Story Reconnections

From ‘horror stories’ to ‘love stories’.

The narrative of separation shapes our relationships with each other and the world around us, guiding us to design this deadly economy. 

To help the narrative of interbeing re-emerge so that we can re-design an economy in service to life, we need to intervene in the cycle of stories-narratives-relationships.

It’s time for us to let go of some harmful ‘horror stories’, helping them to die, whilst making room for and nourishing healthier ‘love stories’.

We base this on the ‘Two Loops’ model from the Berkana Institute, which maps an approach to systems change: a process of simultaneously ‘hospicing’ or ‘composting’ a harmful dominant system, whilst ‘nourishing’ the healthy emergent system.

We notice and encourage two story reconnections, from two ‘horror stories’ to two ‘love stories’.

These are already happening in the world, but they need more energy.

They are ‘reconnections’ because they represent a retrieval of stories that we have lost touch with in the West, which we once knew well, and that have been carried by other cultures for generations.

By reconnecting to these more accurate stories, we can weave the healthier narrative of interbeing, heal our relationships, and therefore design an economy in service to life.

Currently the cycle of stories-narratives-relationships has become a death-spiral, a ‘relationship crisis’, as our stories keep us dangerously disconnected from reality.

By intervening at the level of stories, we can break out of this spiral.

The two stories we’re focusing on respond to and help to shape two relationships, which sit at the heart of how we have designed our economy:

1. Our relationship to nature, and how we treat it 
2. Our relationship to success, and how we measure it

Quick point: when we say ‘horror stories’ and ‘love stories’, we’re not talking about stories about scary things and stories about lovely things.

So we’re not saying we should stop telling stories about despair and disasters, and instead only tell stories about hope and puppies.

At the moment, the stories we are telling are inaccurate, and lead to destruction and division – horror in our world – hence ‘horror stories’.

We’re suggesting that we should reconnect the relationships they describe with reality, to be more accurate and instead lead to love, kinship and connection in our world – so, ‘love stories’.

Each story re-connection forms a creative challenge – how do we encourage these reconnections in the stories we create, tell, carry and share? 

Let’s begin by looking at the first horror story:

Slave…that’s a bit much isn’t it?

Maybe you wouldn’t say these words exactly today, but figures who were central to the development of the separation narrative did.

And it’s a story we’re being surrounded by every single day.

Francis Bacon was a devout Anglican, and this story has some roots in the Bible:

His influence led other scientists and philosophers to make it a central premise in their worldview – a moral position:

And although we maybe don’t directly call nature our slave today, that morality is still with us – we still talk about ‘defeating’ nature, as the CEO of Verily Life Sciences (an Alphabet company) did in 2015:

Which doesn’t make much sense, given that we are a part of nature.

As Rachel Carson – the author of Silent Spring – put it:

And yet this story that we’re its master underpins our economic design today, a fantasy which is revealed by Forum For The Future’s key insight in their ‘Five Capitals’ work:

By treating nature as something that we need to defeat, or even just as an ‘externality’ that we can damage without consequence, we end up forgetting that it’s the source of literally any value, any prosperity, and thinking it’s able to withstand all we can throw at it. But it can’t.

Cultures who weren’t influenced by the ‘anthropocentric’ story carried by western religion and science, who haven’t been living in a fantasy, maintain until this day a different story:

We are gradually realising that our story of nature – as separate, something to relentlessly enslave and exploit – is disconnected from reality, dangerous, and certainly no longer a suitable guide for our economic design.

Jeremy Lent summarises it neatly:

The latest scientific breakthroughs – from quantum physics and systems biology to neuroscience, anthropology and psychiatry – are now breaking down science’s traditional role as arbiter of the narrative of separation, and helping us to recognise the wisdom in those non-western stories. 

We cannot keep designing our economy according to this lie that nature is our slave. This horror story.

Let’s accept and reconnect to the story that our modern science and ancient wisdom is carrying:

That nature is our family, not our slave.

Our community, not our commodities.

Our relatives, not our resources.

A family that we need to love.

This story about nature being our slave isn’t the only horror story here.

The other story we carry is that the economy runs on money, and that therefore productivity – the making of more money – should be encouraged as our principle priority.

But we know money doesn’t fuel the economy – energy does.

Life does.

As we lean into this understanding that we are a part of nature, we start to realise that by valuing it properly, we can properly value ourselves.

We can recognise that we live in a reciprocal relationship with nature – a give-and-take relationship, not a take-take-take relationship.

Which reveals that ultimately, the most important thing for us, and therefore our economy, is nature.

It provides all the value, and therefore it provides our wellbeing, our chance at prosperity, our life.

No nature, no life – and certainly no prosperity. 

But that’s not the story we tell.

We carry a horror story instead.

We measure our economic success using GDP – Gross Domestic Product. It’s simple, easy to remember: more GDP, more productivity, more good.

It’s been useful because it’s so simple.

But it is too simple. 

Even its creator, Simon Kuznets, warned against its use at the scale we’ve adopted it.

GDP is able to be so simple because it is indiscriminate. We tell the story that productivity is success, no matter how you do it.

So guns, addiction, crime and cleaning up pollution all add to the growth of GDP. 

This GDP calculation also doesn’t include the true costs of the activities it measures. For example in the damage to nature and human health caused by the extraction and use of fossil fuels, and the ‘cost’ of the ‘ecosystem services’ that the economy exploits ‘for free’.

When we talk about ‘growth’, this is what we’re talking about. GDP is what we grow, assuming that more GDP is better. It’s supposed to be a proxy for wellbeing – the more GDP, the more wellbeing.

We celebrate making the most profit, getting the biggest GDP, having the highest growth possible, convincing ourselves this will increase wellbeing. 

Growth is natural – children grow, but eventually they grow up. We have a word for when something keeps growing without stopping: cancer.

We need a grown up economic system, but right now it has become cancerous, deadly.

GDP is supposed to be helping us manage our household, but our household is on fire, flooding, polluted, full of rubbish and running out of food and water.

So we need something different, don’t we. 

A better way to measure success.

This not a new realisation.

Jospeh Stiglitz said in 2019 that “it’s time to retire metrics like GDP,” and way back in 1968, Robert Kennedy said “it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”:

Growth of GDP is supposed to be good, but clearly it’s not. 

At least, not good for everyone in the short term…but it’s certainly not good for anyone in the long term.

We need to refocus on what GDP is supposed to be doing. 

What if instead of prioritising GDP – productivity – we prioritised the thing it’s supposed to be delivering us, ‘wellbeing’?

If we carry the story that productivity is all that matters, we miss what really matters. 

As the saying goes – “what gets measured, gets managed”. GDP is supposed to be about generating wellbeing, but by measuring and managing GDP alone, we’ve clearly lost sight of that wellbeing.

So what if we told the story that Wellbeing is what matters – that Wellbeing, both human and ecological, is success?

It doesn’t mean that we stop caring about productivity, it just means that we prioritise and measure what productivity is supposed to lead to – wellbeing.

Given that GPD, the big metric we measure our world against, is all about productivity and money (instead of wellbeing), it’s not surprising that we also think that ‘wealth’ is about productivity and money. 

Which is interesting, because that’s not what it meant originally…

Again, we’ve lost sight of what it was supposed to be. Wealth wasn’t about money, it was about wellbeing, quality of life. By becoming obsessed with money, we’ve neglected the wellbeing.

But people don’t want to neglect wellbeing, they want to prioritise it:

Reflecting broader trends about what kind of world people want to see post-Covid-19:

There are many solutions for upgrading GDP, like the Genuine Progress Indicator (which is like GDP, except that it doesn’t reward damaging behaviour, and accounts for the true costs of our activities), or having a dashboard of metrics. 

But we can’t choose any of those things unless we reconnect our ‘horror story’ about productivity to reality, as the ‘love story’ about wellbeing. 

If we can do that, we can help to weave the narrative of interbeing, choose the upgrades to GDP and stand a chance of stopping our household from catching fire, flooding and running out of food.

Next Chapter

Chapter 6 - Drop the Horror »