Griffith's "story" wasn't a special talent.
1. Griffith's "story" wasn't a special talent
Last time, I read Berserk's Griffith as a meaning-generating apparatus. By distributing not reward but story to the Band of the Hawk, he moved people past their limits.
But let me step back one notch. Is binding people with a story a talent particular to Griffith?
Probably not. That was only an extreme instance of the universal mechanism by which humanity has built large groups in the first place.
Two books take this head-on: Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. This time I read the two on the same desk.
2. Sapiens: humanity cooperated at scale through fiction
The core of Sapiens, in one line:
What decisively separates humans from other animals is that they can cooperate with great numbers of strangers they've never met, by believing in a shared fiction.
Nations. Companies. Religions. Money. Law. Human rights. None of these lie around as substance somewhere in nature. They exist because everyone believes they exist — shared stories.
Here, "fiction" doesn't mean a lie. By fiction I mean a story that gains real power by being shared among many. If anything, fiction is humanity's greatest invention.
A troop of chimpanzees can bond only a few dozen strong. It can't exceed the range of visible faces. But humans, ten thousand or a hundred million, can move in one direction by believing the same story. The pyramids, the joint-stock company, the modern state — all of them are shared fiction converted into mass cooperation.
So: civilization is made of shared illusion.
What Griffith did was a miniature of this. He distributed to the mercenaries the fiction "you can become part of history," and bound a small face-to-face group into something larger. His talent wasn't inventing fiction. It was starting up, better than anyone, a mechanism humanity has always run.
3. Imagined Communities: living the same story with strangers
The other book, Imagined Communities, dissects this with the specific case of the nation.
Anderson defined the nation like this:
A nation is an imagined political community.
A Japanese person has never met almost any of their hundred million compatriots. Doesn't know their faces or names. And yet feels "we're the same people." Why? Because they share the same story.
Here too, "imagined" doesn't mean fake. Unlike the face-to-face community of a village, it means supplementing, with imagination, solidarity with others you can't directly observe. Before modernity, people lived within "the range of visible faces" — village, tribe, religious sphere. The modern state needed to make a community with strangers. The adhesive was imagination.
4. The infrastructure that distributes the story — print, language, simultaneity
What's interesting is that Anderson explained, structurally, how that imagination got distributed.
The key was print capitalism.
Newspapers and novels, printed and circulated in bulk as market goods. From this, several things happened.
One is the sense of simultaneity. Each morning, countless strangers read the same paper. "Right now, I'm living the same time as a vast number of people I'll never see" — this binds spatially distant others into a single "now."
One is the fixing of language. Publishing standardizes language within the range that pays. Countless dialects were bound into a "national language," and the range readable in that language became the very outline of the community you could imagine. The publishing market made a language community.
And the imagined community isn't only of living contemporaries. By sharing the same story, the community takes in the already-dead and the not-yet-born. That a nation can remember its "founding fathers" and speak "for posterity" is because imagination runs vertically through time as well.
People who read the same story, in the same language, on the same time axis — that became the nation.
This connects straight to #0's "manga was a democratization device for cultural capital." Manga, too, distributed the same story with the same weight to children nationwide, building a generation-spanning "imagined community." Newspaper or manga, the medium differs; the structure is the same.
And that sense we get today, around the World Cup or an earthquake or an election, that "everyone knows" — that too is the time synchronization the story-distributing infrastructure produces.
5. Organizations, too, stand on shared illusion
Let me bring this down to organizations.
A company has exactly the same structure. A strong organization doesn't stand on technology and reward alone. It holds myth, aesthetics, story.
"Here, we treat this way of working as beautiful." "Here, we count this kind of person as excellent." — the "organizational aesthetic sense" I wrote about in #0 is precisely part of this shared illusion. The founding story, past trials by fire, the successes and failures retold again and again. They bind members who've never met into one direction.
Mission, values, organizational culture — pushed to the core, they're shared fiction. And that isn't weakness. Without it, people can't cooperate beyond the few dozen of "the range of visible faces."
In civilizational terms, the question of who makes a design's center of gravity, and whose history has shaped the culture of a codebase, has its root here too. Who bound the shared illusion called a codebase, and how. An organization is shared story, crystallized as structure.
6. When the story grows too strong, dissent disappears
But here, the previous chapter returns.
A shared story makes a community hold together. Yet when that story grows too strong, dissent starts to be excluded as "something that breaks the story."
Nationalism. Religious fundamentalism. The startup myth. A culted-up corporate culture. In none of these is the shared illusion itself the evil. It turns dangerous the moment the illusion is placed above reality.
This is continuous with Berserk's Eclipse. When the shared illusion of Griffith's dream grew too strong, the one who didn't fit it (Guts) became "a being outside the dream," and in the end the community itself became fuel for the dream.
So a shared story needs, I think, two conditions:
- That there's a story — without myth, people can't make a large community
- That the story isn't absolutized — dissent can be voiced, and one can leave (Exit and Voice remain)
A good civilization holds a shared story. But it doesn't hold the story hostage.
7. There's a sprout of a story at our own feet, too
Finally, back to our own ground.
There's a sprout of a small imagined community around OrbitLens, too. Gravity. Orbit. Signals, not Scores. Civilization. History. Psychological OS. — these are, little by little, becoming a shared vocabulary. People who've never met are beginning to see the same things through the same words.
And that I'm so insistent on "observing organizations" connects here. If an organization is made of shared story, then whether that story can be kept in an observable form comes to matter. Who built what heat onto what, and why it took this shape. A mechanism like Dark Matter Memo is an attempt to support the shared illusion with "the will to keep it."
But I don't want to forget the condition from §6. If the observed story grows too strong and becomes an apparatus that crushes dissent, that's OrbitLens's failure. Distribute the story, but don't absolutize it. Bind the community, but don't make it an offering.
Civilization is made of shared fiction. The question is whether that fiction is making people stand, or has started to swallow them — here too, the question returns to the same place.
Books
Next
In #3, I'll read Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens together with James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games — the play at the root of civilization, and the difference between a game played to win and a game played to keep playing.
This is a personal reading of Sapiens and Imagined Communities.
The Japanese version lives on OrbitLens Library.
OrbitLens / machuz