Although explanation describes the world as it is lived, people postulate contrasting explanations. Those who see the world as a battleground frame communication as “my explanation versus yours.” Once all other explanations have been defeated, the victor’s explanation wins the rank of “fact.” Winston Churchill: “History is written by the victor.”

Although explanation describes the world as it is lived, people postulate contrasting explanations. Those who see the world as a battleground frame communication as “my explanation versus yours.” Once all other explanations have been defeated, the victor’s explanation wins the rank of “fact.” Winston Churchill: “History is written by the victor.”

When explanation becomes fact, it obscures all other thoughts. Consider the harsh judgment of Pope Urban VIII as he ruled against his friend Galileo in 1633: “We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo . . . have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures)
that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that
the earth does move, and is not the center of
the world.”

Those who see the world as a commons
embrace all explanations and reorder them into a story. Story describes the world as it could be lived. Designer Kenya Hara: “To know something is not a goal, but a starting point for our imagination.”

Stories give us epiphanies that open worlds within us and ahead of us. While explanation is an endpoint, storytelling is a beginning–an exploration of possibilities.

Story does what explanation cannot: it gives strength. The author Christopher Vogler wrote: “I came to believe that stories have healing power, that they can help us deal with difficult emotional situations by giving us examples of human behavior, perhaps similar in some way to the struggles we are going through at some stage of life, and which might inspire us to try a different strategy for living.”

Fiction is not a story that lacks truth. It is a story that has yet to become truth. As the character George says in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers: “Credibility is an expanding field ... Sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of
instant hindsight.”

Communities, institutions, states, and nations rise from fiction. They can rise from nothing else. Carl Jung: “All works of man have their origin in creative fantasy.”

As such, form does not follow function.
Form follows fiction.

Without fiction, there can be no future. “The near-future is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible,” writes Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired.

If explanation successfully silences the creation of story, then those who see the world as a battleground will confront their paradox. Upon eliminating the ability of others to create new futures, he who has amassed absolute power by consolidating the futures of all others into the continuation of his past, will find that his past has no future.

He who sees the world as a battleground requires an opponent. Lacking an opponent, he lacks an identity. And a future for his past.

This is the tragedy of war: by eliminating duality, the victor eliminates himself. Buckminster Fuller: “Either war is obsolete
or men are.”

However, by confronting this paradox, he who sees the world as a battleground experiences revelation: those once treated as resource are revealed to be source.

When one sees others as source, one can no longer see others as opponents but as peers involved in the co-creation of play.

Thus, the vision of the world as a commons reveals itself to be the protean vision of life. For only the commons accommodates all visions–even those that see the world as a battleground. “It is the taut composition which contains contrapuntal relationships, equal combinations, inflected fragments, and acknowledged dualities,” observes Robert Venturi. “It is the unity which ‘maintains, but only just maintains, a control over the clashing elements which compose it. Chaos is very near; its nearness, but its avoidance, gives... force.’” In the end, the commons are the only choice that actually encourages our growth.

Such is the triumph of the commons.