Humans don’t experience reality raw. They filter it through stories: myths about gods, flags, markets, rights, and the purpose of suffering.
A story works when it offers order. It explains why pain is justified, why rules deserve obedience, and why strangers should cooperate. That is how fragile organisms build empires: not by muscle, but by shared meaning.
Yet stories demand loyalty. People will kill and die for symbols because symbols can feel more real than bodies. The storyteller’s power is therefore political, not merely poetic.
Modernity did not end storytelling; it replaced older myths with newer ones, often wrapped in the language of “progress” and “reason.” The form changes, the human hunger stays.
If meaning is built from narrative, the next problem is what happens when narrative loses its authority to something colder than faith.