[lit-ideas] Re: narrative forms and political processes

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 2:20 AM, Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
>
> I think that's what's always going on in every organizational decision (I'd
> push that even harder, and say in almost all decisions of any sort).  We're
> telling ourselves a story about the situation and the 'decision' is equally
> a practical, physical thing (whose name do I mark on the ballot?) and a turn
> of the narrative screw.  What happens next precipitates revisions of the
> story, sometimes extending the story's trajectory as it was envisioned at
> the time of the decision, at other times diverting that trajectory
> dramatically, precipitating a call for rewriting the story as it was at the
> time of the decision.
>

Based on my experience, this description is spot on.

>
>
> To revert to the question of rational decisions I was talking about the
> other day (and with a tip of the hat to Eric Yost and Mike Geary for their
> comments, to which I didn't quite know what to say...), I think the choices
> people make are based on what they think the next episode should be, or what
> they want it to be, in the on-going, improvised drama(s) we're all
> constantly enacting.  All the rational analysis we do serves only to furnish
> the props, the set and the definition of the situation in which we're to
> improvise the next episode -- sort of like the cards Drew Carey used to pull
> up and read from to set up the scene for the ensemble to improvise in the
> show "Whose Line is it Anyway?"
>
> One problem with that way of looking at things is that it means there's no
> certainty to be had, no decision can really be rational and just about
> anything can be negotiated at any time.  A lot of people find that
> uncomfortable.  But to me, that's the way it is and the pipe dream that we
> could have it any other way -- that our leaders or insitutions could be so
> farsighted and competent that they could eliminate the uncertainty of the
> future -- always was just that, a pipe dream.
>

Serendipitously, it was reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, a
book whose central theme is the gap between the stories we humans like to
tell ourselves and the actual randomness of so much of how the world works,
that persuaded me to pull our nest egg out of the market a month before the
crash, which has left Ruth and me in what is still relatively good shape.
Friends who were wealthier on paper have now lost fictitious fortunes on
which they were planning to retire.

John


-- 
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/

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