Narrative

We are storytellers. We make sense out of the world not by a set of facts, but by beliefs about how facts are connected. This leads two people to be able to view the same event and believe something totally different happened.

Narratives, though, always conceal as much as they reveal. Every story is at the expense of other stories, counter-examples. Often people make grandiose narratives about human progress or the immanent doom of humans by referring to some kind of past that sounds beautiful, if only it ever existed.

There is no master-narrative, no final story. All of our stories are networked - all pointing to each other. This narrative weaving, of course, leads to problems when trying to determine what happened. If one wanted to learn about WWII, s/he could start reading today and never stop. What becomes interesting is that reading more material never makes the event in question more determinable; rather, it does the opposite. The event becomes more opaque and confusing.

Think of it this way. The noun "WW II" is said as though it is a singular event. However, WWII is a collection of millions, literally millions of events. Certainly a Japanese citizen in an internment camp would have a different take on WWII than Lemay.

After these events become written about in personal letters or secondary literature we are adding complexity, not reducing it. Think about the number of books written about the Bible. Is the Bible any simpler because of the many commentaries? No, it's far more complex. Commentaries are a form of proliferation. Text 2 attempts to explain Text 1. Text 3 explains both. Every text that attempts to explain also adds another interpretative problem to the world, it obscures while it clarifies.