Nov 19 2017
“I think that we have a habit, narratively, of celebrating conflict as the engine that drives story. In the most naive way, the implications of that are that we’re always looking for a “versus.” “Man versus nature,” and things like that, which tends to set us up against our environment. But speaking of foreclosing possibilities, the reason we think that’s a successful narrative is that it can only go one way, which is that the conflict escalates until it can’t anymore. Which to me doesn’t seem like that rich narrative ground to be hanging out in.
I think that when you build to a story structure that builds to a point of crisis, this make-or-break moment when something’s got to give, you start to expect that in your life. Milton Friedman has a quote, which I just heard Naomi Klein say the other day, and it’s hard for me not to believe in it myself: “Only a crisis, real or imagined, produces real change.”
And you want to say “sure that makes sense, when bad things happen, people respond.” But it’s such a bleak view of the world. I don’t think it accounts for constructive relationships or changes that are more gentle. I think if you start to prize crisis too much, then you start thinking “Well things are bad in the environment right now, but I guess we’re just going to have to have all these natural disasters come and have the human species half wiped out before we get it.” Which feels like a way of checking out from agency.
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