How do you know they weren’t ‘attempts to make a coherent story’ that turned destructive?

I don’t, but what is your alternative suggestion? What important things don’t also have the potential to end badly?

Unless your position is a kind of Daoist quietism, I’m not sure what you are suggesting instead.

Why do you believe such alternative suggestions exist?

Maybe there aren’t any such that are risk free. So you have to evaluate both the potential upsides and downsides to see if it’s a net positive and worthwhile risk to take.

Then I'm really not sure what exactly you are arguing for or against. The act of making a story that attempts to give meaning to human life and society? How would you evaluate that for potential upsides and downsides, and what are you comparing it against?

Why is "story", which is known to be an accurate model, the preferred model? Why not non-linear dynamical system, epigram, clerihew, or haiku?

Probably because most of those don't line up with how humans experience the world. Storytelling has a long history in the human experience, while haiku or epigrams aren't really the sort of thing one can "wrap" a life around.

Humans experience the world as a story, but that is not necessarily the most human way to wrap a life around as you are implying. In some cases there are more powerful frameworks. For example Hitler is wrapped (by most of the world at least) around the damage and pain he caused not around his story. Stories are mostly fine, but thinking that we should strive for that to being the main perspective is limiting.

> For example Hitler is wrapped (by most of the world at least) around the damage and pain he caused not around his story.

Isn't this exactly part of Hitler's story though? I think I'm misunderstanding what your concept of "story" means.

I never said anyone had good prospects to complete such an evaluation in a single lifetime… in fact it’s very unlikely to happen.

But without that it’s hard to see how such proposals have any merit at all, considering the historical track record.

> Then I'm really not sure what exactly you are arguing for or against.

If it helps, neither do they. Given that they are already suggesting Postmodernism provides a valuable philosophical and analytic view to understand the world, it's pretty clear that they've given up on any concept of defining a pathway, outcome, or objective.

Both communism and nazism provided simplified narrative stories.

Yes, that's why I called them "failed attempts to encapsulate reality into an over simplified story."

This sounds like a non true scotsman. If large societies buying into a story doesn’t qualify it as a success, what does? M

Why would that be the qualification for success? I didn’t write that “everyone believing it” was the marker of success, so I don’t know why that would be relevant.

In another comment thread, I wrote that a story is needed which combines accurate scientific information with a human purpose in the world. Those examples quite obviously didn’t have scientific views of the world.

By that standard, successful societies are the ones without a story. While the ones with story are autocratic and dictatorships.

Those societies not being failures as a result. They both fail to properly understand politics and economics. Also sociology.

By that token, every attempt to encapsulate reality into a simplified story is successful until it fails. Not a very useful thing to bring to the table

Any movement. Communism, nazism, capitalism and religions.

Any extremist political '-ism' has thousands of murders in his belt.

The best goverments are the centered ones, the ones which gave both individual and social rights.

Narratives are unfortunately intrinsically very good tools for sociopaths to manipulate people. That makes them an attractive nuisance for sociopaths to gain at very best, just like how large piles of uninvested money serves as an attractive nuisance for thieves. Judged more harshly, narratives are a tool whose purpose is the promotion of delusion.