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the biggest business in the world.
Korten: (Laughs) Yeah, although I think, you know, it’s not clear to me how many people who come from the field of storytelling are fully conscious of the implications of the story themes.
Kall: Well, it’s not just storytelling, though. It’s books and movies and...
Korten: Yeah, right. Of course, of course.
Kall: Novels and corporate consulting.
Korten: Yeah, yeah.
Kall: I mean, one friend I made in the field worked for the World Bank. He ran the Africa office for a while. And then he got into knowledge management and now he does this thing full time, working with story.
Korten: Have you seen the, ah, The Great Turning from Empire to Earth community?
Kall: Yes.
Korten: Yeah, okay. So…
Kall: And I know that you finish it talking about the answer is our stories.
Korten: Yeah, and of course the key there is coming to recognize, you know, how our stories, well, how so many of our really meaningful stories by which we understand ourselves in our world, fall either in the category of Empire stories or Earth Community Stories. And they’re either affirming the legitimacy and necessity of hierarchy or they are affirming the benefits and importance of community and partnership and our human capacity to be responsible, to be caring.
Kall: Now, is there a pattern of where these stories come from?
Korten: Well, ah, yeah. I mean they ah, I mean certainly in our current culture the Empire stories tend to come from our media. Although, you know, they’re so embedded in our culture that we get them from science; we get them from churches; we certainly get them from the corporate media. It’s partly because we have been living under empire for so long and we’re so conditioned to empire stories that we never, you know, we rarely step back and say, “Hey, wait a minute!” You know, there’s a certain set of assumptions that are being, that underlie this set of stories, that don’t really ring true if you step back. The kind of foundational thing is the story that we humans are inherently by nature violent and greedy and competitive and individualistic. Now, you only need to step back and think about most of your daily relations with most of the people we interact with…
Kall: You know what’s interesting?
Korten: …and they’re not that way.
