"Once upon a time there was a tribe living at the edge of the world. It was not a very big tribe but the world was not very big and in it, this tribe was a very successful one. Because the tribe lived in a very tough territory it had very little competition. Over the years, it managed to build a reputation for producing tough fighting men, always ready for a scrap and that meant that other tribes left it alone.
If things had remained as they were the tribe could have gone on for a very long time, living off the land and hunting and foraging, maintaining its reputation by turning up now and then at solstice festivals when all the tribes would gather for the young warriors to measure themselves against each other and the young girls to find husbands. But things very rarely remain the same.
The world changes fast. Word was that tribes in other parts were banding together. Growing larger. Because they no longer had to wait for the solstice festivals each year for the girls to find husbands they grew faster still. The young warriors in their midst no longer had to fight to prove themselves worthy. With a steady supply of women the warriors in other tribes looked for other skills that would help them prove themselves. Besides, once married being a warrior was not sufficient to keep a young wife happy. You needed to have a real job, a career of sorts even.
So, some of the former warriors became farmers and produced more and more food, enough not just to feed their own large and growing tribes but also a surplus which they could now trade with other tribes. Trade brought them the need for ledgers to record everything in, and ledgers brought them the need for learning and learning started languages as they realized the value of the knowledge hidden inside the heads of people in other tribes.
Languages brought diplomacy and diplomacy brought fresh contact and more trade and more marriages and more people and fewer warriors and more farmers. Farming however is a slow, steady business. You just don’t go from producing no food to producing a surplus in a day, or even a year.
The needs that arose from the strain on resources as the size of these tribes grew also gave rise to ingenuity and innovation. New ways of doing old things were found and this provided farmers and their tribes with fresh ways to use resources and they grew and grew and grew in size until the old ways of the past where tribes would meet and ritually fight so their young warriors could gain experience in fighting and gain reputation and find women and have families so the tribe could prosper, appeared useless, inefficient and strangely barbaric and were eventually abandoned. Trade now ruled supreme.
That was how things were in the middle of the world.
At the edge of the world however, news traveled slowly. A hunter would meet an old friend from another tribe out hunting, and they would exchange news. There would be a trader who would make the arduous journey to the edge and bring with him examples of wonderful inventions the tribe had never heard of.
The rumors of what was happening did not seem to affect them. The words of the traders who occasionally found them appeared insubstantial, forgotten the moment the trader was out of sight.
Life at the edge of the world, it was felt, could go on forever."
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The above excerpt is from The Tribe That Discovered Trust. It starts with an allegory before it turns into a factual, science-based exploration of trust, how it arises, how it is propagated across different contexts and settings, how it is lost and how it can be regained. Wittgenstein argued that words have real power to transform our understanding of reality within the context of a situation.
Storytelling holds the power to illuminate our understanding of reality at a visceral level. More than just engaging the mind it recruits all the knowledge, memory and experience of the brain to build momentary, internal imagery in our head that rewires our brain's responses to potential stimuli we may encounter. It is a shortcut, therefore to learning, remembering and understanding. The Tribe That Discovered Trust employs storytelling only in the first part of the book, before delving into the practicalities of trust in different contexts and provides examples to illustrate how they work.
You can download the first chapter of the book here.