DP #1: Why We Tell Stories

The art of storytelling was created to create a bridge between the logical and the applicable, to pass on morality and to establish history.

Storytelling began as a way of relaying personal histories and experiences, a way of telling children about things that elders in the tribe had learned about life and behaviors that would, later, keep them alive. It has been about teaching through entertainment, about establishing behaviors, whether moral or simply necessary for survival.

Early stories probably consisted of basic logical things that now we don't even consider, like what berries not to eat and not to grab a snakes tale, but as such behaviors have become less and less necessary through to development of civilization the behaviors stories have taken on portraying have become less and less about actual survival skills and more about surviving socially and living morally.

Morality has become a fixture in modern culture through religion, which has developed entire mythologies (whether true or not, they are certainly mythologies) encouraging children and adults to adhere to a morality established by societal and religious leaders. These stories are as extensive as the Parables of Jesus (which were Jesus' ways of teaching his moral system) and the Gospels themselves (which were the ways the followers of Jesus who came later would pass on his social and moral teachings).

All of the stories in the Bible have that purpose, as do the mythologies that later developed and followed the ministry of Jesus, from the Mormon church (which established an additional scriptural document with dozens of parables to administer its additional ideals) to the Catholic writer Dante (who created a single parable to elaborate on his personal understanding of Catholic dogma).

Man tells stories to teach while engaging, a method that we employ to teach adults at least as often as children, and a method that we use to control behavior as much as we do to encourage personal reflection.

As far as stories my family tells about me, my father loves to talk about my work with non-profit organizations in Guatemala and Nicaragua. 95% of the time, he does this for the personal benefit of attention, to show how generous those around him are, but there are times when he does it to discuss the morality of assisting those less fortunate than we are, and to give an example of the power of that value, as well as the impact that it's had on my life.

Sometimes people use stories to entertain, sometimes they use stories to warn, but there are also times when people use stories to discuss the positive things that a person can do and the values that a person can have. Values like charity and humility get a lot of airtime this way.