So, my son is reading the book Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, and shares daily. I am reading a book on freedom by a Danish author, Dennis Nørmark: The Price of Unfreedom. And I am sharing, I realise, not so much about unschooling itself, but about how we can avoid paying the awful cost of lost thriving and happiness, our modern culture often claims. Unschooling is one of the hacks, but for sure not the only way.
Bear with me, and let me build my point today.
In Harari's book, one of the basic ideas revolves around the human ability and need to create narratives. We can communicate, like most other animals can in one way or another, but we can not only do that. We have imagination, and a lot of it. With that, we can create narratives, stories. This has several effects on how humanity navigates. By having cultures carried by shared stories, we can be connected with people we have never met, and therefore cooperate not just with those we can give and receive instruction from, but with everyone on a much higher level.
This has to do with the fact that stories create a new level of reality, and from that level penetrates what you could call the actual reality. The idea of a narrative level of reality and an actual level of reality is, of course, a deconstruction of something that within the human realm can not exist, nor be comprehended apart. Yet, we will learn a lot from this deconstruction, as long as we understand there is no point in trying to imagine or understand a world where one of the two does not exist.
I have to bring in another author, and that is McAdams, who wrote the book: “The stories we live by”, basically stating that we are not human without stories. Our establishment of personality and relationships is based on the stories we know, the full narratives and the fragments of traits, plots, stemninger, personalities, outcomes, options, and characters. In full scale, we can not understand our lives in this world without stories as filters, as reference points, as resonance boxes - making the claimed Einstein quote about telling our children stories maybe the smartest hack to the upbringing of our offspring ever said in two sentences.
So here we are. Nothing without the stories we understand our world from, not able to be human, not able to navigate, not fully present, not unfolding. The stories carry us. They are our humanity in many ways.
And here is the rub.
Stories create our reality, and penetrate not just our perception of what is and what is going on, but also our choices and actions within this reality; they do affect how things unfold.
This means some stories are dangerous. Some stories need opposites, need to be questioned.
In Nørmarks book, he shows how the story Fluernes Herre has affected our understanding of fundamental human nature. As a classic, it has become a reference point for basic concepts of human nature. But the author was no psychologist, nor was he an anthropologist - he did no author's research into what actually happens in cases where a group of humans strand somewhere and have to survive. He was an unhappy man who did not like or care about other humans and who wrote a dark book, unfolding one idea of how that could play out.
This idea has become a reference point; people who have never read the book now talk about the idea, and as a declared anarchist, I have often heard this book used as an argument towards the violent chaos our society would be without all of the rules and all of the enforcing of them.
Crazy when you think about it.
Yesterday, as I was out on my run in beautiful English countryside, stopping ever so often to eat the ripe blackberries and enjoy the lush trees and the birds chipping, I was thinking about these things in the context of the thriving of families. I wonder if ideas like this, and the way they were enlarged after WW2, play a defining part in the reasons we ruin our own lives.
Ruin them by not trusting in our children to unfold beautifully, not trusting in humanity to do good, not trusting in ourselves to be awesome.
There is a general idea out there that children want to break the rules, want to cross the lines, want to provoke us, want to trigger us, want to suck the marrow out of our bones, that they are lazy and only care about themselves. That we need to teach them otherwise, and enforce discipline to make sure they get educated.
To believe all of this, we would need to think that humans are inherently selfish, possibly violent rulebreakers.
Do we really think that? Or do we see the signs of that as an effect of how we treat them, rather than the other way around? We seem to think we are solving a problem by enforcing so many rules and structures around our children, thereby creating the same problem.
Nørmark is all about freedom, and his main point is that humans have an innate need to be and feel free, and will sacrifice a lot of comfort and safety to have this personal wiggle room.
I could not agree more.
But in this text, my main point revolves around this freedom being a core element of letting things unfold beautifully in life. If we turn around and look at other stories of childhood and of children left to their own devices or taking action and going out to see if they can survive by themselves, we might get a completely different core idea of what humans are like.
In Scandinavia, we all grew up with the stories of Astrid Lindgren. Most people have heard about Pippi Longstocking, unfortunately mostly from the cartoons - and I can not recommend enough to actually read the books. Read them out loud, even if your children are adults. Listen to the words. The insights and the love for humanity are beautiful.
“I have never done this before, so I am probably very good at it”, being one of the most quoted Longstocking lines, just after: “When you are very strong, you need to be very kind”.
Many of Lindgren's stories are about children who are left to take care of themselves and each other. Longstocking lives by herself in a big house, as her mother is dead and her father is a pirate on the seven seas. Ronja the Robber's Daughter refuses to comply with her father's rule that she can not hang out with her best friend (the son of the rivalling robbers group), and leaves to live by herself (with him) in the forest. The Brothers Lionheart (SPOILER ALERT) both die in the first and second chapters of the book of the same title, and have to share a house and a life in the next world: Nanjiala. There is a theme here.
Like Lord of the Flies, the theme of children coming of age or even younger left without adults to figure it all out is the same. From there nothing is the same. Lindgren is sharing ideas about how children love each other deeply, and that carries them through all of what could be rough. She is talking about loyalty, overcoming fears in the name of freedom, justice, love. She is painting a portrait of children being powerful agents of what they find right and of adults learning from their power, of children being helpful and curious, responsible and funny, adventureous yet calm; children trying thigns out and learning from mistakes, not mistakes foreseen by adults, but rather mistkes created by adults, like when Pippi goes to school for one day as she feels she is missing out on never having the summer break, just to figure out the school makes no sense for her.
There is a beauty and a thruth to Lindgrens stories, and these elements lay out the ground for how I see humanity. I and many other scandinavians, I believe. In another group of stories, the brothers Grimm collected deep shared consciousness when they wrote down the fairy tales found in Germany and sourroundings, and these often share the same perspective of children in creative and loving ways surviving problems created by adults. Look at Hansl and Gretl changing breadcrumbs by small stone, and pushing the evel which into the oven in the end. Look at all the princes solving all of the three tests and killing the dragon. Look at the girl who solves the impossible puzzles and show up dressed yet naked, and the other girl who spins gold from hay AND guesses the name of the little troll who wants to steal her baby. These are stories of children surpasing the problems created by adults and by society, not stories of being disciplined and educated into adapting to surroundings by breaking a base nature of lazyness, mal intent and selfish greed.
We could go on. Read the other impactful scandinavian childrens author Hans Christian Andersten, and learn from Clumpsy Hans, Thumbelina, The Prinsess on the Pea and The Sheperdess and the ChimneySweep, and all the other stories - how becoming who you already are is about staying true, not succumbing to contextual forces of norms and hiearachy and rules, about adventureing out where you feel your path is and doing it your own way only to come back with something more real, than what you and your sourroundings thought you were looking for, about how trusting and loving and being spontaneous and creative, yet honest and forthcoming will save the day. And your life. And your community.
Weaving all the ideas of this text together, what I am saying is this:
We understand our world and each other via the stories, predict the impact of our actions via stories, and affect the outcome of our actions with how we perceive the world. We coorporate to create our shared future via stories, and filter our relationships, oru live, even our presence with the prism of stories.
So here is the takeaway.
Forget the Lord of the Flies. Read different stories. Underneath and inside the storybased cultured human nature is something we might understand as natural. As part of the human genetics, the human mind, the human spirit. And it is NOT violence, it is the urge to coorporate and understand each other, the need to share love, the explorative, creative, brave and adaptable human spirit. It is the ability to love and be loved, only unfolding to its true potential if we are free to be.
Therefore: Beware of the stories. Which ones do you repeat? Which ones are part of your vocabulary, and why? Can we understand The Lord of the Flies in the context of how the world looks for a lonely and broken soul, and take in more stories to understand the complexities of human culture, human options, the human condition itself?
All cultures have stories like the ones by Astrid Lindgren, stories to explore the bravery and freedom and adventureous nature of youth, the rebellion against rulers and rules, and of cooropration and love, passion and true inner power.
If we base our current life on stories like this, we will lead better lives with fulfulling presense in the moment and nuanced and abundant futures.
I am sure of it.
Cecilie
Do share with me, which are your favorite stories? Share them on a list. Could be stories from myths, fairy tales, childrens books, religions, movies, shows, songs, novels. Which ones do you take in over and over, which ones do you recommend, which ones do you think about often or refer to?
We, in our family have long lists like this and I will end with a quote from one of them:
“All stories are true. This one really happened, if that is what you mean”
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