A couple of weeks ago, I put out an invitation for readers to partake in a short online study group about how to interpret stories, using Shakespeare’s classic King Lear as the text. This was an idea that had been in the back of my mind for some time, but I hadn’t fleshed it out in any great detail. So, I decided I should actually sit down and put some structure to it.
As part of that exercise, I thought I should check to see if somebody else has already thought of something similar. Given the ubiquity of stories in our lives, especially the stories of Shakespeare, which are taught in every high school, somebody must have written a useful guide on interpretation. I spent more than an hour searching online and was quite stunned by the poor quality of what is available. Even well-known literary critics like Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye miss some themes that to me are very obvious. The question is, why are there no good guides on understanding stories, even for the works of Shakespeare?
I’d already half-guessed the answer to this by realising that there is no academic discipline dedicated to the study of stories, but I hadn’t fully grasped the reason for this. Now, I think I’ve finally got it.
The first thing to note is that telling stories is an everyday activity. Everybody does it without even thinking. This seems to be a universal of human culture and must be innate in the same way as language itself. We need no formal instruction to acquire our native tongue, and we need no education on telling stories. We just do it.
However, scholarly disciplines such as literature and literary criticism have not concerned themselves with this everyday kind of storytelling. Rather, they have focused their attention on the stories told by novelists, poets, playwrights, etc. In short, they study art. Art is concerned with fictional stories, while the everyday stories that all of us tell are almost always real things that happened. Stories can be factual or fictional, but theoretical approaches have always focused on the latter category.
The foundational text, which is still worth reading to get some understanding of how stories work, is Aristotle’s Poetics. But the word “poetica” in Greek simply meant “to make”. There’s a difference between telling a story based on what actually happened and making one up. The latter is a deliberate, skilled activity. The former is instinctual and automatic.
Aristotle was was concerned with made up stories. More specifically, however, he was interested in Greek theatre performances, and those were not just stories. They included music, acting, stage design, etc. The philosopher grasped that the stories being told had structure to them, but he saw the story as just one aspect of the overall artistic creation.
And that’s the way it has been ever since. The intellectual disciplines that have given some attention to stories have seen the story aspect as one part of the analysis, and not even the most important part. That’s why even modern disciplines like literature are not primarily concerned with stories, and that’s why there is no discipline that concerns itself solely with stories as the object of study.
In summary, if we look at the history of how we have understood stories in Western culture, we find that everyday storytelling has received no attention at all, works of art have been studied in order to understand how they function, and, in general, philosophers, scientists, and other logical thinkers have seen stories as either pleasant diversions or outright fabrications, not as vehicles for truth. To the extent that it has been acknowledged that stories can convey truth, it’s always the result of some kind of quasi-mystical, religious gift ascribed to the artist.
What if we set aside these millennia of biases? What if we start with the proposition that stories have a structure and discrete set of properties that hold regardless of whether the story is a true account or a fictional creation? If this were true, then a story told by Shakespeare would have the same form as one told by a beer drinker down the pub on a Friday evening. The quality would be very different, but the form would be the same.
This realisation of why nobody has bothered to study stories in themselves has unblocked some difficulties I’ve been struggling with over the last several months in relation to my next book project. I now have the premise of the book sorted. It will entail a full description of what a story is and then the application of that definition to Shakespeare’s greatest works. The working title is “The Journey into the Sacred: Shakespeare and the Story of Life”.
Now that the concept is unblocked, I’d like to strike while the iron is hot and concentrate on writing the book. As a result, I’ll be taking a month away from blogging. All going well, I’ll be back in the middle of February.
Meanwhile, I’m pleased to say that we seem to have the numbers for the first study group on King Lear. I’m now extra motivated for that since it should give me some real-time feedback on whether my definition of a story makes sense. For those who have already put their name down, I’ll be in touch in the next week to get things moving. There’s still space for anybody else who wants to join in. You can find the overview of the idea here and the sign-up form here.
Before beginning this week’s post, a quick reminder about my invitation to participate in an online study group about how to understand stories at a deep level, using Shakespeare’s King Lear as a case study. Details can be found here. You can register your interest here. If you’re looking for something new and (hopefully) exciting to start the new year, this could be it!
With that said, let’s get into the post.
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It’s been quite the week in international affairs, and I couldn’t help but notice that two of the issues that popped up are directly related to the theme I’ve been exploring in posts over the last month or so, namely, the tension between capitalism and bureaucracy. On the one hand, we had the abduction of Venezuela’s Maduro, which critics instantly seized on as a violation of “international law”. On the other hand, we saw the violation of US law in the Somali childcare fraud story, which has direct correlations with what is going on here in Australia with the huge levels of fraud around the NDIS program.
Of course, these cases of fraud are just the tip of the iceberg. Look everywhere around the Western world right now, and you find fraud across so many different areas. A lot of that fraud is not even technically illegal. It is the weaponisation of “the system” by a variety of bad actors. But the real problem is that most of the bad actors belong to the system. That is the part of the Somali childcare story that didn’t get a lot of attention and which needs more exploration.
As I pointed out in recent posts, the transition from capitalism to what we can generally call technocracy began in the middle of the 19th century but really picked up steam in the early 20th century. A very practical way to understand what changed is to look at the way businesses used to be run. Prior to the 20th century, almost any business that was not a large corporation (joint stock company) was a sole proprietorship or a partnership in which there was no legal distinction between the business and the owner. The profits of the business belonged to the owners, and so did the losses.
As a result, if a business went broke, it was the owner who had to face the music. Debtors’ courts were the main way in which such matters were resolved. They often led to debtors’ prison. This system was actually quite central to the establishment of both the USA and Australia. Many of those who emigrated were either fleeing from the prospect of an extended stay in a debtors’ prison or were transported by their government because the debtors’ prisons in Britain were overflowing. The important point is that these were individuals facing punishment for a failed business enterprise.
The most notorious debtors’ prison in Britain was Marshalsea
A second important point to make about this time is that there was very little taxation of individuals, including their business activities. This was not due to any kind of benevolence on the part of the government. It was born out of the fact that it was very hard to collect tax and the costs outweighed the revenues. Government preferred to focus its efforts on areas where money could be profitably extracted, such as import duties at ports and taxes on real estate.
As a result, it was incredibly easy to start a small business prior to the 20th century. All you had to do was offer your goods or services for sale and hope to find somebody who would pay for them. No paperwork was needed. No government agency needed to be notified. No regulations needed to be adhered to. As long as you kept your customers and creditors happy, the government would not be involved.
Many immigrants to Australia and the USA in the 19th century took advantage of this state of affairs and started businesses when they arrived. If childcare had been viable at that time, there would have been nothing stopping newly arrived entrepreneurs from going into that line of work. In fact, many of those who immigrated did go into business as private educators, governesses, and the like.
And this brings us back to the Somali childcare issue. On the surface of it, the story sounded like a repeat of those from the 19th century, namely, hard-working immigrants moving to America and going into business for themselves. That is certainly how the apologists would have wanted to present it to the public. It’s a testament to how far gone the corruption has become that they were not even able to create the mirage of a legitimate business.
The main reason was the ridiculous typo on the sign of one of the fake childcare centres, which still makes me chuckle whenever I think of it: the “Quality Learing Center”. What I love about the sign is that both the business owner missed it and so did the sign writer. In an age where spell checkers are available on every device and there are even LLMs freely available to do the job for you, they still couldn’t get it right. I guess it was a learing experience for all concerned.
If an immigrant to Australia or the US in the 19th century had put up such a sign in front of their premises, they would have received precisely zero customers. For the mostly Protestant communities of that era, being able to spell properly was literally a religious matter. Enormous amounts of blood had been shed in order to allow people to read the Bible for themselves. That’s why literacy rates were higher than any other society in history. To start an education business with the name “Quality Learing Center” would have been like starting a pub with no beer; guaranteed to fail.
In that respect, it’s not surprising that the “Quality Learing Center” had no customers. But businesses that don’t have customers are supposed to go broke. That’s what would have happened in the 19th century. Between then and now, something has changed. In the 21st century, customers have apparently become an optional extra.
But the strangeness of the story doesn’t end there. The whole idea of Somalians in Minnesota is weird. Let’s take tens of thousands of people from one of the hottest nations on earth and dump them in one of the coldest states of America. Let’s take people from one of the poorest nations and have them run businesses. Let’s take people from a culture where childcare is a family responsibility and put them in a culture where childcare is a service to be purchased on the free market. Everything about the story is the opposite of what would make sense.
These kinds of inversions are what we find regularly in some of our greatest literature. Oedipus and King Lear begin their stories as powerful kings and end them as destitute beggars. Macbeth begins as a brave and noble general and ends up being hunted to death for his crimes. We see the same thing in nature. Day gives way to night, summer to winter. The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, called this process “enantiodromia”. A more modern term for a related phenomenon is “goal displacement”.
The Somali childcare story is the latest in a long line of inversions that show that the era of the technocracy is reaching its ultimate inversion. The system has turned into its opposite. To understand that, let’s go back to where it started.
We have already seen that there were almost no taxes levied on individuals and their small businesses in the middle of the 19th century for the simple reason that there was no cost-effective way to do so. It is no coincidence that the rise of the bureaucracy went hand-in-hand with the advent of income tax and similar measures. All of the idealistic virtues put forward by proponents of bureaucracy were well and good, but, ultimately, things need to pay for themselves. The reason why governments were happy to embrace bureaucracy in the early days was because they enabled what James C. Scott called “legibility”, which primarily means “taxability”. Bureaucracies earned money for the government.
In relation to business, this process evolved gradually with new legal structures around limited liability companies and the new accounting practices that went with them. This leads us to another crucial part of the dynamic because the profession known as accounting also arose during this era. Accountants became the middlemen between government and the private sector. They ensured that the rules created by the bureaucracy were followed. The government was now able to tax individuals in a cost-effective manner.
In fairness, there were also benefits to individuals and businesses. The introduction of limited liability companies meant that entrepreneurs didn’t have to go to jail just because their business was going through a rough patch. People who are not in jail are still able to contribute to society, whether starting a new business or working for one as an employee. As a result of all these changes, business activity increased overall. Government could then use some of the increased tax receipts to invest in infrastructure that helped businesses. It was a positive feedback loop that benefitted almost everybody involved.
This new dynamic was predicated on two new groups that had emerged, bureaucrats and professionals. We can call them the technocracy. In relation to taxation, the technocracy consists of the tax office and professional accountants who mediate between it and the private sector.
It’s important to stress that this new system really was of benefit to almost everybody in the early days. However, as is always the case in human affairs, a pattern which works well in the first instance inevitably gets applied to domains where it is of less value. Eventually, it gets applied even where it is of negative value. That is where the technocracy has ended up in our time.
The technocratic pattern has now come to cover pretty much any activity you can think of. There’s a government department for every damn thing and a gaggle of university-trained “experts” just dying to implement the latest theories. Meanwhile, the taxation code has grown exponentially, and armies of bureaucrats and accountants are required to administer it.
All of this has only been made possible by the massive expansion of business activity that arose out of the advent of technocracy. But it’s here that we see enantiodromia at work. At the point of greatest seeming success, the system begins to turn into its opposite. The growth in the tax code no longer serves the purpose of increasing the tax take of government. On the contrary, it becomes a way to spend the tax on the ever-growing wage bill of the bureaucracy. The means becomes the ends.
Let’s return to the Somali childcare issue. In the mid-19th century, an immigrant could get off the boat in New York, hire out a premises and begin trading. The government was barely involved. There was no bureaucracy or professional class to worry about. Business was almost entirely a relationship between owners and customers.
Let’s consider the same business in 2026. First, you need to create the company as a legal entity. Only then can you open the necessary bank account to run the business. Only then can you rent out premises for the business. The childcare industry in particular is regulated to the hilt. All kinds of medical training and equipment are needed. Character assessments must be carried out. Records must be kept of every little detail. Regular inspections will need to occur. There’s the fire code. The health and safety regulations. There are the various utility connections that require contracts to be entered into. Of course, there is no way to run a business without a professional accountant to do the books.
All of these things are needed before a single customer walks through the door. And therein lies the whole problem. The technocracy, which benefitted all parties in the early days, now benefits almost nobody. The original benefit to government was increased tax. Now, governments are up to their eyeballs in debt. The original benefit to individuals was lower risk. Now, individuals have to pay through the nose for every one-in-a-million chance event that might happen.
The only two groups who still benefit from the system are the technocrats themselves, the bureaucrats and the professionals. Note that the money they receive for their services must be paid irrespective. The “Quality Learing Center” may have no paying customers, but it still needs an accountant to do the books. Bureaucrats need to disperse the government grants that keep the business afloat. All of the other services required in order to run a business still get paid. The technocrats still earn their living, but the system itself is no longer producing value.
In truth, the technocracy has been a drain on the system for several decades. Ideally, its growth would have been checked long ago. But what Heraclitus had realised way back in ancient Greece was that it doesn’t work that way in the real world. In the real world, things must turn into their opposite. Oedipus and King Lear must become beggars. The “Quality Learning Center” must become the “Quality Learing Center”. Things must become parodies of what they once were.
In truth, the Somalians are just the patsies. They are needed because the average American could not run such a business precisely because the average American still believes in business. An American who told their family and friends that they were opening a childcare company could count on receiving praise and support. No doubt, the family and friends would want to visit the new premises to see how it was going. They’d show up and see the sign and the empty factory, and they’d know immediately it was a scam. Only people from a completely foreign culture could participate in the technocratic racket that creates companies like the “Quality Learing Center”.
That’s also how we can know with some certainty that the whole thing is in its last phases. When you have to fly in patsies from the other side of the world, the gig is almost up. The irony is that one of the main selling points made in favour of bureaucracy in the early 19th century was that capitalist interests were corrupt and a bureaucracy based on rules would solve the problem. Well, to borrow the well-known phrase, it is power that corrupts, and it turns out that technocrats are no different from capitalists, kings, and popes in that respect. Which is to say, they’re just humans.
In the last several weeks, I posted analyses of what have become two of my favourite works of art: Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, and Patrick White’s novel, The Solid Mandala. Both works can only really be understood as part of a tradition. Wagner’s opera was an adaptation of, and a response to, an old medieval myth. White’s novel was his answer to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Although it’s possible to get something from both works without understanding the tradition to which they belong, the meaning of both is greatly enhanced when we understand the larger references.
A related thing that both Wagner and White have in common is that both men were master storytellers. They innovated on the deeper story structure, not as an arbitrary amusement or technical trick, but in order to express new meanings. Once again, a reader who doesn’t understand these innovations can still get something out of it but will miss the most important points.
Out of interest, I thought I would ask a few different LLMs to summarise the meaning of the two works. The results were interesting. Both Gemini’s and Grok’s summaries of The Solid Mandala were mostly quite good and yet missed the main point of the book because they think White is presenting Arthur Brown (the intuitive, “spiritual” brother) as the model to be followed. In fact, as I pointed out in my post, it was Dostoevsky who had made that claim in The Brothers Karamazov, and White was explicitly placing a very large question mark over it. Readers who don’t pick up on the Karamazov reference at the crucial turning point of the story miss this.
I had a quick look at the reviews of the novel on Goodreads, and it seems that almost all readers fall into this category. Presumably, that’s why the LLMs also didn’t include it, since they are just a summation of general opinion. The results were much the same for Parsifal. The LLMs gave a mostly correct overview but missed the crucial points.
Now, because stories are so fundamental to the way in which humans think, you might assume there would already be a discipline devoted to understanding them. In fact, that’s not exactly true. There are a number of fields where stories play a central role. Among them are literature, literary criticism, mythology, aesthetics, philology, and hermeneutics. However, none of these place the story itself at the centre of analysis. Even literature is primarily about the written word and includes non-story genres. (Note that 20th-century “literary fiction” is literature but is explicitly not stories. In fact, much of modern highbrow literature is not technically stories.)
The discipline that comes closest to making stories the sole object of study is a little-known one that emerged in Russia in the early 20th century called narratology. However, because of its structuralist focus, narratology is exceedingly formal in nature and tends to suck all the life and vitality out of its subject matter. What’s needed is a holistic approach which sees the structural aspects of a story as expressions of what Richard Wagner called Life and Nature.
This raises the question: what concepts would we need if we were trying to understand stories in a holistic fashion?
The most important would surely be Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. However, I prefer an adaptation of this that I call the journey into the sacred. Every story begins with the hero making a sacrifice. We can understand the nature of the sacrifice better by using Jungian archetypes; thus, the archetype is the second core concept. The third would be that of “identity”, including its exoteric and esoteric aspects. Every story involves the hero needing to sacrifice their old identity and integrate a new one.
Since each of these properties applies to every character in a story, with only a few core concepts, we quickly get a very complex set of interactions, which is why I’m fond of saying that stories are a kind of communicative superpower, compressing enormous amounts of information in an understandable fashion.
All of this got me thinking of an idea that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for some time, namely, a discussion group aimed at understanding stories. Of course, I could write it up as a set of blog posts, but a more open-ended, exploratory style of discussion with differing viewpoints would be a much richer experience.
So, since a new year is a good time for new beginnings, I thought I’d throw open an invitation to readers and see who might be interested. I propose a short series of discussions aimed at elucidating the basic concepts required to understand stories at a deeper level. We’ll use Shakespeare’s King Lear as the story under discussion.
There are several reasons to prefer Lear. First and foremost, it’s a classic. Secondly, it exists in both written and video form, either of which will suffice for our purposes. Thirdly, translations are readily available, which will be of use to any non-native English speakers who might want to take part. Finally, it is a relatively short work that can be read or watched in a single sitting.
Here’s how I see it working:-
We all read or watch King Lear in advance
Then, we have four one-hour sessions to discuss it
In advance, I’ll send an email introducing the concept which will be the main theme of the session to give people a chance to think about it
The session itself will be an open-ended, Socratic dialogue as we explore how the theme relates to the story of King Lear
At the end of four weeks, the goal is to have holistically explored the meaning of Lear. But, perhaps more importantly, we will also build out a model that can be used to access the deeper meanings of stories that most readers miss
To begin with, I’d like the keep the group small. I think four people is the ideal number, but three or five could also work.
Note, all the work will be completely private. No video or audio will be recorded. No personal information will be shared. Since this will be the first time I have run this kind of session, there won’t be any payment required. The invitation is open to anywhere in the world (as long as we can find a time that works for everybody).
If this sounds like something you’d like to participate in, you can register your interest here (note: you do not need to sign-in to google to submit the form).
