The need for stories
One Piece is, above all, a story. What does that mean? That its not a instruction manual. It's not a recipe with steps. It is not a description, like the ones you would find on a dictionary. It's a story, where people deal with things as things happen, just like your own existence.
And it's not surprising that stories are the most natural way for humans to comunícate information. We remember stories so much better than bullet points. It takes a lot of effort to memorise plain facts. But a good story just stays with you, with zero effort.
And we all know this. I think that we get confused because in school nothing is taught by stories, which makes sense for some things, right? Like matematical formulas or geography. And I don't even think that's right. For instance, when remembering Newton's Laws of Motion, the image of the apple falling from the tree is what truly helps me remember. And yet, we try to teach things as a list of facts, instead of a story.
But it's really tough to remember all those formulas. With stories? No problem. You remember the plot of virtually every movie you watched as a child. And we all know this. You know this. Except the people in charge of higher educations, apparently, because for some reason teaching through stories totally disappears as kids grow.
There is a funny thing, or at least I find it funny, that is very common. You've possible heard it as well. When people say: "this is the bible of...". For instance, the bible of cooking. Or the bible of sales. Have you ever heard that? The Bible of stock trading, the Bible of home repairs.
But when people do that, they totally disregard the format. Have you ever noticed? None of these bibles are stories. And the Bible is very much a story.
Isn't that funny? That you would say: this is the bible of cooking. Because it's the best book about cooking. Or the best book about architecture. But then the book is not a story. Which makes no sense because the Bible is basically a story. It's all about these jews going in adventures, God doing things and Jesus going here and there. It's all stories.
So you would think that if someone would really want to write the bible of cooking, it would respect the format, right? It would maintain what makes the bible so sticky and memorable. Right? But it's never the case. When people write the bible of whatever, is never a story, is like a guide or a manual. It's just so silly.
Something that's, by the way, also funny is that people who say: this is the bible of sales, or the bible of chicken nuggets, I have found that they are usually atheists. Right? Because religious people would not want to take the word in bane, or diminish the importance of the Bible. So it's atheist who claim that their book about cooking is the bible of cooking. But isn't that funny? Because if you are writing the coolest and best book about a topic, and you say that it's the bible of that thing, how is that not an acknowledgement about how cool the Bible is?
Anyway, back to the point: our brains like stories. Stories are a very good way of containing a large chunk of information. It's more natural to our brain that bulletpoints. And to prove that, I'm going to give you some bulletpoints 😆.
This is from a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. It that contains a nice list of functions that stories have in our brains. The paper says:
the broadest and most integrative levels of an individual's knowledge system can be characterized as narrative descriptions of reality
And it goes:
Although narratives can take many different forms, they are distinguished by their ability to compress and encode a great deal of information about the world, including 👇
- the causal relations between events over time (Graesser et al. 1997),
- the planning and sequencing of goal-directed actions (Schank & Abelson 1977),
- the emotional significance of an event within a temporal context (Oatley 1992),
- the unfolding nature of personal identity (McAdams 1997), and
- the dynamic intentions of multiple social agents (Mar & Oatley 2008).
So that's a lot of useful information, knowledge, wisdom, that is encoded in form of a story.
Indeed, stories have an "integrative ability" that allows you to "coordinate vast domains of knowledge and behaviour".
And there is something else that's very important about stories as a form of container for knowledge, which is that they contain information in a way that's not only useful for you as an individual, but also for a group. Stories store common knowledge, or make knowledge common.
Narratives provide a point of contact between the "predictive processing account" and the "socio-cultural context" in which individual minds develop. Narrative representations are fundamentally social in nature, as children are socialized to adopt particular modes of narrative thought during development (Nelson & Fivush 2004).
So that's pretty powerful. And I wanted to make all that clear before going forward because I want you to know what is happening when you are watching or reading One Piece. It's not some sort of stupid pastime that you are engaged in. You are actually absorbing a vast amount of information in form of stories. So well done. If you have watched 1000 episodes of One Piece, you have been educating yourself rigorously. Good job. Keep that up.
The shocking truth about truths
But now I'm going to say something that it's less obvious, and that took me a long time to figure out. And many, many people disagree with this idea, and I'm very sure that they are wrong. Because I really disagreed with this idea myself, and I was very thorough in questioning this until I was forced to change my mind by the weight of the evidence.
I think that stories can have very useful information, very real information, even if they are not factual. So if a story never actually happened, I think that the information contained in that story can be truthful.
If you are not shocked by what I just said, it's possible that you didn't process it, because this blew my mind. What I'm saying, basically, is that something can have never actually happened, and yet contain real information.
Look, I'm a scientist. Not only that: I am a programmer; I write code, I deal with computers, and I publish research about medicine. So I deal with scientific facts. I'm going to give you a fact: 2 + 2 = 4. To me that's sacred. That's truth. And if you say 2 + 2 = 5, that's simply a lie and I want nothing to do with it. No, actually I feel the urge to correct it. I need to correct it. I want to get in there and fix that error. It's an error. And if someone disagrees, they are simply wrong. 2 + 2 is 4, not 5.
So what I'm saying now is that even if Luffy is not a real person that exists, and none of that actually happened in the objective world, the story is full of truth. You see how that is crazy? How that is mind-blowing? What I'm saying is equivalent to saying that 2 + 2 = 5 is also true.
And let me shock you a little bit more. What I'm saying is that the story of One Piece, which means Luffy and other people that never existed, doing things that never happened, is more true than most of the things that actually have happened. So I'm saying that that a lie is more truthful than any truth.
And I mean that. I am truly defending that here today. And I'm going to tell you why.
Meta truths
You all went to school as a child. All of you. Every day, you woke up, went to school, took clases, played games, dealt with teachers and did a bunch of things. So imagine: I pick one of those days, literally, one of the many days that you went to school. Imagine any particular day in which specific things happened. If I described that day, minute by minute, would it be the best way of describing the truth of going to school? No. It's not. It's just one day. For one, it would be extremely boring. Because most of the day is filled with the teacher talking, you waiting in line, and doing insubstantial things. It would be the best way of describing that day, but it's a poor way to explain the experience of going to school.
But now imagine if you analysed every day that you went to school and you extracted the most important things that happened across all days. You pick the things that had the biggest impact over you. Maybe a day in which you told a girl that you liked her, or the day in which you got caught doing a bad thing, maybe your birthday, or the day when you found a frog. And then we do that with each and every person in this room. We find the things that were important for most of us, across all of the days that we went to school. You all had different childhoods, but there maybe be lots of things that were common and that you remember specially.
Now we make up a day in school that includes all those elements. This would be a story about one day in school that didn't really happen, but that includes all the elements that truly represent going to school, for everyone one of us. We create a lie, a day that never happened, in which you do all those things.
What I'm saying is that the fictional story is a more truthful representation of the reality of going to school. It's the condensed and distilled information of what constituted going to school. You take the essence, you distill it, and create a representation. That's a meta truth.
So, again, what you do is you extract the essence of many truths, and build up a story that carries the maximum exponents of those truths. That's a meta truth. Is the most representative representation.
We all know that Luffy and the straw hat pirates are not, technically, factually navigating the sea in a boat, living adventures. But their story is extremely insightful. The story is a carrier of truths, more so than what's happening to any boat that's in the ocean right now. Right? The story of the straw hats carries more insights about how to protect your friends, how to pursue dreams, how to deal with failure... more so than what is happening in any of the boats that are currently, as we speak, in the ocean.
And it's in this sense that I would argue that the story of the straw hats is very real, it's very truthful - because it contains the most important and impacting elements of our day to day, and presents them in the extreme and most meaningful way possible. So it's very true. Is paradigmatically true. Archetypically true.
A good way of looking at it is that the stories are erroneous in detail, and right in pattern.
And remember that the answer to the most vital question: how to behave, must be a pattern. Because its not a rule, it's a dynamic set of reactions to different situations. So the stories, when they are meta-truths, represent is very accurately a patterm. Actually, the pattern is more accurately described in the story than in any factual and specific day. So the story is erroneous in detail, but right in pattern.
The pattern is so abstract, it's so meta, that it goes beyond any instantiation, it's more correct, more useful, more truthful than any particular occurrence of the pattern. And if the pattern is well extracted, it's useful beyond the detail. For instance, even if you grew-up in a place where it never snows, and I tell you how I had fun in a snow ball fight with my best friend, you can still understand how that totally represents the pattern of playing with friends; you can translate that to the specific details in your instantiation of the pattern.
Another way of looking at it is that you have scientific truths, on one hand, but also narrative truths on the other hand. Scientific truths are useful to write computer programs, to build a bridge that does not fall when a lorry drives trough... that kind of things. But scientific truths don't help you with some of the most fundamental problems in life, the problems that actually existed before bridges, computing and possibly even language: how to behave in the world. You cannot ask math how to behave in the world. So scientific truths are useful for some things, but for other things, you need narrative truths. You need meta truths.
It's easy to see how meta truths help you solve the problem of how to behave in the world, or what decisions to make in your personal life. Because you need to understand patterns of behaviour. And patters are encoded in stories.
In other words, you need to predict what would happen if you did something, and you can only predict that if you've observed the pattern. And the pattern is transmitted through the story. And you want the most re-usable pattern, and that's the one of a meta story.
That's why One Piece can be very useful in your life, even if you never plan on becoming a pirate. Because the detail about being a pirate can totally be trascended since the patterns is very truthful.
Stories are not lies
So it's clear that stories are useful even if they are not factual descriptions of the objective world. Well, actually, they are more useful when they are not factual descriptions of the objective world. But I'm not defending that they are useful. What I'm saying is that they are true. Or at least, they are not lies.
I have one example that I think you'll understand. People think that they have free will. Right? You believe that that you are free to do whatever you want. That you chose what to say, think and do.
Well that is not really true. Or at least it cannot be proven by science, so it's not a scientific fact. However, we act like it's true all the time. Don't you? In fact, if someone treats you like you didn't have free will, like you were a salve or a puppet, or very dumb, you would get very angry. So it's not a scientific truth, but it's true, and you know it. You behave like it's truth, because if you didn't you life would be very difficult.
So that's a truth. It's a meta truth. It's not a scientific truth, but it's wise. It works. It's useful. It's the right tool.
Some people really don't want to call it truth if it's not a scientific truth. But I do. I do think that is fair, and just, to call it truth. Because I think that calling it truth is the most scientifically correct.
You see: we've had the term truth for a long while. I mean humans. Many human languages have had the word truth in their vocabulary for thousands of years. But science is three hundred years old, right? It's very new. So obviously when people used the world truth, they were not referring to a scientific truth. If the word was there before the thing, it's obviously referring to some other thing. And that original truth is obviously the one I'm presenting today.
So actually it's more accurate to call truth to the meta truth, the pattern that represented in a story, than the scientific truth, the formula.
I really, really don't like calling it lie. Because when people tell you a meta truth, why do you think they do it? Are they trying to fool you? Why do people tell you stories? Why did Eichiiro Oda write One Piece? Is he a liar? Or think about this: when your father tells you: "it's not important if you win or lose, it's important how you play". Is he lying? Is that a lie? Of course not. It's not a scientific description, but he's not lying, is he? It's absolutely true, in more ways that he can even understand. It works. It's a tool. It's true like a tool.
Another way of looking a it is that scientific truths can be descriptions: truth as descriptions; whereas the meta truth can be tools, so truth as tools. You see? Truths can be descriptions, or can be tools. And this is way way better than calling it a lie. Because tools are very useful, specially for active beings that must move around in the world.
I have a really good example that I like a lot. Do you know who Ignaz Semmelweis is? He's a very important person. A very truthful person.
Semmelweis was a doctor, and while he was doing his residency at a hospital he was very troubled about the amount of children and mothers that died during birth. So he moved to a different hospital, and in the second hospital he worked at, even more children died right after being born. And he was very troubled by this. He wrote in his journals that it "made him so miserable that life seemed worthless".
So he didn't know what was the problem, but there surely was something wrong. And that thing must have been worse at the second hospital. He could compare, so he knew that there must have been some factors. He thought that maybe it was the climate? But he tested it and it was not the climate. Then he thought that maybe it was that second hospital had more people, but made experiments and it wasn't that.
So he made a bunch of experiments, and one of them was cleaning people's hands and using a form of disinfectant. The result was the mortality rate in the First Clinic declined 90%. This was huge. This was incredible. The problem is that it worked, but he didn't know why.
This was 1847, way before microscopes were invented. And he came to the conclusion that there were some sort of invisible tiny beings that could kill you, and that people had to wash their hands to get rid of them. He sort of discovered microbes before they could be proven.
What happened? All his contemporary doctors, and also his wife, believed he was losing his mind. In 1865 he was put into the provincial lunatic asylum. He died in there of a septic shock, possibly as the result of being severely beaten by guards.
Semmelweis's results lacked scientific explanation at the time. What he said was not a scientific truth. It could not be proven. Was it then a lie? Are you going to call this man a liar, who not only set out to save lives, but even succeeded at it? No, obviously no. He was not lying.
As a tool, it was totally true. As a description, it could not be true. Yet.
And that's a meta truth. Is something that works, that helps you, that describes a pattern with more accuracy. And great stories, such as One Piece, are true. One Piece is a true story. Is a story that carries truth.
The danger of meta truths
Now, many people get bothered about stories, because they see a danger. Some people think that telling metaphorical truths may be disabling, and that believing them will cause harm not only to those who believe them, but also to society.
And that's totally true. It's absolutely true. Yes, it's a risk. But that does not make it false. The fact that a truth is dangerous, doesn't make it false.
For instance: people can take advantage of you if you believe things that cannot be proven. There can be malevolence misusing the stories against you. A charlatan can sell you snake oil. A cult can kidnap you. A warlord can motivate you to commit atrocities.
So each of us has to explore by themselves and question this knowledge. We all have to questions the meta truths that we inherited. Or rather, update these metaphorical truths so that they continue to provide advantages.
What's the solution to that? People must understand that it's dangerous. And how can people understand that? With a formula? With some bullet points? No. Not at all.
Now, what's the solution? The solution is not a formula, that does not work. The solution is a story about how stories must be updated. And we have those. That's what Jesus did: argue with the old jews in his town and question the status quo. So we have the New Testament, the new one: the updated. It's the same with stories like The Hunger Games, Star Wars, Matrix, Gladiator...
And if you are worried about people taking advantage of people who believe weak things, the solution is a story that warns you about malevolent people taking advantage of you: The Truman Show (everything is a lie and you don't know it), Erin Brockovich, and so on.
And if you are worried about people ignoring what is in front of them, the solution is not a formula, is not a list: it's a story that warns you about the dangers of blindness, like Titanic (the huge iceberg), Jaws (the huge shark under the water), Toy Story (toys that are actually alive when you don't look).
You see what I mean? So yes, meta truths are powerful, not only for good, also for bad. But that does not make them false. That's not an argument for meta truths being lies.
Because, here's some news: scientific truth are also powerful and can be dangerous. So we have vaccines to cure you, and an atomic bomb that kills thousands of people.
So this is a nice way of getting back to the point of One Piece. The author of One Piece was born in Kumamoto, which is very close to Nagasaki, one of the cities that was bombed by the US with the atomic bomb. 80,000 people died in Nagasaki thanks to the utility of scientific truths.
Surviving the test of time
Texts that are deeply meaningful and useful tend to be really old because old texts have been through the process of being remembered and re-told millions of times. When people do that for generations, only the peak-miningful things live on. This is one of the reasons for the old testament being so damn amazing and packed with the richest and deepest narrative truths. There are stories there than even predate written storytelling, so it's stories that really stuck into people's minds and hearts that live on.
One Piece has not survived the test of time. Nor has it failed it. It's too soon to tell. So I would be cautious before advising people to use One Piece as their moral compass or as a practical reference in life. I personally think that it's a pretty good one, it sure helps me through tough times. But we must be cautious and aware that this knowledge has not been tested enough.
A very good example is the story that the world can be understood as a relationship between chaos and order. It's not about the example, the concrete instantiation that you use to explain it. That gets easily outdated and needs to be updated. But the pattern, the meta truth, is still very powerful because life is still the same in that regard.