“We run on scripts. At the individual and societal level, we run on stories (some of which are heuristics) that make it easy for us to navigate our worlds – common sense that we ‘go by’ so we don’t have to stop and think about every tiny thing.
These scripts, stories, or narratives, can be relatively shallow or deeply embedded in our lives and as national or cultural myths (“boys don’t cry” is a pernicious one). Society pressures us into following scripts that are often very bad for us. Greedy corporations know this and use advertising and marketing to keep us enacting stories that are bad for us (e.g. the Yorkie bar Man-Time Competition).”
For change to happen, we need to do three things:
- Show people the old stories they ‘go by’ no longer work for them (bike’s broke);
- Give them new stories they can try out (get on the new bike);
- Help them repeat the new story through enactment (ride the bike) while also showing them that everyone else is enacting them (also riding the bike).
Image credit: Alex Lockwood, Absurd Intelligence