. And after learning what not safe is. Right. And so these these little archetypal values like safety get get get broken because they’re not one thing to all people. They’re not actually in common. So we have an idea of safety. We kind of know what it is, but it needs a lot more stuff. And that’s when we know the narrative patterns broken, when we’re using bad values to use to apply to our normal narratives. Or when someone’s trying to force a new narrative on us like the new normal. Right. They say it over and over again. They don’t define what it is because they’re trying to insert a narrative. Don’t know what narrative they’re there after. Don’t care. Don’t want it. Don’t need it. No, thanks. And so it’s important to see these little tricks that people are doing like, oh, we can’t do things the way we used to anymore. Yeah. Why are you sure? Like, this is a bit like walking through the woods and just seeing a fence and wanting to share it down. Why? What if the fence is there for a reason? All right. So these are the things to sort of watch out for. And the the big narrative I try to keep throughout my videos as a thread is these are my definitions. Right. Use them if you like them. Don’t use them if you don’t or better yet, modify them for your own use. And also, as always, I want you to understand if I can manage it, how grateful I am that you’re watching because you’re giving me what I consider to be the most valuable thing that people can give to one another. And that is your time and attention.