In Conflict Is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman’s measured and insightful take on conflict, she notes upfront that:

As a novelist, in order to create characters that have integrity, I apply the principle that people do things for reasons, even if they are not aware of those reasons or even if they can’t accept that their actions are motivated instead of neutral and objective.

Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse, page 15

I like this for two reasons: first, the evident truth of the principle, and its attendant call for awareness and accountability; and second, the acknowledgement that the principle is rooted in storytelling practices. We would do well to more regularly admit that the way we tell stories is a core part of how we know the world. It seems, in some ways, to be a truth that needs no reinforcement—like saying that we need air to breathe, or water to live—and yet it’s also regularly reduced to mere marketing (i.e., the notion that stories are good for branding but not for, say, wisdom) or else as something to be overcome—some weakness that has yet to be rooted out. But we can’t escape living in stories anymore than we can escape living in air. Better to know those stories—to know our own motivations and reasons—than to pretend they are not there.