Storytelling

Catharsis is the biggest emotional and physical trigger of them all. We may get it in small doses from almost every drama
or story we see, but the big catharsis, a whole-body emotional and physical spasm
that cleans out your entire system of toxins or triggers a complete change of orientation,
is pretty rare. You wouldn't want to go through that disruption every day, for
a catharsis usually means a radical reorganization of priorities and belief systems.
But it does still happen now and then, when the story and the listener are lined up
just right, and it's the thing that makes so many people want to go into show business
and the arts. They've felt it. In the presence of work that is beautiful and true,
honest and real, something smashes you like a hammer striking glass and allows you
to suddenly put your own experience into proper new perspective. You might have
experienced that deep shudder of realization, a moment of profound connection
with your family, your country, your humanity, with the divine, or the things you
believe in. A story, once in a great while, can touch us at the deepest level, giving
us a new view of the world or a new reason to live, perhaps when we are ready for
that particular story to speak its truth to us. No wonder some people want to be
artists and storytellers, to participate in that mystery, and create the possibility of
that experience for others.
We enjoy stories that are polarized by a struggle between two strong
characters, like The African Queen or Driving Miss Daisy, but we are also entertained by
stories polarized by great principles of living that tug the characters in two directions
at once, so they are torn between duty and love, for example, or between revenge
and forgiveness. Many a show-business tale like The Buddy Holly Story is polarized
by loyalty and ambition; loyalty to the group that the hero grew up with versus the
demands of ambition that require ditching those people when the hero moves to a
new level of success.

As the polarized nature of magnetic fields can be used to generate electrical energy,
polarity in a story seems to be an engine that generates tension and movement in the
characters and a stirring of emotions in the audience.

In a well-constructed story these repeated reversals (ups and downs) accumulate power, adding up to the emotional impact that Aristotle claimed was the point of it all: catharsis, an explosive and physical release of emotion, be it tears of pity, shudders of terror, or bursts of laughter. By Aristotle's theory,
these drumbeats were supposed to accumulate tension in the bodies of the audience
members until the biggest beat of all, at the climax of the play, released a pleasurable
shudder of emotion that was believed to cleanse the spirit of poisonous thoughts
and feelings. Stories retain their power to release cathartic emotions which is still a
profound human need.

Here is a partial list of
possible polarities within a relationship. Entire stories could be built around each of
these pairs of opposites. I'm sure you can think of many more.
323
THE WRITER'S JOURNEY ~ THIRD EDITION
Christopher Vôgler
Sloppy vs. neat
Brave vs. cowardly
Feminine vs. masculine
Open vs. closed
Suspicious vs. trusting
Optimistic vs. pessimistic
Planned vs. spontaneous
Passive vs. active
Low-key vs. dramatic
Talkative vs. taciturn
Living in the past vs. forward-looking
Conservative vs. liberal
Underhanded vs. principled
Honest vs. dishonest
Literal vs. poetic
Clumsy vs. graceful
Lucky vs. unlucky
Calculated vs. intuitive
Introvert vs. extrovert
Happy vs. sad
Materialistic vs. spiritual
Polite V5. rude
Controlling vs. impulsive
Sacred vs. profane
Nature vs. nurture

When a situation is extremely polarized, when the two sides have been driven out
to their most extreme positions, there is a tendency for the polarity to reverse
itself.

In many polarized relationships, one person is more experienced
and has already made a fool of himself in long-ago experiments, so now he knows
precisely how to handle women, cards, guns, cars, or money. To the inexperienced
person it's all new, so we get to watch him or her making the beginner's hilarious
mistakes.

They
reverse polarity in order to experiment with behavior that is outside of their normal
comfort zone. However, rarely is this the end of the story. There is usually at least
one more reversal, as the characters recover from the temporary insanity imposed by
the story and return to their true natures. It is a very strong rule in drama, and in life,
that people remain true to their basic natures. They change, and their change is essential
for drama, but typically they only change a little, taking a single step towards
integrating a forgotten or rejected quality into their natures.
Complete and permanent reversals of polarity are
rare in stories and in life.

BALANCED APPROACH

In most cases it's not desirable or realistic to end up exacdy in the middle of the two positions.
Most stories end with the characters back more or less on the side of the
polarity where they started, but several steps closer to the center and the opposite
side.

The characters' range of possible behavior now avoids the extreme positions and
overlaps a little into the territory of the opposite side, producing a more balanced
personality that leaves room for the formerly unexpressed quality. This is a good
place to end up, because from this position the character can retreat to his or her
old comfort zone if threatened, but still reach across to experience something of the
opposite side.

THIRD OPTION
We could say the protagonist's point of view or style of living is the thesis of
the story. The anti-thesis is the antagonist's opposing viewpoint and style. The synthesis
is whatever resolves the polarized conflict at the end. It may be a restatement
of the protagonist's wishes or world-view, incorporating new learning or strength
gained from the clash with the antagonist. It may be a radical new approach to life
that the hero finds, or it may be a return to the hero's original position, but even then
it will always be shifted a little by the polarized struggle the hero has been through.
Typically heroes learn something from their polar opposites and incorporate this
into their new pattern of behavior.
The resolution of some polarized stories could be the realization that the
polarization itself was false, based on a misunderstanding, or that it was totally
unnecessary if the seemingly opposed parties had simply communicated better in

Catharsis
In your writing, remember that the purpose of everything you're doing is to bring
about some kind of emotional reaction in your reader or viewer. It may not
always be the full-blown explosive reaction of catharsis, but it should have its effect
on the organs of the body, stimulating them through repeated blows of conflict and
setback for your hero. You are always raising and lowering the tension, pumping
energy into your story and characters until some kind of emotional release is
inevitable, in the form of laughter, tears, shudders, or a warm glow of understanding.
People still need catharsis, and a good story is one of the most reliable and

entertaining ways of bringing it about.

the beginning. Polarized romantic comedies can be built entirely around misunderstandings
to show the difficulty of male-female communication, but might end with

the lovers realizing they had been saying the same thing all along.

Social gap will be far bigger- FEAR-ON

Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand twenty-first-century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms. These powers are far more potent than steam and the telegraph, and they will not be used merely for the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons. The main products of the twenty-first century will be bodies, brains and minds, and the gap between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not will be far bigger than the gap between Dickens’s Britain and the Mahdi’s Sudan.

There is creativity wherever there is integration of many into one and the adding of a novel one to the many

East/West

Westerners have a strong interest in categorization, which helps them to know what rules to apply to the objects in question, and formal logic plays a role in problem solving.

East Asians, in contrast, attend to objects in their broad context. The world seems more complex to Asians than to Westerners, and understanding events always requires consideration of a host of factors that operate in relation to one another in no simple, deterministic way. Formal logic plays little role in problem solving. In fact, the person who is too concerned with logic may be considered immature.

The collective or interdependent nature of Asian society is consistent with Asians' broad, contextual view of the world and their belief that events are highly complex and determined by many factors.

 The individualistic or independent nature of Western society seems consistent with the Western focus on particular objects in isolation from their context and with Westerners' belief that they can know the rules governing objects and therefore can control the objects' behavior.

East Asians group objects and events based on how they relate to one another, whereas Westerners are more likely to rely on categories

Reasoning- Westerners are more likely to apply formal logic when reasoning about everyday events, and why does their insistence on logic sometimes cause them to make errors? Easterners willing to entertain apparently contradictory propositions and sometimes this is helpful in getting at the truth?

Carrying out prescribed roles—in an organized, hierarchical system— was the essence of Chinese daily life. There was no counterpart to the Greek sense of personal liberty. Individual rights in China were one's "share" of the rights of the community as a whole, not a license to do as one pleased.

For the Greeks, things belonged in the same category if they were describ-able by the same attributes.

But the philosopher Donald Munro points out that, for the Chinese, shared attributes did not establish shared class membership. Instead, things were classed together because they were thought to influence one another through resonance. For example, in the Chinese system of the Five Processes, the categories spring, east, wood, wind, and green all influenced one another. Change in wind would affect all the others—in "a process like a multiple echo, without physical contact coming between any of them."

Categories are denoted by nouns. It seems obvious that nouns would be easier for a young child to learn than verbs. All you have to do to learn that the animal you just saw is a "bear" is to notice its distinctive features—huge size, large teeth and claws, long fur, ferocious appearance—and you can store that object away with its label. The label is then available for application to any other object having that set of properties.

Relationships, on the other hand, involve, tacitly or explicitly, a verb. Learning the meaning of a transitive verb normally involves noticing two objects and some kind of action that connects them in some way. "To throw" means to use your arm and hand to move an object through the air to a new location. Merely pointing at the action does not guarantee that someone will know what you're referring to.

Categories are denoted by nouns. It seems obvious that nouns would be easier for a young child to learn than verbs. All you have to do to learn that the animal you just saw is a "bear" is to notice its distinctive features—huge size, large teeth and claws, long fur, ferocious appearance—and you can store that object away with its label. The label is then available for application to any other object having that set of properties.

Relationships, on the other hand, involve, tacitly or explicitly, a verb. Learning the meaning of a transitive verb normally involves noticing two objects and some kind of action that connects them in some way. "To throw" means to use your arm and hand to move an object through the air to a new location. Merely pointing at the action does not guarantee that someone will know what you're referring to.East Asian children learn verbs at about the same rate as nouns and, by some definitions of what counts as a noun, at a significantly faster rate than nouns. There are several factors that might underlie this dramatic difference.
First, verbs are more salient in East Asian languages than in English and many other European languages. Verbs in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tend to come either at the beginning or the end of sentences and both are relatively salient locations. In English, verbs are more commonly buried in the middle.
(...) They found big differences in the behavior of mothers even with their youngest children. American mothers used twice as many object labels as Japanese mothers ("piggie," "doggie") and Japanese mothers engaged in twice as many social routines of teaching politeness norms (empathy and greetings, for example). An American mother's patter might go like this: "That's a car. See the car? You like it? It's got nice wheels." A Japanese mother might say: "Here! It's a vroom vroom. I give it to you. Now give this to me. Yes! Thank you." American children are learning that the world is mostly a place with objects, Japanese children that the world is mostly about relationships.

Many of the categories used to understand the world refer to presumed qualities of the object: hardness, whiteness, kindness, timidity.

 Easterners of course use such categories as well, but they are less likely to abstract them away from particular objects: There is the whiteness of the horse or the whiteness of the snow in ancient Chinese philosophy, but not whiteness as an abstract, detachable concept that can be applied to almost anything. In the Western tradition, objects have essences composed of mix-and-match abstract qualities. These essences allow for confident predictions about behavior independent of context. In the Eastern tradition, objects have concrete properties that interact with environmental circumstances to produce behavior. There was never any interest in discussing abstract properties as if they had a reality other than being a characteristic of a particular object.

The obsession with categories of the either/or sort runs through Western intellectual history. Dichotomies abound in every century and form the basis for often fruitless debates: for example, "mind-body" controversies in which partisans take sides as to whether a given behavior is best understood as being produced by the mind independent of any biological embodiment, or as a purely physical reaction unmediated by mental processes.

The difference between the two groups would seem to be that Americans are simply more in the habit of applying logical rules to ordinary events than Koreans and are therefore more capable of ignoring the plausibility of the conclusions.

East Asians, then, are more likely to set logic aside in favor of typicality and plausibility of conclusions. They are also more likely to set logic aside in favor of the desirability of conclusions.

Example
Premise 1: All things that are made from plants are good for health.
Premise 2: Cigarettes are things that are made from plants.
Conclusion: Cigarettes are good for health.

Logical but implausible

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, brought the whole necessity-and-sufficiency enterprise crashing to earth in the West. Wittgenstein argued to the satisfaction (or rather, dismay) of even the most analytic of Western philosophers that establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for any complex or interesting category, such as a "game" or a "government" or an "illness," was never going to be possible. A thing can be a game even if it is not fun, even if played alone, even if its chief goal is to make money. A thing is not necessarily a game even if it is fun or is a nonproductive activity engaging several people in pleasurable interaction. Wittgenstein's sermon would never have been needed in the East. The pronouncement that complex categories cannot always be defined by necessary and sufficient conditions would scarcely have been met with surprise.

EAST DIALECTICISM AND LOVE OF CONTRADICTIONS

The reasons for these differences in preference for contradiction are deep. There is a style of reasoning in Eastern thought, traceable to the ancient Chinese, which has been called dialectical, meaning that it focuses on contradictions and how to resolve them or transcend them or find the truth in both. At the risk of doing violence to the spirit of dialecticism, which does not make use of hard and fast rules about reasoning, we can describe three principles that are important to it, which Kaiping Peng has articulated.

The Principle of Change The Eastern tradition of thought emphasizes the constantly changing nature of reality. The world is not static but dynamic and changeable. Being in a given state is just a sign that the state is about to change. Because reality is in constant flux, the concepts that reflect reality are fluid and subjective rather than being fixed and objective.

The Principle of Contradiction Because the world is constantly changing, oppositions, paradoxes, and anomalies are continuously being created. Old and new, good and bad, strong and weak exist in everything. In fact opposites complete each other and make each other up. Taoists see the two sides of any apparent contradiction existing in an active harmony, opposed but connected and mutually controlling. "Tao is conceived as both 'is' and 'is not.' " As the founder of the Taoist School, Lao-tzu, put it: "When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, there arises the recognition of ugliness; when they all know the good as good, there arises the recognition of evil. And so, being and nonbeing produce each other . . ." Or as Mao Tse-tung, longtime Chinese dictator who regarded himself as a philosopher and poet as well as a politician and soldier, wrote:"... On the one hand [opposites] are opposed to each other, and on the other they are interconnected, interpenetrating, interpermeating and interdependent, and this character is described as identity."

The Principle of Relationship, or Holism As a result of change and opposition, nothing exists in an isolated and independent way, but is connected to a multitude of different things. To really know a thing, we have to know all its relations, like individual musical notes embedded in a melody.
The three principles of dialectical reasoning are related. Change produces contradiction and contradiction causes change; constant change and contradiction imply that it is meaningless to discuss the individual part without considering its relationships with other parts and prior states. The principles also imply another important tenet of Eastern thought, which is the insistence on finding the Middle Way between extreme propositions. There is a strong presumption that contradictions are merely apparent and to believe that "A is right and B is not wrong either." This stance is captured by the Zen Buddhis

(Though the Hegelian or Marxist dialectic, with its emphasis on thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, has been held to be more "aggressive" than the Eastern variety because the effort is always toward obliterating the contradiction rather than accepting it or transcending it or using it to understand some state of affairs better.)

Westerners tend not to be aware of the strength of their commitment to some logical principles that conflict directly with the spirit of Eastern dialecticism. These include the law of identity, which holds that a thing is itself and not some other thing, and the law of noncontradiction, which holds that a proposition can't be both true and false. The Western insistence on this pair of logical principles and the Eastern spirit of dialecticism are, on the surface at least, in direct opposition to each other.

There is some evidence that socialization of children in the East is moving toward the Western pattern. Harold Stevenson and his colleagues monitored the mothers of children in a particular elementary school in Beijing for more than a decade beginning in the mid-eighties, asking them what it was that they wanted for their children. When the study began, the mothers' concerns were for their children's relational skills—their ability to fit in harmoniously with others. Ten years later, the mothers were interested mostly in the same things that Western mothers are: Does my child have the skills and the independence to get ahead in the world?

*Westerners tend to confuse modernization—defined as industrialization, a more complex occupational structure, increased wealth and social mobility, greater literacy, and urbanization—with Westernization. But societies other than Japan have become modern without becoming very Western. These include Singapore, Taiwan, and, to a lesser degree, Iran.

Thus we all function in some respects more like Easterners some of the time and more like Westerners some of the time. A shift in characteristic social practices could therefore be expected to produce a shift in typical patterns of perception and thought.

So I believe the twain shall meet by virtue of each moving in the direction of the other. East and West may contribute to a blended world where social and cognitive aspects of both regions are represented but transformed— like the individual ingredients in a stew that are recognizable but are altered as they alter the whole. It may not be too much to hope that this stew will contain the best of each culture.

The Geography of thought, How Asians and Westerners think differently, Richard Nisbett

Whitehead, For me “the Other” is abstract and artificial. In reality, we are born into the context of the Multiple Other

I use the concept of “Multiple Other” to replace, ontologically and ethically, the concept of “the
Other” used by Levinas, Derrida and Deleuze. For me “the Other” is abstract and artificial. In
reality, we are born into the context of the Multiple Other, and at no time do we simply face
“the Other.” Keeping the concept of “Multiple Other” will justify a position that is
ontologically, ethically sound, and that is the basis of the good life.

Now, in the Whiteheadian sense, there is creativity wherever there is integration of many into one and the adding of a novel one to the many.

In Whitehead’s universe, Process is complemented by Pattern, which is pure potentiality (although
itself dynamic)

In any self-organizing system, one might say, Process is both the source and the result of Pattern, and this applies equally to language. Process is in general the passing on of feeling into expression, and feeling (or prehension) is the reception of expression (MT 23).

Change produces contradiction and contradiction causes change; constant change and contradiction imply that it is meaningless to discuss the individual part without considering its relationships with other parts and prior states.

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