There are in my eyes two kinds of worlds to be studied, the world and the human world. A tree exists without humans, the concept of trees does not. They do not understand themselves as trees and other beings do not either. As humans we take things from the real world (or reality these terms will be used a bit interchangeably here) and turn them into concepts. The tree has variety of them and if we take a closer look, they turn out to be less concept and more narrative. It is there (the tree I mean), but as you can see by my struggle to find the right words “it” is very hard to conceptualize. Tree is the simplest form of conceptualization and already involves narratives, but because the tree is incorporated in so many, we can understand it in many ways. In scientific narratives we can see the tree as a result of many atoms, part of a complex eco-system or a useful resource for monetary gains. The tree can also be incorporated in religious narratives like the World Tree Yggdrasil in northern mythology. Conceptualizing reality through narratives goes beyond this. Because humans interact in complex social systems – today more than ever before – we need to conceptualize these as well, and so we created complex narratives to describe interactions of millions of people like monarchy, democracy, communism, capitalism or free markets. All these narratives only exist in the human reality. To help you conceptualize this think of it as two spheres floating in space, the one is the blue planet earth so real you want to grab it. Next to it floats a second sphere, the human reality. It has been growing for quite a while and is now as massive as earth. It looks like a thought bubble, translucent made of complex structures all connected to each other. Does that help? I don’t know, maybe.

Narratives are in my eyes the bricks of the human reality. They cannot however exist in vacuum and so to develop them we must interact with each other. The mortar of the human reality is social interaction which attaches narratives to each other to form something bigger, a narrative constellation – or complex structures. Like democracy for example narrative constellations are the result of narratives being shared through social interaction. Our experience of democracy and our engagement with it are only possible through the particular narrative constellation of democracy. Moreover, democracy is only possible if the people living it at least roughly share the same narrative constellations of it. The entirety of narrative constellations of all human societies forms in their sum the human reality, the sphere that is floating next to earth. Interesting is that just like the world with its many features shapes our narratives and thus the human world through its pure presence, the human reality also shapes the real world.

Throughout time the human reality has been growing. With more people and more narratives we form exponentially more complex constellations, reaching levels of architecture we could never realize in the actual world. We have narrative constellation with which we can conceptualize space travel without ever flying to space in reality – or so we thought. But humans tried and so eventually we managed to shape reality to our standards building rockets, telescopes, and robots to enforce something from the human reality onto the world. The sad thing is I think about whether we shaped this world in a good way, and I do not think so. We burned down forest in the name of free markets, killed each other in the name of religion or on basis of ethnicity and the good things the human reality brought us have been exactly that, mostly limited to humanity often at the cost of all others who share earth with us. So many stupid things were by the human reality. Skin colour for example does not make any difference, but humans have loaded it up with narratives and so suddenly someone who is black was first a savage, then a slave, and lastly second-class citizen arguably until today at least in some countries. We created a difference that never existed in the human reality and enforced it in the real world.

I think there lies great potential in the studies of the human reality or narrative constellations. Humans have so much influence on the real world that it is important to understand what narratives and constellations form our believes and if they make sense. I have been quite negative here, but humanity has achieved quite a few great things at least for us through building our human reality. The key is to differentiate between narratives that help and those that do not. I know that the line there is hard to draw but there are clear cases. Coming back to the example from earlier, narratives of racism have only helped white colonialists and supremacists; they are a horrible conceptualization of the real world with no basis and so narratives of racism and many more belong to the garbage can of the human reality.