Where Did That Banana Come From?: You Believe in Legends, Fairy Tales, and Myths

I remember, when I was a teen in the 80s, I had a wall calendar that, instead of a picture, each month offered a short science fiction story. I thought each one was great, and kept it in a box for time as an adult in the hopes of revisiting them later. It's long since disappeared, and now I only remember two of the stories. Those two, though left a vivid impression.

One was about a traveling intergalactic zoo. Human children were excited for it to stop on earth so they could see all the different types of alien species. They paid a lot to go. At the end of the story, the perspective shifts to the aliens who have been going from stop to stop. It turns out they paid for the trip so they could travel around the galaxy seeing all the different types of alien species at each stop. It was a "zoo" of creatures on exhibit from both sides of the cages.

The other story took the form of a report home from an alien science expedition exploring a new planet. They study it in hiding so as not to disturb any life they find. Readers are able to ascertain from the report's descriptions that the planet is Earth. The report starts well, but ends with the aliens in a panic: all of the surrounding vegetation is turning brown, withering, and dying, and they're sure they've caused the blight by accidentally releasing some viral contagion that is killing the planet. They leave, crushed. Readers are able to ascertain the change is not a blight, but is simply autumn.

Perspective.

They're both stories about perspective. How you view a situation determines your reality. The stories we tell ourselves define the world that we experience.

(After a bit of digging, I believe the publication I had was the Science Fiction and Fantasy Story-A-Month 1989 Calendar, ed. by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg. The first story I described was "Zoo" by Edward Hoch and the second, I think, "That Strain Again" by Charles Sheffield.)

The stories we tell ourselves define the world that we experience. The stories we tell each other define the world.

A few years back I wrote a couple of posts after reading the book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari: The Fictions That Give Meaning to the World and Reality Is Negotiable. He's more recently started adapting his work for children, and I've been reading Unstoppable Us, Volume 1: How Humans Took Over the World with my kids. Here's my review of that book:

If you invent a good story that enough people believe, you can conquer the world.*

This book tells the story of how that already happened, how humans--Homo Sapiens--became the most dangerous animal in the world, spread across the globe--weakening and eliminating species along the way--and became the most dominant life form on the planet.

Sapiens managed this because we have a superpower no other species has ever had: the ability to tell stories. Because shared stories allow Sapiens to cooperate in large numbers, particularly with large groups of strangers. Shared stories, cultures, practices, and beliefs bond us, give us a way to achieve things together. Stories and cooperation. They are unique to Sapiens. They are the key to our success as a species. They are our superpowers.

This book is a retelling of the first part of Harari's adult book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (in which he refers to "stories" as "intersubjective beliefs"). I haven't read that, though I've read his follow-up, Homo Deus, which builds from Sapiens and extrapolates into the future.

I think he does a marvelous job of taking that information and translating it into a work for younger readers. Just fabulous. The third chapter (of four) drags a bit and seems to lose focus, but the second, "The Sapiens' Superpower," is astounding. I wish everyone, children and adults alike, would read it. I certainly learned some things--from the whole book--and my children enjoyed reading it with me.

I'd be very happy if schools everywhere would adopt this book as required reading. It tells a great (true) story.

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*From the conclusion.

Since at least Fiction Is As Essential As Nonfiction in 2009, the importance of stories in shaping the world has been one of my main themes on this blog. It's as core a belief as any I hold.

Because I love the second chapter of Harari's book so much, I'm going to share a large portion of it here. He tells a wonderful story.

In a fight with a wolf, a crocodile, or a chimpanzee, a Sapiens would have very little chance of winning. Even an old grandma chimpanzee could beat the world boxing champion.

The only reason we can scare away wolves and lock chimpanzees in zoos is that we cooperate in very large numbers. One human can't defeat one chimpanzee, but a thousand humans can achieve incredible things that chimpanzees can't even dream of. And it's thanks to our secret superpower that we can cooperate better than any other animal. We can even cooperate with complete strangers.

Take, for example, the last piece of fruit you ate. Maybe it was a banana. Where did that banana come from? If you were a chimp, you'd have to go to the forest and pick a banana yourself. But because you're a human, you usually rely on help from strangers. Very few people pick their own bananas. In most cases, someone you've never met and never will meet grew this banana thousands of miles from you. Then other strangers put is on a truck, a train, or perhaps a ship and transported it to your local store. Then you went to the store, chose your banana, took it to the cashier, and gave the cashier some money. And that's how you got your banana.

How many people touched that banana before you bought it? How many of these people do you know personally? Maybe you don't know any of them . . . but they helped you get your banana.

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Eagles fly because they have wings. Humans fly because they know how to cooperate in large numbers. This is what makes us so powerful. We can cooperate with thousands of strangers to get bananas or build a school or fly to the moon. Chimpanzees can't do that. They don't have stores where they can buy bananas that grew on the other side of the world. They don't have schools where hundreds of young chimps study together. They don't fly anywhere, certainly not to the moon.

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There's only one other type of animal that can cooperate in very large numbers: social insects, such as ants, bees, and termites. . . . 

Yet there is one big difference between humans and ants: ants know how to organize themselves in only one way. . . . 

In contrast to ants, we humans constantly change how we cooperate with one another.

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Our superpower is something we use all the time. We just don't think of it as a superpower. Many people even see it as a weakness. It is our ability to dream up stuff that isn't really there and to tell all kinds of imaginative stories. We're the only animals that can invent and believe in legends, fairy tales, and myths. . . . 

The useful thing about stories is that no matter how ridiculous they are, they help large numbers of people cooperate. If thousands of people believe in the same story, then they'll all follow the same rules, which means they can cooperate effectively, even with strangers. Thanks to stories, Sapiens cooperate much better than Neanderthals or chimpanzees or ants.

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Does all this sound strange to you? Do you find it hard to believe that stories control the world? Just look at how all the grown-ups around you behave. They do some interesting things, don't they?

Some people wear all kinds of hats because they believe that a god likes these hats very much. Other people don't eat certain foods because they believe that a god said not to eat them. Some go fight people on the other side of the world because they believe that a god told them to. Others give lots of money to construct a big building because they believe that a god wants it.

Their children might as, "Why do we need this building? Why do we have to wear these hats? Why do we have to fight people on the other side of the world?" And the parents tell them the stories that all the grown-ups believe so that the children start believing them too.

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Did you ever go to a park and meet some kids you'd never seen before, and within minutes you were all playing soccer together? How did you do that when you didn't know the other kids? After all, soccer's quite a complicated game with lots of rules. . . . 

[This works] because most kids believe the same story about soccer. Everyone accepts that the aim of soccer is to kick the ball into the goal. Everyone accepts that you can only touch the ball with your feet, never your hands, unless you're the goalkeeper. Everyone accepts that you can never kick another player. Everyone accepts that the pitch has boundaries, and the moment the ball crosses a boundary, it is out and passes to the other team.

But why do all kids accept these rules? Well, it's because their parents and teachers told them the story of soccer. Perhaps they saw their older brothers and sisters play soccer, and they probably even watched famous people like Lionel Messi and Megan Rapinoe play soccer on television.

In exactly the same way, grown-ups can play very complicated games because they all believe the same stories and follow the same rules. One of the most interesting games grown-ups play is called "corporation." It's way more complicated than soccer.

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 . . . So we still don't know what McDonald's is, do we? Where could you go if you wanted to see, hear, touch, or smell it? The truth is, you just can't. You can look at the restaurants, talk to the cooks, touch the tables, and smell the burgers. But that's not McDonald's. McDonald's isn't real in the way that a chimpanzee or a banana is real. McDonald's is a story that millions of grown-ups tell each other and believe very strongly, but it exists only in our imaginations. We created it with our special Sapiens superpower.

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Do you know how the McDonald's Corporation was created in the first place? It wasn't created when Richard and Maurice McDonald laid the first brick of their first restaurant or fried their first burger. It wasn't created when the first customer walked in and paid them a dollar. No, it was created when a lawyer performed a bizarre ceremony and told everyone a story: the story of the McDonald's Corporation.

To tell the story properly, the lawyer first had to put on special ceremonial robes--also known as a suit. If you're going to tell people an important story, you need to look impressive. Then the lawyer opened a lot of old books written in a language that nobody except lawyers understands: legalese. . . . 

The lawyer searched through these old books for the exact words needed to create McDonald's, then wrote them down on a beautiful piece of paper so they wouldn't be forgotten. Then the lawyer held up the piece of paper and read the story out loud to a lot of people.

Of course, nobody could see the McDonald's Corporation, or hear it, or touch it, or smell it. But still, all the adults were convinced that the McDonald's Corporation really did exist because they heard the story that the lawyer told, and they all believed it.

That's how McDonald's was created. And that's how other corporations were created--Google and Facebook and Mercedes-Benz and Toyota. They're all stories that grown-ups believe. And because everybody believes these stories, a lot of people can cooperate.

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Money is also just another imaginary story that grown-ups believe. . . . 

Along came some great storytellers called bankers and politicians, and they're even more powerful than lawyers. Grown-ups have a lot of faith in bankers and politicians and will believe almost any story they tell. They tell stories like "This small piece of paper is worth ten bananas," and the grown-ups believe them. And as long as everyone believes this story, that small piece of paper really is worth ten bananas. You can take that piece of paper to a store and give it to a complete stranger, and the stranger will give you real bananas, which you can actually eat.

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One thing that our storytelling superpower gives us is the ability to cooperate in very large numbers. But that isn't all. Our superpower also allows us to change the way we cooperate, and to make these changes quickly. . . . Humans can quickly change the way we behave by simply changing the stories we believe. . . . 

People around the world believe in all kinds of strange stories. The story of corporations, for example, and stories about complicated ideas like nationalism and democracy. But there are two important things to remember: people need stories in order to cooperate, and they can change the way they cooperate by changing the stories they believe. That's why we're far more powerful than ants. That's our superpower.

So this is how our ancestors conquered the world: with stories. None of the other animals believe in stories. They only believe in things they can actually see, hear, smell, touch, or taste.

Do you find it hard to believe that stories control the world? Stories control the world. People need stories in order to cooperate, and they can change the way they cooperate by changing the stories they believe. That's our superpower--our ability to dream up stuff that isn't really there and to tell all kinds of imaginative stories. We're the only animals that can invent and believe in legends, fairy tales, and myths.

Stories control the world.

Stories kill people.

Why Are Americans Shooting Strangers and Neighbors? ‘It All Goes Back to Fear.’

“It all goes back to the fear,” he said. “Why are cheerleaders getting shot for opening the wrong door? Why is a grown man scared to go into a boot store without carrying his weapon? Why are these people so afraid?”

Across the country this month, at least four men have opened fire on someone who’d stumbled upon their space, resulting in one death, two injuries and a car pocked with bullet holes. The apparent acts of snap-aggression have reinvigorated the debate around the prevalence of “stand your ground” laws in the United States and a pressing question: Why are people so quick to pull the trigger on strangers?

Why did a 65-year-old man kill a 20-year-old woman who had accidentally pulled into his Upstate New York driveway? Why did an 84-year-old man fire two bullets into a 16-year boy who had mistakenly knocked on his door in Kansas City? Why did a 43-year-old man in South Florida allegedly shoot at a 19-year-old Instacart delivery driver and his 18-year-old girlfriend who had arrived at the wrong address?

Experts blame a cocktail of factors: the easy availability of guns, misconceptions around stand-your-ground laws, the marketing of firearms for self-defense — and a growing sense among Americans, particularly Republicans, that safety in their backyard is deteriorating. . . . 

The violent crime rate decreased in 2022 compared to the previous year, Washington Post data shows. And over the longer term, the National Criminal Victimization Survey showed the number of people reporting sexual assault, robbery and other physical attacks is overall much lower now than in the 1990s and has not increased in recent years. . . . 

The perception that life is getting more dangerous has spread on the right as GOP leaders and pundits repeatedly argued, without evidence, that immigrants and protesters are jeopardizing American peace. Conservative news channels have devoted more airtime to violence than their center- and left-leaning competitors: Over the past three years, for instance, Fox News anchors and guests spotlighted crime 79 percent more often than those on MSNBC and twice as much as voices on CNN . . . 

Fear, paranoia and misunderstandings of the laws governing self-defense and use of force is a recipe for tragedy.

People are afraid because of the stories they're hearing, repeating, and believing. People who are afraid kill others. Stories kill people.

You believe in legends, fairy tales, and myths.

Why Did We All Have the Same Childhood?

You might not think of typing “BOOBS” on a calculator as cultural heritage, but it is. The custom has been shared, preserved, and passed down through generations of children sniggering in math class. This sacred communal knowledge, along with other ephemera of youth—the blueprints for a cootie catcher, the words to a jump-rope rhyme, the rhythm of a clapping game—is central to the experience of being a kid.

When children are together, they develop their own rituals, traditions, games, and legends—essentially, their own folklore, or, as researchers call it, “childlore.” That lore can be widespread and long-lasting . . . 

The main way childlore spreads is, perhaps obviously, by children teaching it to one another. Older kids mentor younger ones both at school and at home, where siblings play a vital role in passing jokes and games down through generations. As for how childlore spreads geographically, there are a couple of key players. One is the new kid, who shows up at school with a pocketful of lore from elsewhere. The other is cousins, who are many kids’ closest peers who don’t attend their school.

Adults have a role to play in perpetuating childlore as well, albeit a supporting one. Parents and teachers share nursery rhymes, folk songs, and games with kids, and adults create the movies, books, and TV shows that kids consume. Our nostalgia for our own childhood shapes what kids get exposed to. But Steve Roud, a British folklorist and the author of The Lore of the Playground, emphasized to me that folklore is by its nature not handed down by an authority. It is of the people, by the people—even if those people are children. So although kids may crib from pop culture and adopt things they learn from adults, making something their own and using it for their own purposes is what transmutes it into childlore. PAW Patrol is not childlore; a game that kids invent on the playground using PAW Patrol characters is. . . . 

“The scraps of lore which children learn from each other are at once more real, more immediately serviceable, and more vastly entertaining to them than anything which they learn from grown-ups.” . . . 

Adults, it seems, are in a perpetual state of worry that Kids These Days just don’t play like they used to, probably because of whatever technology was most recently introduced. . . . 

Childlore is a shared language among children, and although adults may remember it fondly, we aren’t fluent in it anymore. We don’t always know it when we see it, because it isn’t for us. “All you see is kids running around screaming,” Roud said. “You don’t realize that they are playing a game.”

The stories of childhood are practice for the grown-up stories that control the world.

And, really, in a very broad sense, isn't this what we're doing when we discuss politics and religion, when we gossip and spread rumors, when we create mission and vision statements for our workplaces, when we try to figure out how to live with one another as neighbors and define ourselves as communities--aren't we really just negotiating the rules of our shared games and trying to find groups to be part of whose styles match our own?  How we define reality is up to all of us to figure out together, and it happens in the interplay between us.

See more: Imagination: Not Just for Kids.

A poem about how taking the time to tell the story right--even if it means changing a few facts along the way--makes all the difference.

David Kirby

THE WRECK OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD

“Everyone’s good in a crisis,” says my brother-in-law’s wife

to my brother-in-law, who seems less than pleased to have

this information, he having just said, “I’m good in a crisis”

in response to her assertion that he’s not really good at anything:

 

picking up after himself, taking turns with the kids,

cleaning the kitchen after a big meal that she has shopped for

and prepared. Bravado, the marvelous, the startling:

these aren’t as impressive as that which is steady, consistent,

 

reliable. Not Faustus but Penelope. Jack Gilbert says as much

in his poem “The Abnormal is Not Courage,” which

describes a 1939 Polish cavalry charge against German tanks,

their sabers flashing as cannon fire cuts them to pieces,

 

although the best thing about this story is that

it never happened: the cavalry came across lightly-armed

German infantry and dispersed them, though

the Poles themselves were routed when German reinforcements

 

arrived and fired on them with machine guns.

The tanks appeared only after the battle was over,

as did journalists who saw the tanks and the dead men

and the horses and drew the wrong conclusion, although

 

in a way the cavalry charge actually worked, since it halted

the German advance long enough for a Polish battalion

of foot soldiers to retreat to safety. But isn’t

the story better the way Gilbert tells it? Who wants to hear

 

about a mistake? If you’re going to tell a story,

make it a good one. Be patient. When 18-year-old

John James Audubon came to America, he found

some Eastern Phoebes nesting in a cave and, having heard

 

that they returned to the same spot to nest every year,

he decided to test that idea, so for days he sat in the cave

with them and read a book until they were used

to him and let him tie string to their legs to identify them,

 

and, sure enough, the next year the same birds were back.

Don’t try too hard, in other words. “Human speech is like

a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears

to dance to,” says Flaubert, “when we long to move the stars

 

to pity.” Really? The stars don’t need us.

The stars are fine. It’s the bears who need dance music.

On your feet, Smokey! Here’s one you’ll like—

I wrote it just for you. Besides, every hundredth time

 

we sit down to write a bear song, we write one

that leaves the stars shaking with sorrow, their tears

raining down in torrents and then evaporating in the atmosphere

before they reach us. Beauty can’t be targeted—that was

 

Ezra Pound’s mistake, says Brodsky, a surprising one

for somebody who lived in Italy so long. Beauty is a by-product.

Beauty is the stepchild of doing one’s job, as when Cyrano

de Bergerac suffered a neck wound in battle and decided

 

to study astronomy while he recovered, eventually writing

a satirical novel about a voyage to the moon, thus influencing

future science fiction writers but also being

discovered three hundred and fifty years later by the Edmond Rostand

 

who made him famous in a play called Cyrano de Bergerac

in which his love for the beautiful Roxane is thwarted

because Rostand gave him a large and unsightly nose,

an assertion as exaggerated as the false Polish cavalry charge

 

and thus, like that invention, a key element in turning

a good story into a great one. Gordon Lightfoot’s

hit song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

was riddled with so many inaccuracies that the singer-songwriter

 

agonized over his sending the doomed freighter to Cleveland,

for example, when it was really headed for Zug Island

when it sank on Lake Superior in 1975, and the families

of the twenty-nine men who perished in the wreck

 

met to mourn in the Mariners’ Church of Detroit

and not, in Lightfoot’s re-phrasing, the Maritime

Sailors’ Cathedral, but his producer and long-time

friend Lenny Waronker told him not to worry about

 

the facts, to play to his artistic strengths and “just tell

a story.” The Poles weren’t stupid. At the time

of the 1939 cavalry charge, their cavalry

was already being organized into motorized brigades.

 

After all, who won the war? Audubon’s tying

strings onto the legs of the Eastern Phoebes

is the first known incident of banding birds.

Cyrano didn’t have a big nose, but Rostand gave him one.

 

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” charted at #1,

and before long shipping regulations were changed

to include survival suits, positioning systems,

depth finders, increased freeboard, more frequent inspection of vessels.

 

None of this would have happened if Gordon Lightfoot

had made sure all his facts were correct and the song

had turned out to be a dud. Writing isn’t hard.

You just have to be patient. You just have to get everything right.

 

—from Poets Respond

May 7, 2023

Beauty can’t be targeted. Beauty is a by-product. Beauty is the stepchild of doing one’s job. Be patient. You just have the get everything right. If you’re going to tell a story, make it a good one.

Stories control the world.