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The Daily Attentional
Vol. 1, Week 2: How to See Through Our Differences
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“Those who tell the stories rule society.”— Plato
We are not so much governed by the rule of law as the rule of stories.
Our stories define who belongs, who threatens, and whose suffering matters. Control the stories and you control how the laws are executed.
Plato understood this reality of the political order. Stories shape the moral imagination of people which determines what they will demand and what they will accept. “Those who tell the stories rule society,” Plato said.
For people to consent to be governed they have to accept the stories that define the character of society and their place in it. If you want to change society you have to change the dominant story.
Alienation and resentment grow, and democracy fails, when people feel that the law doesn't recognize their story. Healing begins when suppressed stories are allowed to enter public life and their truths expand our collective governance.
Artist Faith Ringgold created pioneering narrative quilts that capture the experiences of Black Americans. Her quilts compel honesty. They reclaim narrative authority from institutions that have excluded certain lives from official history. By stitching personal memories into public art, Ringgold's work asserts that their experiences are not marginal, they are politically constructive.
Ringgold's quilts are acts of resistance against dominant and exclusive stories. They remind us that belonging is not an abstraction, it is a lived reality and necessity for all. A democracy that cannot accommodate multiple stories will eventually enforce a single one.
And that story will serve power, not people.
- Plato, "Republic," Book III.
- Faith Ringgold, "The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles" (1991).
COMING TOMORROW: The Courage of Nonconformity
