The Great Storytellers

Professor Yuval Noah Harari says that stories provide the foundation of human beings' capacity to cooperate in much larger numbers compared to other life forms.  This capacity to cooperate arises from use of fiat money for trade and wealth accumulation, organizations as legal persons for bringing together large number of persons in a venture, a belief system like religion / constitution that ensures uniform social conduct.  And these are all based on stories / narratives - legal, social and religious - that we collectively subscribe to. 

While mulling this over, it occurs to me that the Brahmins in Hindu society perhaps constitute one of the finest and most prolific storytellers.  I may use the term we because I belong to this group. We excel not only in creating stories but also in telling those story in a most captivating way.  This is borne out by the humungous collection of mythological stories in Hinduism, and our mastery of classical music, dance, and dramatics (sangeet, nritya and naatya shastras).  Also, the language ascribed to us, Sanskrit, itself is exquisitely suited to singing hymns, telling stories and conduct of Karmkand.

Collaboration implies cohesive groups, and groups necessarily need a leader as their face and the glue.  Since it is stories that validate the ideas cherished by a group, and by implication its leader, it is only natural that leaders need the storytellers and the storytellers need their patronage to practice and sharpen their mastery of the said crafts.  The storytellers also need to be very versatile as successive leaders may have very different traits and each prevalent trait has to be justified and even celebrated to ensure that the group remains cohesive.  And thus a society tends to accumulate stories that may have conflicting morals encapsulated in them even as they maintain a semblance of continuity.  Some stories may support a very moralistic leader while others may extoll the pragmatist even as some others may find complete justification for suppression with a firm hand.  As the repertoire grows, one can pull out a story for endorsing any action or style of leadership.

In today's society this role, that traditionally belonged to Brahmins, has moved from a social group to the elites in bureaucracy, media, academia, judiciary etc.  They are the new age Brahmins.

While a symbiotic relationship between rulers and storytellers serves a very important function as long as the going is good, it drains the capacity of the elite storyteller group to be a watchdog and to alert the society against a less than ideal leader or to be a mechanism to correct an errant leader.  And if someone in the group does set out to do so, we hear calls for a "committed" bureaucracy / media / judiciary etc.  And such self serving groups may end up accelerating the decline in a society instead of correcting it and bringing it back to the right path. 

And so a society must choose its storytellers with care and also critically examine the stories told to them.  This is one reason why democracy is indispensable despite it not being the best possible system.