Who in our culture is pacified by the story? Do you look up to them? Do you aspire to be one of them? Or like them? To have what they have? To do what they do? To be as they are?

Do you ever want the nagging voice to go away?

How do we do that?

First definition: story. A story is a scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods.” “Okay.”

“Second definition: to enact. To enact a story is to live so as to make the story a reality. In other words, to enact a story is to strive to make it come true. You recognize that this is what the people of Germany were doing under Hitler. They were trying to make the Thousand Year Reich a reality. They were trying to make the story he was telling them come true.” “Right.”

“Third definition: culture. A culture is a people enacting a story.”

What are the characteristics of people who are civilized or primitive?

How is their story different?

“A German who couldn’t bring himself to take a place in Hitler’s story had an option: He could leave Germany. You don’t have that option. Anywhere you go in the world, you’ll find the same story being enacted, and if you don’t take a place in it you won’t get fed.”

How are we different from those Germans?

Why is this important? Let it sink in.

Are you beginning to see the true power of a single story?

Ishmael thought for a moment. “Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”

What does it mean to live as one pleases? Why does Ishmael not realize that this has been taken from him? If it can be taken, was it his to begin with?

What is the wild? How is it differentiated from campus or the neighborhood you grew up in? What does “wild” mean?

What does it mean to have a name? Why is it important? What does it signify? How does it change us?

When Ishmael is told that he “is not Goliath,” he feels depersonalized. What causes this? What would happen if you realized you weren’t the you that you’d been told you are?

“It was in puzzling out such small matters as these that my interior life began–quite unnoticed.”

How did your interior life begin?