Reaching Toward The Standard

The interrogator arrives in different forms, but the question is the same. What’s your angle? What’s this whole Story Grid thing really about?

Sometimes it wears the mask of sincere curiosity from a new student who has just discovered that learning to tell stories is harder than they imagined. Sometimes it wears the sneer of a skeptic who has been told that storytelling is subjective and therefore unteachable. Sometimes it comes from inside my own head at three in the morning when the work feels impossible and the world seems indifferent.

But it is always the same challenging question.

And there is a very deep answer—one I’ve circled around for decades but have only recently found the courage to articulate with humility. I needed to know my song well before I started singing. I do now.

The answer is this: I am searching for the standard. Not a standard. The standard.

The standard of what, you ask?

The standard by which we can separate what is true from what is bullshit.

I use that word—bullshit—deliberately and technically. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote an entire treatise on it. Bullshit is not lying. Lying requires knowing the truth and deliberately saying the opposite. Bullshit is worse. Bullshit is indifference to whether something is true or false. The bullshitter doesn’t care. They seek to convince and manipulate you toward their ends.

For time immemorial, our species has been searching for a reliable process to sort truth from bullshit. We have built religions, philosophies, sciences, and legal systems in pursuit of this sorting. Yet here we are, swimming in a tsunami of noise, unable to distinguish signal from static, unsure whom to trust, unsure even how to trust ourselves.

What ails our global civilization is not a shortage of information. It is a surfeit of bullshit. And storytelling—the oldest technology we have for making sense of experience—has been conscripted into the bullshit machine. Edward Bernays—Sigmund Freud’s American nephew—among many others architected the transformation of this sacred capacity into a profane conditioning mechanism. Stories are now regarded as manipulative tools, propaganda delivery systems, entertainment designed to numb or inflame. Few believe storytelling can convey truth anymore. Narratives must be controlled and used for effects, means to ends.

I am here to tell you that they are wrong.

There is a standard. It has existed since existence began. And if you are willing to do the work, you can meet it. Even help reset it.

Before I tell you what the standard is, I need to tell you what truth is. And what bullshit is. Because if you don’t understand these two pathways, you will never understand why the standard matters.

Truth is the distinctive pathway afforded by something the ancient Greeks called the Logos. You don’t need to know Greek philosophy to understand this. The Logos simply means the rational principle underlying all of reality—the source of meaning, coherence, and connection. When things are going well for you, when you feel aligned with something larger than yourself, when you experience genuine communion with another person or a work of art, you are following the Logos.

Here is the critical point: The Logos is not a final answer. It is not a static definition you can write down and be done with. It is a process. A pathway. A dynamic unfolding. If you are searching for an absolute, static answer to any important question, you will find yourself very confused. There is no propositional meaning to life. There is participatory meaning through life.

Truth, then, is an experience. It is unique to each individual who encounters it. It cannot be reduced to a formula or a slogan. We know the truth when we experience it, and we cannot reduce that experience to a statement without making it trivial and banal.

Is experiencing The Matrix or To Kill a Mockingbird the same as saying, “The Matrix is about actively participating in the transformation of reality” or “To Kill a Mockingbird is about overcoming prejudice”? Those statements are partially true. But they are nowhere near the actual experience of those stories. They are shadows on the wall of Plato’s Myth of the Cave.

Bullshit, by contrast, is the distinctive pathway of indifference to truth. Bullshit is uttered without regard for the ineffable or the divine. It is a means to an end only. It doesn’t care whether what it says is true or false. It cares only about the effect it produces. Bullshit is static in its disregard. It can be boiled down to a word, a slogan, a talking point. It is the path to producing banal, unremarkable noise that replaces genuine experience and inhibits connection to reality.

The means to the end is the end of meaning. The beginning of meaning is the ends to the absolute mean.

The Greeks didn’t have a technical term that maps cleanly onto our modern use of “bullshit” as Frankfurt defines it. If they had, it would have named the kind of pseudologos—false or indifferent speech—that corrodes meaning and coherence.

So here is the bottom line:

• Truth opens up the possibility for genuine meaning through the Logos—the prescriptive, sacred, ascending pathway to enlightened community.

• Bullshit traps and distorts by manipulating perception, making individuals indifferent to what is real—the cautionary, profane, descending pathway to despairing isolation.

This is why storytelling matters. Stories are the sacred technology by which human beings transmit truth or propagate bullshit.

And right now, bullshit is winning.

To understand how we got here, we need to go back. Way back. Before there were written words. Before there were philosophers. Before there were books to sell or bestseller lists to game.

There was only the oral tradition. No formal alphabet.

Picture a fire. A woman stands before her community and tells a story by singing a song while performing a dance. The best stories get repeated. Somebody else hears and sees her story, travels to another fire, tells their version. All of these stories compete with one another like organisms in an evolutionary process. The stories that resonate most deeply with human experience—the truest ones—rise to the top and survive across generations.

What are these stories?

Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. The Mahabharata. The Epic of Gilgamesh. The Kabbalah. The Bible. Mythic stories from every culture on earth. They are individual to their civilizations, but they all share something fundamental. They all participate in what I call the same invariant song.

The songs remain the same. The specific performances differ. More truth rises with more people singing these songs in their own unique way.

Then came the philosophers.

In Western tradition, the first were called the natural philosophers—the so-called pre-Socratics. Thales said, “All is the moist,” (usually rendered as water), “The lodestone has psyche,” and, “All things are full of gods.” Anaximander proposed the apeiron—the boundless—as the fundamental principle, which we can loosely think of as primordial chaos. Democritus (building on Leucippus) said, “All is atomic”—there is an essential substance and order. And Heraclitus said, “All is the river”: You never step in the same river twice—everything is in flux, an early grasp of what we’d now call complexity.

These thinkers certainly criticized one another’s views, but they did so by issuing competing monological pronouncements—sequential declarations across generations—rather than by adopting dialogue itself as their core method.

Chaos. Order. Complexity. This debate cycled around for centuries. It was like the old Lite beer commercial: “Tastes great!” “Less filling!” “Tastes great!” “Less filling!” Heraclitus was the guy who said, “Hey, it tastes great and is less filling.”

This is the problem we face today. Believe it or not, we are still fighting over tastes great versus less filling and grappling with it tastes great and is less filling.

But here is the key point you must understand. While these ancient songs were sung, they were monological. One person would sing. The others would listen. Truth was transmitted from the singular voice to the collective ear.

Then came Socrates. And everything changed.

Socrates looked at the monological tradition and said: I can sing pretty well, but I’m always better when I sing with someone else.

He invented dialogue. Dialogos. The pursuit of the Logos through shared intersubjective communion. Socrates formalized the prescriptive exploratory process to find a standard way to get to more truth. His insight was revolutionary: Truth is not a solo act. Truth is a chorus.

He would go to the marketplace and engage strangers in conversation. “What do you think courage is?” he would ask. Someone would offer a definition. Socrates would probe it, question it, reveal its contradictions. Not to humiliate or win an argument and prove he was better than his interlocutor—to learn. To expand his understanding and theirs together. To exchange information and have faith that the exchange would bring forth an entirely new understanding that was neither his nor his companion’s, but its own thing.

People did not like this.

They arrested him. They gave him a choice: Stop asking questions or die.

He chose death. He took the hemlock and died for the principle that truth cannot be found alone, that genuine inquiry requires the vulnerability of dialogue, that the standard of truth emerges only through the friction of perspectives.

Socrates had a student who loved him. His name was Plato. And Plato was devastated that the democracy had murdered the smartest man in the world—a designation verified by the Oracle of Delphi herself.

Plato couldn’t understand why the Oracle had said Socrates was the wisest. It tormented him until he finally figured it out. Socrates was the wisest because he knew he didn’t know. He recognized his ignorance and kept trying to figure things out. That’s it. And the only way to figure things out is with another person.

So Plato set out to fix the republic that had killed his mentor. He wrote his philosophy in dialogue form—almost always with Socrates as the central voice—putting arguments in his teacher’s mouth and singing Socrates’ song after the singer was gone. (Especially in the middle and later dialogues, Socrates often serves as a vehicle for distinctly Platonic positions.)

If you read one thing by Plato, read the Myth of the Cave in Republic VII. It is about the pursuit of the Logos.

Plato’s The Republic, also proposed something troubling. He said we must watch over the makers of tales. We must approve only the good ones and reject the bad. Poets and storytellers who say that wicked men are happy, or that justice is someone else’s gain and one’s own loss, must be forbidden.

Plato was wisely concerned with the propagation of bullshit. Bullshit had killed his mentor. He wanted to cut the bullshit by having wise guardians police the stories.

But here is the problem that haunted Plato and haunts us still:

By what authority can we watch over the storytelling? Who decides what is true and worthy of emulation versus what is bullshit and worthy of condemnation?

Plato proposed that highly trained philosopher-kings could do it. He started an academy to do just that. But who watches these philosopher-king watchers? No one is perfect. The wisest man in Athens was the one with the greatest humility.

This is the essence of our modern Panopticon problem. Imagine standing in the center of a circle, surrounded by people watching you to make sure you are behaving properly. Then another circle watching those people. Then another. The surveillance becomes infinite, isolating, terrifying. Michel Foucault said this is what culture is. He was wrong about that being all culture is, but he was right that the concept is very active today.

Plato identified the problem—following the standards of truth in storytelling—but could not solve it. He could not nail down the standard into a static perfect form.

It would take his greatest student to break the Platonic framing and offer an alternative approach.

Aristotle began attending Plato’s Academy when he was fourteen years old. He stayed for twenty years. He was the best student they had ever seen.

Then Plato died, and Aristotle lost hope. Despite being the best student, he was passed over to lead the Academy and effectively exiled from the kingdom.

Sound familiar? Plato lost hope when Socrates died. Now Aristotle loses hope when Plato dies. The pattern repeats.

Aristotle left Athens. He traveled. He tried to figure his shit out. He studied biology and medicine—things he loved. He made a living as a tutor, eventually mentoring a young man named Alexander who would go on to conquer the known world.

After twelve years away, Aristotle returned to Athens and founded his own school. He called it the Lyceum—which literally means “to shine light.”

Aristotle is said to have remarked of his teacher: “Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is the truth”—a traditional attribution that captures the spirit of his break from Platonic idealism.

For all of his brilliance, Plato isn’t the truth. The truth is the truth, and it cannot be distilled into a slogan or algorithm.

Here is what made Aristotle different. He was fascinated with transformation. How things change. How hope becomes despair and despair becomes hope. He’d had plenty of both himself. Plato wanted the perfect abstract idea, the eternal form. Aristotle wanted to understand the process by which one form, a caterpillar, transforms into another, a butterfly.

This led him to articulate a new way of thinking about reality—not primarily as a static idea to be contemplated and internally perfected but as a process to be externally explored. A pathway toward Logos.

Aristotle didn’t just talk about it. He did it. He made following the logos practical. And he founded the Lyceum to teach this process to others.

His methodology—especially in his biological and physical treatises—prefigures and strongly influences what we now call science. He is the first systematically empirical thinker in the Western philosophical canon.

When you look closely at how he worked, you can see five broad moves. And if you’ve been around Story Grid for any length of time, you’ll recognize them as my Five Commandments of Storytelling. My translation of Aristotle’s innovative and active pathway toward the logos.

First, Observation. The scientist must observe the evidence of phenomena. Truth is not found in abstraction but in the world. You’re not going to find it only in your head. It’s all around you. Observe.

Cognitively, this is nominal measurement: simply registering that something is there. A phenomenon overwhelms your senses and stands out as salient—interesting, disturbing, impossible to ignore. This is the home of salience perception.

In Story Grid terms, that is the Inciting Incident. Something happens that the protagonist cannot unsee. An unexpected event enters an otherwise steady state and demands attention.

Second, Classification. The scientist must classify phenomena into categories of similarity and difference. “That’s kind of like that. That’s different. Interesting.”

This is ordinal measurement: the first cut that orders the phenomenon. You split what you’ve observed into its two forceful parts:

• The attraction of the phenomenon—the force of coherence, protagonism.

• The repulsion of the phenomenon—the force of incoherence, antagonism.

This is the home of evaluation. You see the opposing poles, one pole demanding and the other pole refusing.

In Story Grid terms, this is the Turning Point. The situation flips as attraction and repulsion reveal themselves. What looked simple becomes charged. The scene can no longer continue on its initial trajectory. Something gives.

Third, Cause. The scientist must propose the process by which a phenomenon transforms from one classification to another. The caterpillar becomes a butterfly. How does that work?

This is interval measurement: thinking in ordered steps between states. Here, the simple binary of antagonism and protagonism explodes into levels of analysis:

• The physical spatial level of A and P

• The social relational level of A and P

• The ideological temporal level of A and P

You start asking: What’s happening in the body and environment? What’s happening between people? What’s happening in the deep “why” layer of belief and value?

This is the home of the conceptual—and it is where you hit the crisis of combinatorial explosion. Two classes become six directions. There are now far more possible causal explanations and story moves than you can pursue simultaneously.

In Story Grid terms, this maps to the Crisis question at a higher level. Faced with too many plausible pathways, what kind of meaning are you really investigating—physical, social, ideological, or some synoptic mix?

Fourth, Reasoning. The scientist reasons the steps of the process by observing evidence of before and after and then inferring what had to happen in between. You choose which cause to pursue, which line of inquiry to follow.

This is ratio measurement: weighing alternatives, comparing magnitudes, deciding which level and which vector to emphasize. The combinatorial explosion forces a focusing move.

In Story Grid terms, this is the Climax choice. You commit to a particular throughline. And for a writer, that means you effectively choose a specific reader—a particular view from which this causal line will matter most. Out of all the potential ways you could tell this, you decide, “I’m going to tell this story, for this kind of person, along this causal arc.”

Fifth, Evidence. The scientist must use multiple sources of data to justify their observations, classifications, causes, and reasons. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Abstract ideas that cannot be justified by evidence are not useful models for transformational processes. They are magical invocations.

This is cardinal measurement: not just ranking or comparing but counting, testing, checking. It’s where you halt the theorizing long enough to perform an experiment, see what actually happens, and then refine your model.

In Story Grid terms, this is the Resolution and its aftermath. You put the scene on the page. You let it play. Then you analyze the performance to see whether it actually moves the reader toward catharsis or leaves them cold. You edit the evidence so it better conforms to the purpose of the messaging to the receiver.

Everyone who says, “You’ve got to be talented to be a writer,” short-circuits this entire process. They are invoking magic instead of observation, classification, cause, reasoning, and evidence. They’re saying you either got it or you don’t. They don’t know how it works, but they can do it and you can’t.

That is what I call bullshit.

So when I talk about the Five Commandments of Storytelling—Inciting Incident, Turning Point, Crisis, Climax, Resolution—I’m not offering you a cute heuristic. I’m giving you a way to practice Aristotle’s method inside narrative form.

Here is the big mind shift: We need to look at storytelling scientifically. And we need to look at science narratively.

Aristotle agreed with Plato that bullshit stories were dangerous. They either inflamed people’s passions—driving them to classify their fellow citizens as unworthy of consideration at best and unworthy of life at worst—or they dulled sensibility, numbing the populace into complacency. Bullshit stories make audiences either monstrously aggressive or zombie-like passive.

But instead of focusing on the dangers of bad stories, Aristotle did something Plato hadn’t. He studied what makes good stories work.

He examined the epic poems passed down from the oral traditions—the ones that inspired perseverance and bound audiences together through shared meaningful experience. He looked at them word by word, line by line, stanza by stanza. And then he distilled the quintessence of these works into a storytelling methodology.

He wrote it down in a book called The Poetics.

What we have of Poetics is itself fragmentary and technical, but even in this compressed form, we can see that Aristotle is analyzing existing tragedies and extracting recurring patterns, not spinning rules out of thin air.

One of his core insights is that human beings are mimetic creatures. We learn by mimesis—by imitation, copying, modeling. Children copy their parents, students copy their teachers, apprentices copy their mentors. We take in other people’s songs and try to sing along.

Aristotle thought this was not a bug but a feature. Our love of imitation is part of what makes us human. We delight in recognizing patterns, seeing “that’s like that,” watching a representation of something we know and feeling the click of recognition. That delight is at the root of why we seek out stories at all.

The problem isn’t mimesis itself. The problem is what and how we imitate.

One kind of imitation is inauthentic copying. This is when we take another person’s song and reproduce it mechanically without undergoing the transformation that produced it. We mimic the surfaces—the style, the message, the slogans—without participating in the underlying struggle. We do it to get a desired effect: applause, sales, followers, power.

That is falsity dressed up as truth. It is bullshit masquerading as inspiration.

From the outside, it can look like catharsis. The crowd roars. The passions are inflamed. People feel charged, righteous, vindicated. But nothing has been purged. No perspective has deepened. No compassion has widened. The audience leaves more possessed by its ideology, more certain of its own purity and the other side’s depravity.

That is not catharsis. That is possession.

Then there is another kind of imitation—authentic mimesis.

In authentic mimesis, you let another person’s song penetrate you. You allow yourself to be changed by it. You study how it works, you map it onto your own experience, and then you respond with a one-of-a-kind expansion of that song. You aren’t trying to pass off someone else’s truth as your own. You are trying to meet and, if possible, exceed what has come before—not by outshouting it but by deepening it.

You are not parroting Homer or Sophocles or Toni Morrison or Cormac McCarthy. You are entering into conversation with them. You are doing, in your own life and work, what Aristotle did with the tragic poets: observing, classifying, seeking causes, reasoning through the patterns, and testing your scenes against the evidence of real human response.

That is mimesis in the service of truth.

We don’t live in Aristotle’s Athens anymore. In the last century, a number of very sharp thinkers have looked at mimesis and drawn a darker conclusion. Jean Baudrillard, for example, built an entire career on the idea that we’ve moved from representations of reality to simulations that no longer refer to anything real at all—what he called simulacra. Copy replaces original, image replaces thing, and we end up in what he called “the desert of the real,” an endless hall of mirrors where every sign points only to more signs.

He described three orders of simulacra:

• In the first order, images are clear copies of a real underlying thing—representations of a physical reality.

• In the second order, images start to mask and distort that reality, mediating our social world so heavily that we relate more to the representations than to one another.

• In the third order, images refer only to other images. We float in a purely conceptual realm of codes and brands and narratives with no stable anchor.

If you translate that into Story Grid language, Baudrillard is describing a pathology across the very three levels of reality we work with:

• At the physical spatial level, stories become detached from embodied salience—no real bodies, no real consequences, just spectacle.

• At the social relational level, stories become scripts for status and tribal belonging—performances of identity rather than genuine encounters.

• At the ideological temporal level, stories collapse into free-floating conceptual propaganda—pure messaging, untethered from any lived process.

There is something right in Baudrillard’s critique. Inauthentic copying does degrade truth. Bullshit mimesis—ideological propaganda dressed up in familiar forms—really does produce zombie-like audiences high on dopamine and low on discernment. The modern media ecosystem proves that every day.

But Aristotle would say that’s only half the story. If you only see mimesis as a downward spiral into copies-of-copies, you miss its other function—ascent. You miss that we can also imitate upward—toward better integration, toward deeper understanding, toward more coherent expression of what is actually the case.

Think about how we’ve come to know anything. Children don’t learn to speak by inventing their own private language. They imitate. Then they start saying things no one has ever said before. Students don’t become craftsmen by refusing to copy. They copy until they can extend what they’ve inherited from the masterworks they’ve aspired to imitate.

Under the Aristotelian lens, mimesis is not automatically a fall from grace. Far from it. It is the starting point for participation in a tradition, a way of climbing from raw physical salience, through richer social imagination, toward more coherent ideological conception.

Whether it degrades or integrates depends on whether it is in service of bullshit or in service of truth.

So when we talk about aspirational masterworks in Story Grid, we’re not inviting you to become a Baudrillardian producer of empty simulacra. We’re inviting you into Aristotle’s older project: to imitate in order to understand, to understand in order to transform, and to transform in order to bring yourself and your reader closer to catharsis.

The Poetics is the seminal work that drives Story Grid. It gives us innumerable insights into coherent, clear, consistent, concise, and convergent ways of transmitting transformative truth from an author to an audience. Every story expert uses Aristotle’s core concepts to justify their propositions, whether they know it or not. But most of them skip Aristotle’s fifth commandment—evidence. They rely only upon his ideas without understanding how he found those ideas or how to find new ones.

For our purposes, Aristotle’s conclusion was this: There are two kinds of stories.

• Bullshit stories that inflame passion or dull the audience into complacency—often built on inauthentic copying, ideological possession, or clever manipulation of inherited forms.

• True stories that connect the audience to the author and the world they share in such a way that both are purged of emotional turmoil. In other words, the true story brings both author and audience to catharsis. They experience sacred, ineffable truth together.

Catharsis is not just feeling intensely. It is not leaving the theater more certain that your tribe is righteous and the other tribe is evil. It is release—a letting go of the bullshit stories you have been telling yourself about yourself and others.

True catharsis widens your circle of concern. You leave thinking, The players on the stage are just like me. I could make those mistakes. I could fall into that trap. You feel pity for the protagonist and fear for yourself, and then—in Aristotle’s language—you are purged. You see your fellow human beings as akin to you, not as abstractions or enemies. You find commonality and meaning.

That is the difference between bullshit inflaming of the passions and genuine catharsis. One tightens possession. The other loosens it.

That word—catharsis—is Aristotle’s answer to Plato’s problem. It is the standard to pursue on the pathway toward, not away from, logos.

Writing stories that truly reach this standard is extraordinarily difficult. It is not a matter of learning a few tricks, mastering a structure template, or sprinkling in the right obligatory scenes. To write a cathartic story, the writer must undergo a catharsis of their own while they write. They must submit themselves to the same de-bullshitting process they are trying to afford the reader.

This is why the work hurts.

Think of Eugene O’Neill. By the time he wrote Long Day’s Journey into Night, he had already won the Nobel Prize. He was, by every external measure, a successful playwright. Yet when he finally sat down to write the truth of how he grew up—the alcoholic father, the morphine-addicted mother, the brother’s self-destruction—his wife reported hearing him sobbing desperately in his study as he worked.

He was not crafting a clever simulation of family drama. He was undergoing catharsis in real time, mapping his own scars onto the page.

That’s why the play hits like it does. That’s why it feels more real than most realistic plays.

Catharsis on the page requires catharsis in the writer.

And because that process is so painful, most of us, most of the time, look for an easier way.

That temptation gives us our three pretenders, the faux modern-day philosopher kings we’ve mistaken for holders of the standard.

Why has storytelling been overrun by bullshit? Why do so few stories feel more real than real?

Because catharsis is hard to recognize, impossible to fake, and terrifying to pursue. So humanity invented substitutes—proxies for truth that are easier to measure and easier to fake than real catharsis.

Plato’s unsolved problem—who watches the watchers?—has, over time, given rise to three broad kinds of solutions to the true standard problem that keep resurfacing in different guises.

Each of these pretenders offers the writer a way to avoid doing what O’Neill did in that room: facing their own bullshit on the way to the page.

The first solution is tyrannical mandate. We train philosopher-kings to be the arbiters of truth. Editorial gatekeepers confer validity and recognize the best stories.

In the ancient world, these were priests and rulers. In the modern world, they became publishers.

If a powerful enough person or institution puts their colophon on your book—so the logic goes—it must be true enough. It must be worthy enough. You must have met the standard, because people with authority say you did.

This is deeply tempting to writers and readers alike. It offers you a way to outsource your bullshit detection. You don’t have to ask, “Did this story actually change me?” You can just ask, “Who published it?”

The second solution is authoritative pedagogy. Instead of relying on individual gatekeepers, we create institutions with abstract criteria. We write down what a good story must contain, and we measure all stories against that checklist.

In the modern world, these became MFA programs, critical reviews, literary awards. If you get the right degree, master the right jargon, please the right workshop, or win the right prize it must—again—mean you’ve met the standard.

This pretender is tempting because it offers a sense of control. If storytelling is subjective, the thought of an objective rubric is intoxicating. Follow these steps, hit these beats, and you will be safe.

Safe from what? From the possibility that you will pour your heart and guts into a story and still fail to move anyone, including yourself.

The third solution is popularity. The marketplace decides. The more people who buy and talk about a story, the truer it must be. The numbers prove the truth. In the modern world, this became the bestseller list.

If the sales graph goes up and to the right, if the reviews are numerous and enthusiastic, surely you’ve met the standard. Surely that many people can’t be wrong.

This pretender is tempting because it offers a quick, numeric answer to the most painful artistic question: Did I waste my life on this? If you sold a million copies, the answer must be no. Right?

When I entered book publishing, these were the three solutions to the story problem. They had evolved from ancient gatekeeping into modern institutions:

• Major publishers—the Big Five—served as the tyrannical mandate. If you weren’t published by Random House, what were you really?

• Critical institutions—Iowa Writers Workshop, The New York Times Book Review, an MFA from Columbia—served as authoritative pedagogy.

• Bestseller lists served as popularity metrics. “I sold three million copies, so my story must be true.”

I have experienced all three forms of these traditional stand-ins for truth. I’ve been published by Random House. I’ve had bestsellers. I attended an Ivy League school. I have deep connections to celebrities, journalists, agents, producers, executives.

And I am here to tell you the answer is no. No, these are not the standards of truth.

All three can be gamed. All three have been gamed. My colleague Tim Grahl spent years documenting exactly how to manipulate the bestseller lists. He played the game and won. And he’ll tell you straight: It’s a fugazi. It’s a joke.

Worse, all three pretenders can reward precisely the kind of work that Baudrillard warned us about—ever more sophisticated simulacra. Books that feel like books, courses that feel like real training, careers that feel like success—all built on inauthentic mimesis, ideological possession, and market manipulation.

Which begs the question: If colophons, certificates, and numbers can all be corrupted by bullshit, are they legitimate measures of truth?

They are not. They are, at best, necessary but not sufficient. You cannot build a career without touching them. But you cannot build a meaningful body of work by confusing them with the standard.

The only incorruptible validator is the one Aristotle named and O’Neill bled for—catharsis.

Now let’s jump forward again. Plato is gone. Aristotle is gone. The Lyceum is dust. We get democracy 2.0—parliaments, newspapers, telegraphs, railroads. Then we get democracy 3.0—mass literacy, radio, cinema. Then democracy 4.0—broadcast television, Madison Avenue, polling.

And lurking inside all of those upgrades is a very old problem wearing a new suit.

What do you do with a population that can read, listen, watch, and vote but cannot possibly check everything for themselves?

You could, like Aristotle, teach them through cathartic stories to see the world more clearly, to purge their confusion, to come into communion with one another and with the truth. That was the Lyceum project.

Or you could do something else. You could treat the public not as partners in dialogos but as a mass to be managed. You could see their uncertainty, their anxiety, their desire to belong, and you could build machines to steer all of that in directions that are convenient for you.

That’s where Edward Bernays walks onstage.

Bernays is often called “the father of public relations.” He was Freud’s nephew by marriage, and he read Freud not as a mystic or a tragic diagnostician of the human soul but as a technician’s manual. If people are driven by unconscious wishes, repressions, fears, and status anxieties, you can either help them bring those into the light—or you can use them.

Bernays chose to use them.

He learned his craft during World War I on the US Committee on Public Information, which was essentially a state propaganda machine designed to sell the war to a skeptical American public. Posters, films, pamphlets, ghost-written news stories—all aimed at shaping sentiment, not by arguing carefully from evidence but by associating images, slogans, and emotions.

After the armistice, Bernays had a simple, very modern thought: Why should this machinery stop in peacetime? Why not use it to sell bacon, cigarettes, presidents, and entire ways of life?

That is exactly what he did. He rebranded “propaganda” as “public relations” to make it more palatable, but he did not change the underlying logic. He said so openly. In one of his books, he describes public relations as the “engineering of consent”—engineering, not requesting, not earning. Consent becomes a product line. You build campaigns that manufacture it in the factory of mass media and then deliver it to clients: corporations, governments, trade groups, causes.

You don’t wait for the public to reason their way to a conclusion through dialogos. You shepherd their impressions and impulses until they step where you wanted them to step all along.

His classic campaigns make the pattern obvious:

• He helps an American tobacco company turn cigarettes into “Torches of Freedom” by staging a group of debutantes smoking in an Easter parade and making sure the cameras are there.

• He consults for meatpackers to promote bacon and eggs as the “hearty American breakfast,” commissioning doctors to endorse it and then seeding those endorsements as news.

• He organizes soap-carving contests for children to boost a brand’s sales and goodwill.

In each case, the move is the same. Take a product. Wire it into some deeper identity story—freedom, health, patriotism, childhood innocence. Then flood the channels until the association feels natural.

Notice what is missing. There is no serious attempt to bring author and audience into mutual catharsis. There is no shared exploration of reality. There is no willingness to be changed by the interaction. The goal is not communion; the goal is compliance.

This is bullshit in the technical sense we’ve been using. It is indifferent to the truth. It doesn’t care whether cigarettes liberate anyone or whether that breakfast is actually good for you. It only cares whether the campaign moves units, shifts polls, wins elections, calms a scandal, or opens a new market.

Means to an end. Full stop.

Now, why am I spending time on this advertising guy when we’re supposed to be talking about stories and the standard of truth?

Because Bernays industrializes Plato’s nightmare. Plato worried that bad stories would inflame the passions of the crowd and make them easy to rule. Bernays systematizes that worry into a business model. He takes Freud’s discovery that we are not transparent to ourselves, that there is a deep unconscious sea beneath our waking justifications, and instead of asking, “How can we help people confront that honestly?” he asks, “How can we route that?”

He routes it into cigarettes, breakfasts, stock offerings, foreign policy.

Over the twentieth century, that Bernays logic migrates everywhere. It leaves the narrow world of product marketing and politics and seeps into the culture industries. It seeped into the newsrooms. It seeped into universities. And, crucially for our purposes, it seeped into publishing.

The old gatekeepers were never saints, but at least in theory their mission was to identify and disseminate works that mattered—that brought readers into contact with something true. As the Bernays operating system took hold, the mission quietly shifted. The question in the meeting moved from “Is this book true?” to “Can we position this? Who’s the target? What levers of fear, status, outrage, or tribal allegiance does it pull?”

Once you accept the engineering-of-consent model as normal, long-form narrative becomes just another tool in the kit. A book is a campaign vehicle. A “nonfiction” label becomes a kind of camouflage. The author’s face and backstory are branding assets. Blurbs are social proof. Bestseller lists are not emergent measures of catharsis; they are marketing instruments and political instruments.

And when the numbers become the standard—when the only thing that matters is whether the campaign “worked”—then the whole system structurally rewards bullshit. It rewards whatever inflames the passions, whatever keeps the attention feed scrolling, whatever sells this quarter.

From that point of view, the onslaught of bullshit in contemporary publishing is not a bug. It is the expected outcome of fusing Bernays’ propaganda logic with a digital distribution infrastructure that can vomit four million titles a year onto the market and algorithmically sort them by click-through rate.

If your standard is the Logos—truth experienced through catharsis, communion, and coherence—this is catastrophic.

If your standard is the engineering of consent, it is a triumph. The machine is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

And this is where we have to be absolutely clear. You cannot fix this merely by scolding the machine. You cannot solve a Bernays-designed system with more Bernaysian tactics, with a slightly more “ethical” propaganda. That is just bullshit trying to eat its own tail.

The only way out is to re-establish a different standard, a different mission, one that refuses to treat the audience as clay to be molded and insists on treating them as partners in dialogos—as beings capable of, and hungry for, catharsis.

That is the fork in the road for publishing. Does it double down on the engineering of consent—on outrage cycles, ideological purity tests, personality cults, branded content pipelines? Or does it remember that its real job is older than Bernays, older than Plato, older than writing itself: to carry forward those rare works that connect us to one another and to the ineffable truth we cannot compress into a slogan or a quarterly report?

If Plato feared that bad stories would inflame the mob, and Aristotle showed us how good stories could purge and clarify, Edward Bernays quietly chose Plato’s nightmare and built an industry on it. He took Freud’s map of the unconscious and used it not to heal but to steer—away from catharsis and toward consumption.

Contemporary publishing, whether it admits it or not, largely runs on that operating system.

We’ve now arrived at a grim irony. For all his despair, Baudrillard was not entirely wrong. If you build your culture’s storytelling infrastructure on the three pretenders—tyrannical mandate, authoritative pedagogy, and popularity—then when the technology shifts, you get his “desert of the real” almost by default.

Call it the revenge of Baudrillard.

For centuries, it was expensive to turn a printing press. You needed capital, machinery, labor, distribution. The sheer cost of making and moving physical books limited how much bullshit could get into circulation. Gatekeepers were flawed, corruptible, and often wrong, but they at least slowed the spread. There was friction in the system.

Then the twenty-first century happened.

With digital technology, we created a simulation of the printing press and put it on every desk and in every pocket. The marginal cost of reproduction collapsed toward zero. It no longer takes a million dollars to flood the world with your words. It takes a laptop, an internet connection, and a pulse.

Now anyone can print whatever they want—no catharsis necessary. Self-publishing, print-on-demand, social media feeds, AI text generators—each new layer strips out another chunk of friction. The first and second orders of simulacra that Baudrillard described have become the third by default: signs pointing to signs, content quoting content, stories built out of other stories with no lived experience underneath.

On one side, you have infinite simulacra—cheap, fast, frictionless storytelling that can be produced and consumed without anyone undergoing the pain of real transformation.

On the other side, you have finite cathartic works—rare, slow, and costly in psychic energy, each one purchased with a writer’s willingness to suffer through their own de-bullshitting.

The modern system massively incentivizes the former and barely notices the latter.

With online selling and ebooks, traditional publishing lost its monopoly on distribution. Colophons lost their gravitas. Ask anyone on the street the difference between Random House and a print-on-demand imprint. Good luck getting an answer.

MFA programs became prohibitively expensive—Columbia costs about $78,000 a year—and they don’t guarantee any professional entrée. You get a certificate and a “good luck to you.”

Book reviews drowned in the expansion of online commentary. Amazon reviews are mostly bots. Art discourse was replaced by political tribalism. Nobody talks about aesthetics anymore. They talk about who’s good and who’s evil.

And the tsunami of content became overwhelming. Around the turn of the millennium, tens of thousands of new titles were appearing annually. By the early 2020s, estimates run into the low millions of new books per year when you include self-publishing. Right now, as you read this, hundreds of books are being published somewhere in the world.

The old joke goes: two people leave a restaurant, and one says, “God, that food was terrible.” The other says, “Yes, and such small portions.”

Well, we’ve got plenty of terrible now. And the portions are infinite.

The three traditional solutions to watch over storytellers—however inadequate they were—are now absurd and meaningless. Everyone knows the games. Either you want to learn how to play them, or you’ve given up on publishing entirely.

Chaos is the norm. Few believe storytelling conveys anything but bullshit. Long-form stories are viewed as distracting entertainments for aging demographics or boring crap that old people wax on about.

My kids can’t sit through a movie. They get up, go to the bathroom, check their phones. And they’ve had the best education money can buy.

So what are we doing here? Should we just pack it in?

No.

Here is a crucial logical point: Bullshit only makes sense as one pole of a spectrum. A spectrum always has at least two poles. You cannot talk about “tall” unless “short” also exists. If everyone were the same height, the word “tall” would be meaningless. The differential requires both ends.

The same holds for truth and bullshit. If everything were bullshit, nothing would be. The concept would dissolve. For bullshit to have any content at all, there must be another pole—call it truth—against which it deviates.

The very fact that we can recognize inauthentic, manipulative, indifferent speech as bullshit implies that we can, at least sometimes, recognize its opposite.

So when people say, “It’s all bullshit,” they are making a self-defeating claim. Their ability to name bullshit presupposes some acquaintance, however faint, with what is not bullshit..

Truth is on a spectrum, like height. Everyone cannot be tall, which means short must exist as the other pole. In the same way, there cannot be bullshit without truth.

The existence of bullshit proves the existence of truth.

We’ve got to bring that other pole back into view because right now, truth is getting its ass kicked.

So what is the standard?

It is not a person. An authority cannot tell you that you’ve met it. No one person is the standard holder.

It is not an institution. No certificate can validate it.

It is not a number. No sales figure can prove it.

The standard of truth is catharsis.

Catharsis is the ineffable connection between author and audience that is beyond explanation or definition. It is self-evident. Each of us knows it when we experience it. We all know it when we experience it.

Aristotle did not define catharsis. He described the experience of it. Catharsis is the purging of emotion. It is communion with another being such that you understand where they’re coming from. It’s what Atticus Finch means in To Kill a Mockingbird when he tells his six-year-old daughter that you cannot understand someone until you walk around in their shoes. She understood what he meant.

Picture a theatrical performance. The audience is completely enraptured by the actors on stage, fully invested in the outcome. The experience is like watching a distillation of real life without the players knowing they’re being watched. As the script unfolds, the writer is absent—only the words and actions are observable. The actors imbue the fictional lives with their own experience.

When the climactic action occurs, the result is unexpected but completely believable. There, but for the grace of God, go I. You watch Oedipus Rex and think: Thank God that didn’t happen to me. He did everything he could to avoid that fate, and still it came for him.

When you leave a great play, a great movie, a great book, you are purged. You think: They’re just like I am.

That’s catharsis. It’s not “I give it a six out of ten.”

But here’s the difficult part—the part that makes this so hard to wrap your arms around:

No person can tell you that you’ve met the standard. No institution can confer it. No number can measure it.

When you meet the standard, you will know.

The standard of truth is self-evident. The system recognizes it when it is present. It is unmistakable. The truth is its own standard.

Story Grid’s job is to show you the pathway to the standard. We cannot travel the pathway for you. We cannot validate your arrival. We understand what the standard is, and we will confirm or disconfirm whether you are getting closer. But when you get there, you will not need us to tell you.

You will know it in your bones.

Remember: As Aristotle describes it, catharsis is not a purely private event. It is at least two people sharing an experience—author and audience, actor and spectator—such that both are transformed.

You need two for catharsis. So you may feel it, but if no one else does, it’s not traveling the way you need it to. Story Grid is about telling you the truth about whether the message has arrived or not. It is not about lying to you when we don’t want to validate you.

But just knowing it yourself is not enough.

This means you and your audience must experience it together. You and your reader.

Trusting yourself and the other person becomes the critical key to meeting the standard. There can be no lying. The encouraging progress and the disappointing corrections must both be shared honestly. If your reader is not experiencing catharsis, they cannot pretend you’ve met the standard.

That would be bullshit—and we are in the business of detecting bullshit, not propagating it.

Can you see why we cannot lie to one another about this? Lying about progress keeps students in programs longer. It extracts fees. It turns teaching into a bullshit machine.

We are not interested in bullshit machines.

You experiencing catharsis is a great indicator. It means you’ve connected. You care. You know what you want to communicate. Now the trouble is: How do you get the evidence of that catharsis onto the page so someone else can experience it too?

This is where the methodology comes in. Story Grid helps you remove the noise in your writing, amplify the signal, clarify the cathartic message you want to share. The song is the same, but your performance is unique.

Don’t mistake genres and our emphasis on them for formula. These are song categories—like country and western, hip-hop, classical, etc.—not templates.

The pathway is not magic. It is tenacious work. It looks like climbing a cliff face with gaps you must leap across, knowing you will fall. When you hit the ground, the methodology is there to hold out a hand, and it says: “Okay. Let’s try again. Let’s go.”

That’s it. That’s all it is.

And at the end of the pathway, something real is waiting for you. Not a certificate. Not a number. Not an authority figure’s approval.

There is catharsis. There is communion. There is truth.

This is what Story Grid is about. This is what I have spent my life pursuing. This is why we built a university, a methodology, and now a magazine called The Standard.

We will publish only work that achieves catharsis. Not work that is pretty good. Not work that shows promise. Work that meets the standard.

Whenever anyone asks what Story Grid is, you can point them to The Standard and say: Read this. If you feel something, if you are purged, if you recognize that these authors are just like you—then you understand what we’re doing. If you don’t feel it, we haven’t earned your attention yet.

The world is full of bullshit. The old authorities have collapsed. The new metrics are gamed.

But truth is not dead. Catharsis still exists. The standard endures.

It has been waiting for twenty-five hundred years—since Aristotle first described it—for storytellers brave enough to pursue it.

I believe you are one of them.

Now let’s get to work.