The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [432]
It was his perception of this psychological characteristic of human groups which Ibsen summarised in those words from An Enemy of the People quoted at the head of this chapter: `the majority is always wrong' and `the minority is always right'. This is an observation which on the face of it might seem perverse, contrary to common sense, inviting the ridicule of all received opinion. But it is precisely `received opinion, the ruling consciousness, which by definition can never grasp the subtle truth of the point Ibsen was trying to make. He is not of course saying that whenever the majority of the human race agree on something they must in all cases be wrong. Most people accept, for instance, that it is undesirable for human beings to go around killing each other. They are not misguided in this belief) ust because they are a majority. There are many issues on which the majority of people hold similar beliefs and are right to do so. But at any given time, in any human group, large or small, there will be a generally prevailing state of consciousness which in very significant respects will be blind; which will be unable to see the world objectively. It is in this sense that, as Ibsen put it, the `majority, the ruling consciousness, is always wrong. And there should be nothing particularly surprising about this, since it is self-evident that in any collection of human beings there will be only a minority who have achieved that degree of selfunderstanding which can allow them to see the world without their perception being in some way fogged or skewed by unconscious subjectivity.8
The question then arises: if in this sense the majority is always likely to be wrong, what steps are open to humankind to try to counter this tendency to remain imprisoned in egotism and perpetual immaturity? Is there no alternative to being carried away into bubbles of fantasy and wishful thinking, followed eventually by inevitable disillusionment? We have already seen how it is precisely this question which the archetypal structure of storytelling is designed to answer. But no analysis of the hidden purpose of storytelling would be complete without seeing how it has been complemented throughout human history by another archetypal process programmed into our unconscious, in which the telling of stories also plays a central part. Such is the theme of our next chapter.
`God created man in order to tell stories.'
Hasidic saying quoted by Franz Kafka
`Because of our traditions everyone knows who he is and what God expects him to do.' Fiddler on the Roof, adapted by Joseph Stein
from stories by Sholem Aleichem
`Try to submerge yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to the illusory ego. Recognise that the boundless Light of this true Reality is your own true self, and you shall be saved!'
Tibetan Book of the Dead
`Who sees the variety and not the unity must wander on from death to death.
Katha Upanishad
In 1988 two archaeologists reported on a remarkable discovery they had made in a cave complex in the Pyrenees which contained Palaeolithic paintings. They noticed that the places where the images were most thickly clustered, some tucked away in narrow side passages, awkward to reach, all had one thing in common. If a note was sung in them by the human voice, the sound gave off a resonance, more obviously than anywhere else in the caves.1
These and other Palaeolithic paintings are the earliest records we have of the human ability to conjure up images of the world around us: the basis on which we create stories. The pictures they show, of men and animals and even dots apparently representing the monthly cycle of the moon, are the beginning of narrative. And although we do not know why our ancestors around 20,000 years ago should have devoted so much skill to inscribing these particular images on the rock-faces of pitch-black underground caverns, the fact that they particularly chose to do so in places where