In Val Harari's new work, A Brief History of Today, there is a very fundamental idea that the foundation of human civilization is the fictional ability of human beings, that is, the ability of human beings to tell stories. Religion is the story, the nation is the story, business is the story, and life is full of stories.
Stories have such a strong persuasive force on people, we often hear others say that everything will accompany a story to prove themselves, such as saying that they are rich, then this person must say that he has encountered something, this story must have a certain exaggeration and compilation component, and then to prove that he is rich. Like going to an enclave to buy breakfast or something.
There are also examples that most of us can perceive, when we reason with children, you just reason with him, he will certainly not listen. When you add a story, such as the story of not being able to open the door to a stranger, using a piglet to open the door to a big bad wolf, it is easier for children to listen to it. Robert McKee, the godfather of Hollywood screenwriting, said in one of his books, "The Economics of Stories," that the reason why stories can move people is not because of how advanced the story is, but because the story is the most in line with the human mind, and it is an indispensable survival tool for human beings from ancient times.
The origin of the story should start from two or three million years ago, that is, during that time, human beings frantically inflated their brains, a large number of brain gray matter (brain cells) and white matter (brain nerves), so we are now so big in the human brain, so that we give birth to children in advance, because the head is too big, in hiding in the mother's stomach for a while, the mother's birth canal is not enough to give birth. But looking at this process, in fact, it is not satisfied with bioethymology, because the big head needs to consume a lot of energy to supply, so this must have encountered a genetic mutation that created an additional harvest, so it produced such an evolutionary process.
So what did this mutation cause? It is the concept of "I" that human beings have come into being. You have to know that animals don't have my concept. So what good is it that after the emergence of my concept, we will start to associate the fate of the same kind of people around us with ourselves because of the change of environment, so we will be afraid, we will understand ourselves by understanding others.
Here we can illustrate the example of animals, such as pigs in the pigsty, they are not self-aware, when a companion is slaughtered by humans, they will only think that the environment has changed, there is only one companion, and they should still eat and sleep. They wouldn't have imagined that they would one day be slaughtered like their companions.
So when human beings have the concept of "me", the life and death of human companions, they will think that they will one day die like their companions, so human beings will be afraid. So how to solve this fear, that is, to tell stories, such as lightning and thunder in the sky, we will make up stories that the thunder and lightning mother are thundering and raining, life and death we will say that there is Yama or Meng Po and so on. So the origin of the story was originally to solve our human fears, so when humans have the consciousness of "I", it is like a node that will constantly connect other points, such as connecting to others, connecting to the future, connecting to life and death. It is only in recent years, with the development of science, that we have gradually lifted some feudal superstitions and let people persuade others in a rational way.
So in ancient times we would pray to the gods to bless us with good weather, and now we believe that this brand of cosmetics can make people beautiful by looking at advertisements. In the long evolution of mankind, the essence of the story is not just a kind of entertainment, it is the first weapon that humans have built for themselves, and it is also a weapon that will never fail.