We Need New Stories
Because the old ones aren't working
Politics, at its most basic level, is storytelling. Politicians offer narratives that explain the world, with villains (Ayatollahs! Immigrants! Vaccines! Trans People!) and heroes (Bombs! Armed Federal Agents! Christians! Billionaires!) and straightforward causalities and solutions. The list of heroes and villains varies depending on your political affiliation, but the formula is pretty much the same across the board. Problems as complex or abstract as homelessness, addiction, poverty, or disease will be fought, conquered, vanquished, etc. All we need is one brave dude to do it for us.
Politics isn’t the only storytelling engine, of course. Movies, video games, podcasts, social media—everywhere we look, stories are being spun. As I watch the 50th season of Survivor on CBS (IYKYK), I am astonished by the ads for their other shows, most of which seem to be about federal law enforcement agencies, including FBI, Marshalls, CIA, and NCIS. (Given CBS’s rightward shift, can ICE be far behind?) Then there are all the shows about local law enforcement, including Sheriff Country, Boston Blue, Blue Bloods, Elspeth, CSI, and Tracker, which is apparently about “a trusted lone-wolf survivalist who uses his instincts to find the missing and collect rewards.”
If we look at these shows as propaganda (and why wouldn’t we?), the messages are fairly straightforward: there are bad guys and good guys, the good guys are tough men wearing uniforms, and everyone else is either a victim, a villain, or a bystander. The only people with agency are the people with guns.
Most stories in this genre feature a lone hero or a small squadron of heroes who must conquer evil with brains or brawn or courage or charm in order to save the day. If you read interviews with January 6 protesters or Q-Anon cult-members or extremists of any persuasion, you’ll find that they believe this story to be about them: they are the brave hero fighting against the forces of darkness, and the mission has given them a long-missing sense of purpose.
Our putative leaders are subject to the same delusions. Witness the unhinged memes and metaphors the Trump administration is spewing about their war in Iran, which show all the geopolitical understanding of a toddler shouting “Bang! Bang!” while standing in a sandbox filled with nerf guns and fireworks. President Donald Trump and his Defense Secretary/Sentient Flag Decal Pete Hegseth seem utterly perplexed at the fact that managing to “disfigure” a head of state doesn’t actually mean that you’ve won anything.
Wolves and Humans Are Pack Animals
Despite their lone hero structures, most of the original man vs. monster stories were birthed in societies that were more collective than not, in which mutual interdependence and layers of tight and loose social connections were the default. The adventures of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Cú Chulainn, Sun Wukong, Rama, or any of the other heroes of world mythology were told in communal settings, allowing each listener to imagine themselves as the protagonist without having to sever the bonds that bound them to each other.
Now, however, separation is the default, particularly among young people, who may be the loneliest generation to ever walk the earth. A 2025 survey conducted by YouGov for the Young Men’s Research Initiative, for example, found that 54 percent of the young men polled agreed with the statement “I often feel lonely,” and the percentage was much higher among those who reported spending a lot of online time on social media platforms, gaming, gambling, or pornography—the exact places young men typically go to find connection online. Even the stories that young men tell each other about an idealized masculine life tend to be solitary, as found by a recent analysis of a genre of social media clips captioned “My 5-9 After My 9-5,” in which young men show off their typical post-work schedule of workouts, side hustles, and chill. Most of these videos, the analysis found, “featured men who engaged in no meaningful social activity or interaction.”
The media has tended to code this story as “loneliness,” but loneliness is the symptom rather than the disease. The disease, as my father Philip Slater wrote in his groundbreaking 1970 bestseller, The Pursuit of Loneliness, is individualism.
“An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his or her daily business. We seek more and more privacy, and feel more and more alienated and lonely when we get it. And what accidental contacts we do have seem more intrusive, not only because they’re unsought, but because they’re not connected with any familiar pattern of interdependence.”
