1.
A Familiar World - Prologue

2.
Summon Adventure - Savior, Demon, Hero

A journey that transforms them all
Villain · Mentor · Comrade
The Link Between Cinderella and the Old Testament
Masterplot: The story that serves as the framework
Heroes of the 'Post-Heroic Era'

3.
Rejection - How do I become my own hero?

The oldest story in the world
Dead monkeys don't talk
Homo Narrans, the storyteller
Writer's Room
All-natural medicine
3D Printer of the Mind: The Brain
The most famous wooden horse in history
monkey in the mirror
narrative self
Different times, different heroes
Everyone is a king

4.
Meeting with a Mentor - Words, Sentences, and Pictures: A Means of Storytelling

Give me a weapon and find a friend
Rule number one: there are no rules.
One word story
The magic of words
An image speaks volumes more than a thousand heroes.

5.
Crossing the First Threshold: How the Internet Is Changing Our Narratives

The Myth of Zuckerberg
Turbo: A triumph of narrative technology
I, phone
Monkey see, monkey do
Forming a digital camp
puberty

6.
Harsh Tests, Allies, Enemies - Which Narrative Will Define Our World?

Narrative Wars
Creating a Safe World for Democracy
The First Adult Fairy Tale: Homo Economicus
God is clearly crazy
The King's Invention
A New Fairy Tale: Everyone Makes Their Own Crown
Create a black person
A Bloody Jewish Fairy Tale for Adults

7.
Entering the Deepest Cave - The Eternal Temptation of the Right

Come and get it!
Alliance for Survival
Total antagonist
May the Force be with you - Sparta, Star Wars, Disney World
Primitive Fascists Like Trump: Lies, Myths, and Fiction
Conspiracy Narrative: An Interactive Fascist Fairy Tale

8.
The Decisive Test: What Stories Did Germany and the US Create?

distorted obligations
Deep Story and the Infinite Land of Fiction
Germany's Deep Story until 1933
Drama washes away oppression
The only thing that is truly German

9.
Grabbing a knife - not a very strong gender

Apple, Snake, and Woman
Myths and hero stories as a male domain
Incels and Their Misogynism

10.
The End of Humanity Won't Be Broadcast on Television - Why Climate Stories Fail

The film's story was a disaster
Why We Get Climate Wrong
Conquer the land
Hero Greta

11.
Resurrection - The Exhausted Monkey

Self in crisis
What we talk about when it comes to happiness
Sex, Lies, and Movies
Astrology and Another Depoliticization
Story Square
Identity Politics: Narrative Dissonance and the Rights of the Narrative Self
A monkey tired of stories

12.
Returning with the Potion - How Will We Save the World?

Cassandra and Corona
The Trolly Problem: Present and Future
Imagination is a muscle, and stories are a virus.
It's better to risk your head and neck than to lose your face.
Utopia for Unstable Times
The true antagonist
The Last Picture

Acknowledgements
annotation
References

Why stories are important

Why do we tell stories? And why do we immerse ourselves in compelling stories? The authors' answer is clear.
Because stories, especially powerful ones that stick in the mind, have helped humanity survive.
According to the authors, we should be more accurately called 'Homo narrans', 'storytellers', rather than 'Homo sapiens', meaning 'wise men'.
Because we are only occasionally wise, but we always tell stories.


So how do stories help us survive? Consider a prehistoric situation where a man recounts a moment of crisis he encountered while hunting to his tribe.
He encountered a huge lynx.
When the lynx attacked, he threw a spear made of wood and stone at the lynx.
The window broke and he was wounded in the arm.
What can he do without a window? He runs away.
I try to run up the tree behind me, but my injured arm prevents me from climbing up the tree.
He keeps running towards where he can hear the sound of the waterfall.
He's at the edge of a cliff and the lynx is about to tear him to pieces.
Exhausted and without the strength to attack, he overcomes his fear of death and jumps down the cliff.
After a few seconds of free fall, he lands on the cold surface of the water.
Is he dead? No.
He emerges from the deep water, gasping for breath.
I did it!

The tribesmen would have found this escape story, much like an action movie today, exciting to hear.
And at the same time, you would have gained these lessons and information.
For example, important information such as not relying solely on weapons when encountering enemies, the water under the waterfall is deep enough to jump into in an emergency, and the courage to jump off the cliff is necessary.
So to speak, stories were a successful survival strategy and a great tool for conveying information.
Stories of courageous people fighting against enemies, sacrificing themselves for their tribe, and working together to overcome adversity taught people what was desirable and what was not.
If just one person in the tribe had followed suit and talked about it, the tribe would have been safer and more prosperous.


Stories were the 'social content' of prehistoric times, and the more emotionally charged they were, the more they were shared and reposted—to put it in today's terms.
So to speak, our survival depended on how well we could convey this information, which was essential to life.
In other words, tribes with better stories had a better chance of survival.
-Page 90

In search of the 'narrative gene' inherent in humans
―Analyzing the universal structure of all stories

In his 1945 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell analyzed thousands of myths and legends from around the world, all of which shared a pattern of overcoming adversity and achieving success.
The same scheme is found in Celtic and Arab mythology, in the demigods of India and Greece, and even in the ancient stories of culturally distinct Native Americans and indigenous peoples.
The stories of Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad follow exactly this narrative.
Campbell understood this as a 'narrative gene' inherent in humans.

In fact, there are common narrative patterns that appear repeatedly in various stories around the world.
In 2018, a research team led by Professor Pogrebna of the Department of Behavioral Economics and Data Science at the University of Birmingham analyzed the emotional curves of 6,000 films, and found that the 6,000 films did not deviate significantly from six formats (or, more broadly, three categories).
It doesn't matter if it's a Hollywood movie, a Bollywood movie, or a K-movie.

What are the categories? One category includes stories of poverty-stricken people becoming millionaires ("Rag to Riches"), while the other, on the other hand, involves a protagonist's endless decline ("Rich to Rags").
The second category includes stories about someone falling into a pit and escaping ('Man in Hole'), and conversely, stories about someone rising for a long time and then falling endlessly ('Icarus').
In the third category, we have the familiar Cinderella story, and on the other side of that, the Oedipus story, which begins with a strong blow, rises in the middle, but ultimately meets with tragedy.

So which films did people choose? The most profitable and most popular story was the "man-in-a-hole" format, where someone falls into a hole and tries to escape.
The Cinderella story followed immediately.
You might think that 'profit' and 'evaluation' are separate things.
So, which format received the most acclaim from audiences? It was the "from-poor-to-millionaire" format.
Films that experience endless downfall or end in tragedy are rarely chosen or praised by audiences.
The story of going from 'millionaire to pauper' was not particularly successful.
People generally love happy endings.

Politics, the media, business, war…everything needs a story.

There are narrative structures that are not only familiar in stories from movies or novels.
The backbone of a successful story, the master plot, is a constant cycle of competition, redemption, exploration, transformation, revenge, underdogs, love stories, chases, coming of age, and self-sacrifice.
This narrative structure is found everywhere information is exchanged, whether factual or fictional, including news, education, and advertising.


In June 2018, 12 Thai youth soccer players were trapped in a flooded cave.
As their story began to make the news, millions of people around the world cheered the boys on.
The intense media coverage gave them all hope that they could survive.
And finally, they all returned alive.
The cave where the boys were trapped is now a tourist attraction that attracts a million visitors every year.
This is an example of how the master plot of the 'salvation' narrative works well.

In contrast, there was far less reporting on the 85,000 children under five who died of hunger during the Yemeni civil war that same year.
The reason for these conflicting reports is clear.
Beyond the fact that unusual events are more newsworthy than ongoing crises, the fate of Yemeni children was too abstract for narrative purposes.
In other words, there was no individual incident symbolic enough to make Yemeni children the main characters, and the crisis situation was too ambiguous.
It was impossible to develop a solid journalistic narrative with the hope of a happy ending, like rescuing a Thai boy from a cave, in the story of the Yemeni children.
No matter how much we argue about the function of 'news', this is the reality.
Even now, when a major disaster or calamity occurs, the media immediately becomes obsessed with finding heroes or righteous people, and readers often show greater interest in this than in the cause or origin of the incident.

Moreover, the 'competition' narrative is a standard narrative seen in all forms of election campaigns, and the 'transformation' narrative appears in various before and after shows.
The narrative of the 'underdog' is a guarantee of success for competition programs like 'Superstar K' and 'Mr. Trot', and it is the same for politicians.
Everyone loves a story about an outsider who rises to fame overnight.

The power of stories that can even put humanity at risk

But when this kind of 'narrative' starts to be used by politicians or politics, another situation unfolds.
A representative example is the conspiracy narrative.

The man, a father of a family, stormed into a pizza place armed with an automatic rifle.
He believed that in the basement of that pizza place, Democratic lawmakers were committing sadistic organized crime against children.
Hillary Clinton and other prominent politicians are said to be kidnapping and torturing children to obtain adrenochrome, a metabolite used by Hollywood stars to prevent aging.
This man was a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory.
QAnon has spread the narrative that a hidden power structure called the "Deep State" dominates American society, and that it is the role of "heroes" to expose and fight back against this secret.
The man who broke into the pizza place wanted to be that kind of hero.
In fact, we easily fall for these (conspiracy) narratives.

Politicians, businesspeople, and sometimes conspiracy theorists cleverly exploit this situation and engage in a "narrative" war.
To justify slavery, white people spread the narrative that they had to dominate other races and lead them to civilization.
The Nazis used the medieval myth of the 'evil Jew'.
There is no need to go further.
Due to the 'Bulyeongseonin' narrative created during the Great Kanto Earthquake during the Japanese colonial period, over 6,000 Koreans (estimated) lost their lives to Japanese vigilantes, and in the 'Peace Dam' incident, in which North Korea attempted to burst the dam and turn South Korea into a wasteland, not only intelligence agencies but also so-called 'experts' came to the forefront and deceived the public.


The same was true for some businessmen.
The story of the United Fruit Company, which drove the elected Guatemalan government into communism in order to monopolize banana exports, or the story of the tobacco company adding the "torch of freedom" story to encourage women to smoke, have become classics of "propaganda" or "public relations."
Stories can distort reality and even be used for someone's benefit.

A time when new stories for the future are needed

So how can stories change us and our future for the better? In this book, the authors argue that we need a new narrative for our future.
A representative example is the narrative for overcoming the climate crisis.
The authors point out that people are not accepting the climate crisis today because it is being misrepresented.
For example, the mainstream climate narratives are dominated by plots like the "competition" plot, where ecology and economy are at odds with each other, the "Icarus" plot, where we have to give up a lot to prevent the climate crisis, and the half-man-in-hole plot, where we are in crisis and there is no escape.
The authors say a different, more hopeful narrative is needed.
Something like the narrative of 'hero Greta Thunberg' fighting against the climate crisis.
Fridays for Future, the youth movement that emerged in the wake of Greta Thunberg, is now recognized as one of the most influential movements of our time, creating new heroes in every country.
We need many more inspiring and inspiring stories like Greta's.

But the fundamental shift begins when we make ourselves the protagonists of our own narratives—our own stories.
What if we saw ourselves as humanity on a heroic journey? What will alert us and move us? Where will we reject our calling? What thresholds of change emerge from the climate crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic? And most importantly, what is our grand goal? What fundamental changes can we make to transform the world?

The authors highlight our ability to envision a more peaceful world, and our ability to unite for it: recognizing a bad past, imagining a better future, and our passion to talk about it.
Today, these skills seem more necessary than ever.
The authors say that if we rediscover these abilities and use them effectively, it would be a real transformation.


This book is a 'text' for all those who depend on stories, with the long history of human history, from Greek mythology to Netflix, as the warp and the content of stories used by various people, from screenwriters to politicians and finally ordinary people, as the weft.