Facts don’t change people’s minds, but stories certainly do. It’s true, that if you hear a story enough times you’ll believe it to be fact. It helps to remember that a good yarn before bedbedtime helps to relieve anxiety for both adults and children, even if it’s a total fantasy.
One of the greatest challenges we face in life is understanding what it’s like to be another person, to live in their shoes, so to speak. Aging can be fun if you look back to see all the mistakes you’ve made with various relationships over time, the high standards you made for everyone else but yourself, and then, be able to have a belly laugh at your own absurd notions of what you thought was real.
The big story doing the rounds globally is related directly to the decline of our current global empire and, apart from causing a huge amount of anxiety for everyone, is the fantasy that everyone else in the world is to blame for the decline of our wonderful way of life, the story goes, ‘they’ are responsible for our economic and political woes – and of course, when you shift blame you never see your own dysfunction or personal lack and therefore miss the opportunity to reset your life. By agreeing to give governments more power and weapons to win against those ‘devils’ we push peace outside the ring and dialogue fades as part of the formula. We all suffer.
Along with declining lifestyles, poor retirement options and the lack of jobs, this story plans to create a ‘zero-sum’ view of the world around us, that view is: “I can only succeed if you fail”…Few now believe the old story that a rising tide will lift all our economic boats and globalisation has been exposed as just another managed story to enrich the capital flows running the world. There is less openness, less inclusiveness and greater inequality between nations than ever before.
If these stories are designed to create fear of others then how can there ever be any chance of adult discourse or mutuality with other nations, this is not the road to peace, our leaders don’t want peace because it’s not profitable and it can’t keep them in power. We must be demanding dialogue not war. Every human relationship needs a healthy and honest interplay between the two sides if there is to be hope of ever getting along. The idealogy of war being promoted globally now is the opposite of what a workable relationship looks like. A mature relationship is tolerant of others, it certainly doesn’t use weapons to get your message across, the story of self-defence is rubbish, supplying weapons to gain peace is leading us all to the edge. The question we need to discuss today is: “What story are you listening to”?