The Shape of a Story

I want to start today by talking about shapes. Don’t worry, it’s not a full geometry lesson. If you passed Kindergarten, you have everything you need to keep up.

Imagine a pyramid. It’s one of those huge ones the Pharaohs built, and it towers above you. You stand in its shadow, staring up toward the top, but the peak is so high you can’t clearly see it. Do you feel the sheer bulk of the hand-shaped stone? Do you feel your own inadequacy as you stare at the product of years of slave labor?

Great. (Well, not great, but you know what I mean).

This pyramid is a metaphor, but it is also reality. As humankind has spread across Earth, we’ve organized our society in just this way: not solely through slave labor and sweat under a burning sun, but also as a mass of people crushed into the dirt by the weight of a few powerful people sitting at the top. Most of us are on the bottom. Some of us are fortunate enough to have enough power that we are not directly touching the sand — maybe there are others beneath us, cushioning us and making it that slightest bit easier to support the weight of our betters. And we feel bad for those beneath us; we want to grant them the privilege we hold, even though we do not have much ourselves — not compared to the rich men in their space rockets who can seemingly touch the sun. But the pyramid is rigid, and there are only a few people between us and the sand. If we shake this pyramid, the tremors will not touch those at the top. Instead, it will bruise those at the bottom, and it might even dislodge us from our spot and send us tumbling back into the sand.

If we’re lucky, hard-working, and possessed of impeccable moral fortitude (or cut-throat ruthlessness…whatever works) we will climb. And when the opportunity presents itself, we invest in ladders to make the climb easier. Sure, we might have to climb on the backs of others to reach a higher level, but only those at higher levels have the power to change living and working conditions for those at the lower levels. And so, when we can, we offer a hand to friends, neighbors, and coworkers in an attempt to keep everyone as close to the top as possible. To flatten the pyramid, as it were.

This is how the geometry of society works. We live within the shape, trying our best to be moral people (or not) as we live our lives. And although the shape is confining, it is also normal. None of us notice the shape anymore. If you slip up, gravity yanks you back to the bottom to start all over again. And maybe there’s a safety net or two if you’ve got a medicaid card or live in a certain state or have a right to the nhs or whatever the specific safety net is, but gravity is still gravity. If you stumble, you will fall.

In a pyramid.

And in a pyramid, there is only so much room at the top. Each level gets progressively harder to access, but once you make it to a level, you’re reasonably secure. Until it happens. Maybe your kid falls out of a tree and breaks her leg. Maybe the car won’t start. Maybe food prices double overnight. Maybe disability strikes. Maybe an advance in technology decimates your chosen career and now you can’t get a job. Whatever it is, it will happen. Maybe it already has. And then it doesn’t matter how many good choices you’ve made or how much you’ve scrimped and saved, the inexorable slide back down the pyramid will begin. And as you fall, you wonder: maybe, maybe if you had managed to climb just a level or two higher, you would have been able to avoid plummeting back down to the bottom.

But here’s the truth: the pyramid runs on gravity. If you fall in a gravity well, you will fail. And when you do, those voices saying “but if you had just…” are merely reinforcing the shape responsible for that gravitational field.

Meanwhile, we watch a single person accumulate more wealth than entire nations. We watch billionaires announce that they’re going to fix world hunger then break that promise in favor of a vanity space cruise dressed up as exploration, because fixing the world isn’t their job. And here’s the hard part: they’re right. It’s not their job to fix the world. No single person, however wealthy, is obligated to reshape a system to be “better” (as defined by them).

But that argument reveals something important about the shape of the structure itself. We have built a world in which all of society’s power can accumulate in one pair of hands. How is it that we’ve managed to become powerless while one person has the wealth to completely reshape a system? And even more vexing: how is it that we’re okay with this state of affairs? The problem isn’t whoever happens to be at the top of the pyramid. The problem is the shape that requires someone to sit at the top.

“The problem isn’t whoever happens to be at the top of the pyramid. The problem is the shape that requires someone to sit at the top.”

The pyramid promises that anyone can rise. All you must do to achieve success is work hard, be smart, make the right choices, and have the right friends. But the pyramid still requires a base. The wider the base, the more stable the pyramid. For every person who climbs, many more must stay where they are in order to maintain the integrity of the structure. Those barriers you hit that send you sliding back down into oblivion aren’t pyramidal malfunctions. They’re the pyramid’s gravity reinforcing the system.

Now picture a doughnut.

It’s sweet, sure, and yummy, but mostly it’s a solid shape. You can trace your finger along its surface forever and never find a highest point or a lowest one. There is no peak to climb toward and no edge to fall from. You exist within the doughnut the same way you exist as a human being. You simply do. (Nobody make any I think not jokes, please…)

In a pyramid, everything is ruled by gravity. Power pulls downward. Those at the bottom carry the weight of everyone above them, and every misstep risks a fall. You spend your life climbing, balancing, trying not to slip—because in that shape, falling is always an option, and the ground is always waiting.

A doughnut plays by different rules.

Instead of a pyramid fueled by gravity, a doughnut is fueled by a circular flow, like a lazy river.

In this shape, motion isn’t vertical, it’s horizontal. People don’t climb and fall, they travel through the cycle. Help, care, knowledge, resources: they pass from person to person, moving around the loop. If someone stumbles, the motion of the whole helps carry them until they find their footing again. No one stands at the top directing the movement, and no one is mired at the bottom so that everyone else can thrive. The structure exists because everything within it is connected and in motion.

“Harm to one is harm to all” isn’t just a moral statement here—it’s mechanical. When something goes wrong, it doesn’t stay isolated. It moves. It is felt, responded to, absorbed, and answered by the people around it. In the same way, care, currency, power, knowledge, etc don’t trickle down from a distant peak. It travels the same paths, reaching wherever it is needed.

Everyone is still at the center of their own experience, they’re like the nucleus of their own atom, and they influence everyone who comes into their sphere. But no one is alone in this shape, and no one’s electron cloud is a million times larger or more powerful than someone else’s. Each person is part of the movement that supports everyone else. The system doesn’t rely on a few people holding everything together—it works because support is shared, passed along, and returned.

You don’t climb in a doughnut.

You exist within it, you thrive within it, you dedicate your energy to reinforcing the shape rather than attempting to climb it.

What would this look like incorporated into the society we currently live in? I don’t know, because I haven’t lived it. My mind is still stuck in the rigid lines of pyramidal thinking.

That’s where stories come in.

The pyramid didn’t just appear. It was built, stone by stone, over generations — and it has spent those generations extracting resources from anything that threatened its shape, packing those resources into more building blocks, and moving on to the next concentration of extractable resources.

Circular societies have existed. They still exist, in pockets, in traditions, in the kind of community that springs up after a disaster when everyone suddenly stops asking who deserves help and just starts helping. But historically, when the pyramid encountered those structures, it didn’t study them or learn from them. It stole their gold, poisoned their people, and corralled them with poverty while it waited for them to die.

Trying to dismantle such an entrenched system is a bit like being a spit-full of dwarves bundled up by a troll and set over a troll-sized campfire. You’ve got your axes, and your axes are good, and you are absolutely not going down without a fight. But if axes were going to work, they’d have worked by now. You’re not going to get anywhere by yelling curses at the trolls while they debate how to eat you, you need a clever burglar who can rally the community.

So what do you do when the direct assault isn’t enough?

You weave a story.

Fiction is powerful. The stories we read teach us what to expect from the world. They let us imagine interactions, let us learn from the behavior of others, let us model situations that have never happened to us and take the lessons away from them.

When I was twelve, I read The Ranger’s Apprentice by John Flanagan. The mentor character, Halt, inspired me with his mystery and his tough love, and I wanted to be just like him. So one day, while I was talking with my dad, I did my best to emulate the character I so admired. My dad said something I thought idiotic, and I did exactly what Halt would have done in that situation. I raised my eyes heavenward.

Ooops.

For some context: I’m not great at social cues. Sometimes it takes someone hitting me on the head with a figurative two-by-four for me to understand things. And while my dad would never take that approach, I certainly learned to never roll my eyes at anyone again (and that “raising eyes heavenward” has a name…and that “rolling” your eyes doesn’t necessarily require an arc…)

Just like twelve-year-old me copied some of the patterns I found in the stories I loved, everyone incorporates bits of their favorite stories into their view of reality. Stories are a fertile breeding ground for metaphor, a shared point of reference, and a contributor to society’s moral compass. In short, stories shape culture.

“Stories are a fertile breeding ground for metaphor, a shared point of reference, and a contributor to society’s moral compass. In short, stories shape culture.”

And in most cases, what we’ve been reading has been reinforcing the pyramid.

Now, I know this reads like a conspiracy theory where everyone has been meeting in big 5 boardrooms to categorically decide that all stories must encode hierarchical thinking. And if you’re excited by that possibility, then I can’t help you. It didn’t happen that way. Honestly, getting that many influential people to sit down in the same room and hammer out a plan to rule the world truly is fiction stuff. It’s easy to believe, but it’s not helpful.

No one conspired in a boardroom. But the influence is as complete as if they had. Pyramidal thinking has been so thoroughly embedded in our narrative structures that it has become invisible. It’s the structure of manifest destiny, colonialism, and extraction. Worse, stories that don’t rely on a base of pyramidal thinking feel wrong or incomplete when we read them—which means they don’t get published, they don’t get read, they don’t get raved about by superfans, their authors don’t get invited to speaking events, and their ideas don’t spread at the same rate as authors who purvey the ideas people are primed to expect.

It’s an echo chamber served with a side salad of confirmation bias. Psychology and sociology, not conspiracy.

And as a result, even the mainstream sci-fi stories that try to explore utopia tend to do more to illustrate the impossibility of utopia than the possibility of one that works. As we watch failed utopias compound, we receive the message that toroidal societies will never function as smoothly as the pyramidal societies we’ve been born into.

And they won’t — so long as we hold onto the belief that someone has to be on top and someone has to be on the bottom. As long as we hold on to the “up” and “down” that has oriented our school’s figurative space combat, we will never evolve new strategies.

You cannot build what you cannot imagine. But here’s the thing about stories: what built those thought patterns is also what can break them down. The same mechanism that trained generations of readers to accept the pyramid as natural can be run in reverse. Stories are the references we can use to reframe reality. They can let a reader spend a few hours inside a world that doesn’t require someone at the bottom, and walk away with a slightly different idea of what’s possible.

Stories tell us that “the enemy gate is down”.

It’s easy to throw an Ender’s Game quote at you, but it’s harder to explore nuanced morality and imagine a new point of reference. I’m going to give it a try, though, and I’m looking for others who are trying to do the same thing.

Let’s tell stories about good that comes from inside rather than a binary good and evil that each rest in an external being. Let’s consider how to flatten hierarchy. Let’s debunk suffering as virtuous. Let’s recognize our power. Let’s refuse to be victims. Let’s stop waiting to be saved. Let’s end the eternal competition, the interminable climb and fall, and instead build a world where everyone can thrive.

Over the coming essays, I’m going to try to look at the specific tropes that train us for pyramid-thinking — the Chosen One, the Evil Overlord, the drama triangle of victim, aggressor, and savior. Together, we’ll look at binary morality and what we lose when fiction refuses to hold nuance. We’ll also look at what I’ve started calling circular stories — narratives that imagine power differently, that don’t require a villain to function, that treat community as the point rather than the reward, and that might be able to generate the toroidal current we need to sustain our community as it grows.

I’m not at the top of a movement pyramid. I’m a person with ideas who is looking for a doughnut of other people with ideas — readers, writers, thinkers, fantasy nerds who have noticed that something is off about the worlds we keep building in fiction, and who wonder what it would mean to build differently.

I like reading stories. So that’s where I’ll start.

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