Smoke, Mirrors and Stories:

“The stories we tell literally make the world, if you want to change the world, you need to change your story.” – Micheal Margolis:

Long before social media and lightning-speed access to the world’s known history, humanity had to find other ways to inspire, or indeed shame themselves. We’ve always given great credence to storytellers, but antiquity is loaded with listeners, some who would achieve at the highest levels, some who would fade in time. Which tales led Alexander to attain greatness? You can picture it, a young boy under a star-studded sky, his astute eyes peeled across the fire, his ears pricked and his young mind absorbing wild fables, something coursing through his veins. Call it what you will, but whatever the feeling was, whatever charged through him like an electrical storm went on to conquer the known world. On the flipside, what tales were told to the ones who could’ve, but didn’t conquer the world? The individuals with talents to match Lennon, Rowling, Presley, Aurelius, Boudica, Armstrong, and the Fitzpatrick Kennedy’s? It’d be reductive to presume that greatness wasn’t achieved by those who could’ve attained it simply because of the stories they heard. or had told themselves, but I’d argue that it would make up a great bulk of them.

Alexander saw himself in the heroes and pictured the grand adventures as his own fate. A young Mike Tyson was tasked by his mentor to study the history of Alexander, those stories charged him, and something coursed through his veins too, something that would carry him to become the heavyweight champion of the world, and so it goes. However, for every Tyson, there is an unquantifiable number of extraordinary people who’s names we will never know. Again, not to be reductive, some of the reasons could well be economical, geographical and untimely demise, how many wunderkind were lost in the war? How many literary prodigies that could’ve rivalled Tolkien? There is an abundance of reasons why those unknown individuals remained as such, but undoubtably one of those reasons is self-reflection.

Facebook appropriately named the pages ‘walls’, a place where millions of people go with religious conviction to feel inspired, angered, amused, to laugh, to cry, to wail, wail at the wall, the comparison seems silly but it’s essentially the same driving force as theism. Millions attend Reddit, Tik-Tok, Instagram and so on for the same purposes. This normally ends with seeing a long-lost friends third cousin on a yacht wearing boat shoes, with the caption ‘Believe in yourself, even when others don’t’, but in reality he’s up to his eyes in debt and has to clock in at Sainsbury’s on Monday, 6AM sharp, but we don’t know that, we just dwell under a grey sky. A phrase is thrown around on social media that tries to encapsulate this, ‘Comparison is the thief of joy’ – Teddy Roosevelt. What isn’t often spoken about is that this is by no means a novel phenomenon, it isn’t a modern problem that requires a modern solution. It is accentuated by present technology, yes, but the fundamentals of what is now heightened have always been around, and comparison isn’t always the thief of joy, sometimes it is what drives us to achieve things that we thought were out of our sphere.

Step into the home of a Roman aristocrat, the first thing you’ll see is the wall of faces, antiquities answer to our Facebook. These faces are death masks. Moulds taken of the recently deceased that are then hung in the family home. Most noble families had these masks and some would date back hundreds of years. Roman children were compelled to study each and every face, learn the name and the list of accomplishments that the individual achieved in their lifetime. They would do this until they could recite each ancestor and recall all their endeavours without skipping a beat. Heavy stuff, not just yachts and boat shoes, if comparison is the thief of joy, imagine the weight put on these young Roman’s. For many, this was the crux, it begged the question ‘Who will you be?’ They would’ve literally been able to see themselves in the masks, and figuratively in the tales. Self-reflection at its peak, they’d have gotten nothing nearly as profound from the mirror. Some would’ve been drawn by the profundity and would have gone on to produce a long list of achievements themselves. Some would have buckled under the weight of ancestries looming expectations. What’s the difference between those who achieved great things and the ones who didn’t? Ceaser extracted something from the stories that a young noble whose name we don’t know, simply didn’t. For the young noble that perhaps matched Ceaser in raw talent and ability, the inner story was much greater than the fable’s. Humans at their core are information machines, inputting and outputting vast swarms of data, trying to understand ourselves and the world around us. For Ceaser, the inner story connected with the stories coming in, and it sparked a flame in him. The noble that could’ve been, was crippled by self-doubt and put down by the whispers of a false monologue. Today we are inundated by real world and digital data, forced to look at the modern God’s of rock and red carpet aristocrats, the extraordinary few flying in the faces of the mundane masses. They beg the question, ‘Who will you be?’

Unlike the Macedonians or the Roman’s, we’re able to curate the stories we listen to. We can digitally outcast those who offer little more than hubris and self-grandeur, and replace them with people whose stories evoke us and set the Alexandrian spark alight. The same can be done in the real world, although it isn’t as easy. Most people born into lower socio-economic backgrounds remain there. Although studies have shown that poverty has a biological effect on DNA, it isn’t the entire picture, if it was, it would be inescapable. Many people have broken the chain of so called hereditary poverty and built a new life, they had refused the story that surrounded them and sought new tales. Individuals such as these made the entire world aware of Compton, a deprived province of LA, now a word synonymous with some of the wealthiest hip-hop stars. Individuals like these created new musical genres, penned the worlds greatest novels and even introduced the planet to a particular way of cooking fried chicken. These people bend the zeitgeist, they demand the eyes and ears of billions and all because they refused the story they were told. ‘Who are you?’ meant nothing to them, ‘Who will you be?’ meant everything.

Would Def Leppard have risen up from the poverty of Sheffield if Zepplin hadn’t achieved the same in London? Would Zepplin have become a global phenomenon if they didn’t have the Beatles or the Stones to follow? What would Elvis have become if it wasn’t for Ernest Tubb, Big Mamma Thornton and a vast number of others who refuted the cards they were dealt and forced a reshuffle? They all shared a false monologue whispering lies, all spent nights under star studded skies, all sought a new tale, all spoke, lived and breathed a new story into creation. Most importantly they all beg the question, “Who will you be?”