This blog is part of a series. WTF is social? Using Human Completeness as the core ability of the human brain, we examine various facets of social life and how communication technology and size of social circle, impact our ability to be socially effective.
Stories
Why do we like stories? One way to think about them is to treat them as just puzzles and exercises for the social brain. Who is going to do what and why? Who is lying and who is speaking the truth? What will happen next? Stories are equivalent to sports for social brain. Stories are not interesting because of what is in the story but how the story is told and what is likely to happen next and what are the choices left for each character as the story progresses. The most boring stories are those that preach, they have nothing for the social brain. Stories are like chess: opening, middle-game and endgame, each one is important and builds on what has already happened. They train us for social life. The popularity of Reality TV tells us the same thing. It is not the story that matters. It is people, how they behave vs how we think they will behave. We just love to understand and simulate other people's brain inside ours, for good reasons.
This is a bit of a hopeless situation because it tells us simply that politics is the only game in town. Being social and being political are same. We will never be able to eliminate politics from human affairs, not until we make humans something non-humans. The only thing that makes humans human is politics or what I have been referring to as “human completeness” or "social brain" as termed in Dunbar's papers/books.
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