Modernity has abused few words more than “story.” Just ask a writer. 

Today’s parlance grants the mantle of story as readily to slick ad copy and minute-or-less Instagram harangues as it does to a Dickens masterpiece or Coppola film. Storytellers far wiser than I have marked a cheapening of story’s cultural connotation and fielded those banal cautions of imminent supplanting by large language models. And to give the devil his due, a humanity that construes our most precious vessel of wisdom as a cudgel to clobber clicks, likes, and views out of content-drunk audiences has not only doomed itself to this future, but given it a just predicate.

Through history, we’ve quibbled about the media, morality, and monetization of telling stories. However, the disparate societal understanding of what a story is (and is not) seems a conundrum peculiar to our postmodern age. While this question may smack of pedantry in a world of visceral and immediate horrors, I contend that the bastardization of “story” is a prime culprit of our increasingly siloed and rudderless culture. 

We need look no further than Merriam-Webster to observe our malnourished conception of story. For the top contender, we are left with a sorry choice between “an account of incidents or events” or “a statement regarding the facts pertinent to a situation of question.” These definitions more fairly characterize a research abstract or a police report than a novel, play, or even a web comic. The dictionary’s failure lies in its elevation of reportage over revelation and fact over truth. 

Stories, both factual and fictional, are not just contrived vessels of information, but agents of transformation. They provide perceptual frameworks that, at their best, give us an out-of-body experience of life behind different eyes. Instead of blueprinting the world in facts and figures, stories mimic life’s revelatory nature, where truth manifests in the consequences of personal decisions and actions. I will leave the explication of truth for men with much higher IQs, but it can be broadly understood as the unchanging, unempirical principles of knowledge that make up objective reality. Good stories, even the most fanciful, clarify that reality by laying bare its substructural truths. 

Like a compass, the best stories orient our lives toward those truths, harmonizing the aims of a mortal existence with the eternal. When the temporal is tuned to the transcendent – the ultimate good – meaning reveals itself. Every lasting religion, nation, and culture rests on a foundational story. Critics may debate the fact or historicity of such narratives; but the truths they purvey are evidenced by their unlikely endurance. A true story may be suppressed, but it cannot be destroyed so long as man is a thinking creature. 

Of course, in a fallen world, even true stories are subject to perversion if misappropriated by malign or tendentious interests. When stories are hijacked and refocused through the lens of agenda (political, social, commercial, or otherwise), the pragmatic is sundered from the eternal. The narrative ceases to reveal truth and instead makes an ideological point. At this juncture, story devolves into propaganda – what might aptly be called an “anti-story.” Rather than encoding meaning, propaganda clouds meaning by positing material ends as eternal truths. This obfuscation orients the culture toward a lie, eroding the common ethos and fragmenting the polity. While it is easy to identify this arc in retrospect, the fogs of manipulation prove much harder to part in its midst, especially for those who do not bear the immediate brunt of ensuing catastrophe. How then do we hedge against the weaponization of story in our daily lives? 

A healthy first step would be to establish the common definition of story as something like, “a perceptual description of a real or imagined series of events that encodes meaning through successive revelations of truth.” This shared understanding would enable us, as a culture, to discriminate between story and its many pretenders. It would also liberate us to explore how genuine storytelling can help companies, NPOs, movements, and brands of all stripes connect the meaning they embody to audiences by aligning commercial aims with transcendent good.