dude. this "we live in stories" crap is so over. actually, if we were the stories we tell, there'd be no evil at all. your body getting riddled by bullets is not a story. at any rate, i just want to point out that the wearethestorieswetell thing originated with literary critics, who really wanted to live in stories - that is, curled up on their couch with books - and then somehow entered public consciousness in a kind of hackchump postmodernism. it sort of sounds good, or like an explanation or something. push it even slightly and you realize it's a bizarrely backwards and misleading metaphor. it doesn't help with the ethics, the aesthetics, the metaphysics, the science, the history, the psychology. it's a gigantic univocal pseudo-explanation that does absolutely nothing.

brooks: "Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness. But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged." ok. so. i freely select my story, and i select a story that leads to cooperation and goodness. (really?) what is my story, my story of the whole world and human history? ain't got one, dave. maybe you do. but if you do i can guarantee you this: it's false. but of course "false" makes no sense in a world consisting of stories, whatever that could possibly mean. actually i have a thousand stories and a thousand beliefs and experiences that don't fit into my thousand stories. it's a mess out here. but at any rate, if you wanted to explain islamic extremism, how useful is it to say that they selected a bad story? =0.