Why Stories Shape Culture (and How to Write Your Own)
Storytelling is older than masonry, older than the written word. It is humanity’s first technology for orienting itself in the world. To understand culture is to understand stories and the mediums that carry them. Stories can take the form of myth, history, anecdote, or entertainment. Stories are more foundational to a civilization than any mere material by virtue of their explanatory and orientating power. If you want to accomplish anything large scale, you’ve either got to have a lot of slaves to do your bidding or a lot of willing enthusiasts who believe in your story.
Everyone has felt the utter boredom and disappointment of a story poorly told, and the inverse elation of a story in the hands of a master. Even a good story suffers at the hands of a fool, but a good storyteller can find the crux of anything. Because of its foundational aspect, the art of storytelling is indispensable for the student of culture and he who seeks influence. Understanding the art of storytelling means seizing the headwaters of culture.
The Importance of Medium
A medium is defined as a means of effecting or conveying something. These can take as many forms as a person can imagine. The medium in which a story is told is always worth consideration. In the words of McLuhan, “the Medium is the Message.” To take consideration of content without consideration of medium is to note the day’s weather without ever having heard of seasons.
The medium of a story affects its effects a great deal. Are we considering oral history, a prophecy, a play, a symphony, a sonnet, a psalter, a broadcast, a live stream, a film, a short-form video? Consumption is primed in the wake of the medium’s arrival. Consider a sermon and a sales pitch, both with the same script. Are we to pretend the altar won’t reverberate those same words a little differently? You’d have to be a fool not to take into account the medium in which you’re conveying your message.
The truth is, many of us are creatives with romantic ideas of how we’d like to be portrayed. But the facts of cultural relevance are brutal on our self-imagination. It’s worth considering if the medium you’ve chosen is worthwhile– in chic– and if it possesses the ability to hold attention. The problem with any technical discussion of medium is it’s quickly outdated. McLuhan himself said “If it works, it’s obsolete.” The only reason I’m bothering to put this message in a written format is because I want to reach a very specific type of person with the attention span worthy of what I’m teaching. Wait, where’d you go?
In the Year of our Lord 2025, short-form video content’s addictive nature has created a sort of moral panic. It’s not uncommon for someone to say “watching a whole movie feels pretty productive!” We can be cynical about the power of the medium or we can be aware. I’d rather you be both. And so all I mean to impress upon you is to say that if you want to understand and to shape culture, and to be conscious of your being shaped by it, you must consider the medium in a more serious manner than is commonplace.
Mediumism and Spirits
The word ‘medium’ also names a person who channels spirits. This isn’t an accident of language. Stories, mediums, and spirits all shape the unseen atmosphere of culture. Immediately upon the invocation of spirits certain pupils roll their eyes. Whether you treat ‘spirit’ as literal or metaphorical, its effects are real: school spirit, national spirit, the spirit of the age.
For example: Go and ask a school teacher if school spirit is real. They’ll tell you beyond a shadow it is. They’ll say something like “you can feel it– it possesses the whole campus.” What is spirit, in this case? It is defined as those qualities regarded as forming the definitive or typical elements in the character of a person, nation, or group or in the thought and attitudes of a particular period. Isn’t it obvious how this relates to culture?
It isn’t hard to see the way in which these two definitions of medium, as we have outlined, could tend toward a certain fuzziness in distinction. Mediums channel spirits, and spirits influence culture. Again, I want to impress upon the reader that you need not believe in anything supernatural to verify what I am saying. Another way to put it is to think about the inspired individuals who so frequently produce culture, many of whom are themselves storytellers.
Consider the Homeric epic, the Prophets of Scripture, shamans possessed in trance, and the artists finally relieved of that invisible block which paused their creative flow. All of these share in common an immense influence over the development of culture, seemingly suddenly bursting forth with something perhaps too complex for the individual to consciously produce of themself. It’s true that rather than being demystified upon culture’s dissection, the student finds themself positively convinced of a variety of spirits guiding the tides of a great many movements, achievements, revolutions, and frenzies. Often, if they are perceptive, they make use of the signs of a swelling tide of sentiment and ride the waves of the predicted zeitgeist.
Nietzsche sensed the spirit of the age before it erupted. His proclamation that ‘God is dead’ was not a celebration but a warning. Without a unifying story, the West would drift into the bloody cataclysms of the 20th century. A radical self-honesty, as well as a deep understanding of the sources of culture via the analysis of stories, can afford the individual deep, almost magical powers of foresight and awareness.
Because while paying attention to the stories you’re told by others– about your religion, your nation, your people, your history, your self– is telling, paying even closer attention to the story you’ve constructed for yourself is perhaps a greater asset. To remain disengaged would be the same as sleeping with your doors and windows open at night– anything is invited to come and do as they wish. But to commit to being an observer, an analyzer, a student, an artificer of culture seeking an ever greater awareness of self and surroundings– this is a bold task worthy of its reward. Caution is key in this pursuit. To enter into dialogue with anything, whether persons or stories or spirits, one must be prepared to be permanently altered by what one discovers.
Foundational Stories: Oral History, Mythology, and Objective Truth
The earlier we seek, the fuzzier our story is. Before written history, people groups passed down their stories in the form of oral history, which through compression became myth. If I am an ancient person traveling somewhere, fighting off hordes of strangers in a foreign land, at some point it may become pertinent for me to explain to my offspring what all of this is about and why it’s worth continuing when I’m gone.
Religions are often based on such narratives, as they give people a why for what they’re doing– something empiricism cannot provide. I can observe my environment, but observing what is can’t tell me how things ought to be. You must understand the 21st century as a unique period of time in which competition for the overarching narrative is at an all-time high.
We no longer live in isolated tribes or nations, but increasingly in a world that is global. Exclusionist narratives have fallen out of fashion, and a great relativism has set in. Questions like “What should I do? How should I be?” are met with answers like “Well it depends man, it’s all relative man.” Except to say that everything is relative– that there is no objective truth– is itself not a relative claim but a universal and objective claim about all truth.
When you understand religions, histories, and political worldviews for what they are (stories about where we’ve been, where we might be, where we might ought to go) you begin to realize no one is going to be kind enough to hand you the objective truth on a silver platter. You must construct the best narrative you are capable of using piercing analysis and deep humility. Where most stop short is they tell themselves a story which is convenient, which leads to part-time emotional stability, but long-term delusion or at worst disaster.
Narratives, by virtue of their orienting capacity, instill us with a very real emotional regulation which, when disturbed, is felt as a very real threat to the self. Ideally, we course correct our map of reality gradually, ironing out where it is dysfunctional or leading us on a course to disaster, while simultaneously being willing to suffer whatever cognitive or existential pressures are necessary to create an ever more holistic and survivable map of reality.
A good map can make all the difference when you’re in the wilderness. Probing the nature of those stories which serve as the narrative engine of our own self-identity is the only way to understand culture in any meaningful way. Only through such work can we become, at least in some small respect, self-determined and capable of influence.
