Yet a third way to explain the difficulty we have telling stories has to do with agency.
On the one hand, regarding our private lives, we have a degree of freedom that existed perhaps nowhere in the world before the last hundred years: we are free to marry or sleep with whoever will have us, to live wherever we like, to take whatever job, to pursue any career. There are financial constraints, but almost nothing is left of the social barriers, familial obligations, codes of honor, religious commitments that once created the structure within which drama occurred.
On the other hand, this arena of market-like freedom is hemmed in on all sides—by an ever more powerful system of government and corporate surveillance; by ever more minute legal regulations on how we rear and educate children, grow and prepare food, care for others, document our transactions; by a political and cultural deadlock that seems ever more entrenched and impossible to resolve; by the machinations of an ever more powerful global ruling class; by our own attachment to our material comforts; by impending ecological doom. And about these matters, we seem to have no agency whatsoever.
Something is terribly wrong and we feel unable to do anything about it. At most we can heroically devote our lives to a hopeless fight against an insurmountable evil (not a very appealing prospect). Or we can wait, in fear and vague dim hope, for something to happen.
We are not protagonists, we are not even actors—we are essentially audience, but an audience that can never escape, an audience doomed to watch until they die. Somewhere in the world are people who appear to be actors, but they all seem to be terribly corrupt, and what’s more we’re not so sure that even they have agency; they look more like the avatars of vast cultural and historical forces.
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