why do humans have such a tendency towards creating stories? "A literary cycle is a group of stories focused on common figures, often (though not necessarily) based on mythical figures or loosely on historical ones." take the Matter of Britain. for centuries, groups of people just began telling each other stories sometimes non-fiction, but over time fiction penetrated deeper and deeper until eventually certain stories were complete fabrications, yet still passed on (eg., the Greek gods). while Charlemagne truly existed, most of his paladins did not in the Matter of France. why is it compelling for us to create fabrications? creativity?
being creative lets you be fanciful, imaginative, and interesting. it excites the mind and intrigues the audience. it's crucial to rhetoric. its as though thinking wildly is a dopamine-producing process, similar to how solving puzzles or playing games is. theres no particular reason humans should necessarily gain satisfaction from games evolutionarily, though 'play' is encoded into all mammals in some sense, yet humans love games for the sake of it. Similarly, wild thinking must stimulate us arbitrarily so.
if I can trap your attention by stimulating your imagination, you'll keep listening to me. you'll grow to like me. my words have meaning and instill the production of thoughts and values within you. by telling a riveting story, I can now capture your attention, have you believe what I'm telling you, eventually trust me and even become a follower or a rival. group theory dictates that any method whereby humans can create trust among disparate tribe members will be evolutionarily advantageous. this extends to the benefits of religion.
so, religion IS stories. mythology. religion is a series of stories that are collected and passed on about specific historical figures, and over time about made-up ones as well. the stories provide a gathering of people, ways to cope with scary thoughts (death, purpose), morals, values. a group of people said let's stay in a big group and all tell these stories, and recruit others to tell these stories. but the foundational question is, why are stories so potent to humans? and is there even a line between religion and stories?
stories are a subclass and a flavor of LANGUAGE as a whole. so, what's so valuable about language, that which is instilling stories with such value? whatever benefits language provides, stories must also include those. the origin of language is multifactorial. before language we needed to evolve a basic theory of mind, recognize you are different from me, and abstract abilities like planning. infant language development is revelatory in that early language among humans probably started similar to that, and all early language could only continue to evolve if it WAS understood by the children at the time. nonhuman primates are revelatory as well, like how chimps can communicate with hand gestures, have genetically encoded gestural signals (eg chest beating). gestures were the first form of language.
so how did language become subspecialized into stories, and why? each can refer to objects or events that aren't present in the moment (including imaginary ones), each can put an idea in someone's head and get them to change their behavior to do it. each can instill NEW ideas inside someone's head, things they never even conceived of but now can consider doing (eg, learning). what ideas would you want to instill? evolutionarily, look to apes to see how they use gestures etc to communicate with each other, what types of things they try to get the others to do. move, stop, come, do this for me, there will be rain, that way is dangerous, if you do this action then this bad thing will happen, i love you, help me.
mental images are entities conjured inside your mind. humans evolved to do this in three ways: (1) dreams [spontaneous]), (2) memory recall [think about a past experience], (3) prefrontal synthesis [active imagination]. early language served a more operational, functional purpose - getting food and water, staying safe, where's the tiger? strict memory recall, and theory of mind, were important, but only later on did we start flexing our prefrontal synthesis muscles, once we had the basics already figured out.
stories are language that hijacks and stimulates the prefrontal synthesis pathways directly. telling stories can quickly conjure 'memories' into other people's minds, as well as new ideas = teaching. stories are typically fanciful or atypical, novelty which cements its teachings more quickly in the user. also, children seem to preferentially enjoy the fanciful, and were integral to the evolution of language, so perhaps stories grew initially as vectors for quickly and reliably teaching children evolutionary advantageous lessons without having to demonstrate anything to them physically. same as regular teaching or communication would be, except spicier, with more flare.
the spicy flare aspect is what seems unique to stories, and what seems to fuel their main strength: the ability to quickly transmit among the masses and influence them. stories require symbolic culture - a feature of certain human cultures where they pass on behavioral traits among generations via centering the reasoning for those behaviors on something completely made-up, symbolic. it started as distant as 300,000 years ago. "we must do these behaviors because of [concept that's made up]". promises, currency, etc. social constructs were likely the first or one of the earliest forms of symbolic culture - we must do certain things this way, 'just because we trust each other' (essentially). at its core, its the concept of trust - we all agree to trust that the made-up thing is real/reliable, and therefore all agree to conduct our behaviors as such. so, cooperation.
what purpose did the Matter of Britain serve? or ancient African folklores? what about LOTR? what about DND?
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