October 15, 2024
My Search for a New Overstory
Philip Kotler
“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” Steve Jobs
Much of our lives is spent on stories. The most familiar story is the dad, mom and kids story. Most people grow up with that story. True, some people are born into a story without a dad, or mom, or brothers and sisters. But basically, the major story that we are born into is our family story.
The family story is shaped by larger stories. How did religion affect your life? How did your family’s income and occupations affect your life? How did friends and neighbors affect your life?
We encounter many other stories during our school years. We learn about cavemen who survived by hunting, fishing and finding edibles in nature. We learn about farmers and peasants and their overlords. We hear the larger story of people moving into towns and cities for employment and housing.
We hear how people were governed royal families and noblemen, later by republics, sometimes by democracies, and other times by tyrants or fascists.
We hear the larger stories of capitalism, socialism and communism. Every economic story has countless variations. Capitalism plays out differently in the U.S., Japan, Sweden or other countries…
All large stories attract defenders and attackers over time. The English royalty system has its loyalists and its critics. American capitalism has its attackers and defenders. Most stories over time become overly familiar and often develop a stale quality.
We yearn for new stories. The story of homosexuals and lesbians took some time to open up. Now we have marriages between two men or two women. We are seeing more racial marriages between white and black people. We should not be surprised to see a revival of polygynous marriages of one man and several women or one woman and several men.
What Is an Overstory?
A recent successful book of fiction by Richard Powers carries the title Overstory. An Overstory is the uppermost layer of foliage from multiple trees that creates a canopy or overhang. In a forest, the overstory is made up of the main tall trees that form the adult tree canopy. The plants below, such as shrubs, ferns and flowers, are called understories.
As an example, the Middle East is dominated by the overstory of Mohammed, the Koran and Mecca. Five times a day Muslims will go on their knees, face the Middle East, and pray to their god Allah. In normal conversation, Muslims will utter the name Allah several times. This overstory is so wide and deep that it directs so much of the behavior and decision making in the Middle East.
In a similar way, Christianity is a competing overstory that started in the Middle East, spread to Europe and the rest of the world with Christian ministries. It comes in so many versions ranging from fundamentalist beliefs at one extreme (“man is sinful”) to liberal Christian beliefs (“love of others”).
Judaism is an overstory but differs from the other overstories because of self-imposed limitations. Jews never sought to convert non-Jews into becoming Jews. In fact, a gentile who wants to convert to Judaism has to go through much study and accept a whole set of beliefs and practices. Judaism, like the other overstories, contains quite different beliefs and practices, ranging from super-orthodox Jews to the other extreme, cultural Jews.
All of these overstories are dominated by a belief in one God. However, the Hindus live under another overstory, a story of several gods, not much different than the earlier overstories that dominated beliefs in ancient Greece and Rome.
Emerging more recently has been a new overstory opposing the religious stories of the past. The overstory is the God-less world. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species provided a new overstory of mankind as originating from the apes and lower species through evolution and natural selection in the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. Later the German Friedrich Nietzsche wrote several books that religion and God no longer worked in the modern world and to the statement “God is dead.” Nietzsche replaced the notion of God with the concept of “Superman,” a rational and highly independent individual such as Jesus, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Goethe and Napoleon as examples. Nietzsche’s nihilism contributed to the new overstory that life has no meaning except for what individuals can individually conceive. Existentialism is the philosophy that the individual person is a free and responsible agent determining his or her own development through acts of the will.
Everyone needs to become fully conscious of the overstory that is guiding their behavior and decision making. They need to understand the reason and influences that led to their overstory. Most people will continue living their overstory to the end of their life. Other individuals might start doubting their overstory and find that another overstory holds more “truth” for them. We have examples of persons who switched from Capitalism to Communism or the reverse, or who have switched from nihilism to Catholicism or the reverse. My main observation is that one cannot live without having an overstory.
What is an overstory? Some people define it as the foliage at the top of a forest that influences everything under it. Most major religions are overstories.
