Stop Selling Stories- It's Breathing, Not Intervention

Every artist claims they want to change the world.

Every artist claims they want to change the world. It’s practically mandatory at this point – the artist as socially conscious citizen, espousing liberal democratic values, sparking important conversations, making people think. Walk into any arts funding meeting, scroll through any artist’s statement, and you’ll find variations on the same theme: my work challenges, questions, provokes, transforms.

We all do it. Not because we’re dishonest, but because these are the phrases that open doors, that satisfy funders, that make our work legible to institutions. The problem isn’t that we’re lying. It’s that these phrases have become so vague they are meaningless.¹ A streaming series “sparks conversations.” An Instagram exhibition “raises awareness.” A mural “gives voice to the voiceless.”

If every social act contributes to society – reinforcing or challenging values – then claiming your art is “social intervention” says precisely nothing. You might as well announce that your breathing affects the atmosphere. Technically true, but it tells us nothing useful.

However, whilst announcing you breathe may earn a raised eyebrow, ceasing to breathe is not to be advised. Respiration may not be newsworthy, but it is necessary.

Likewise, as absurd as it is to envisage artists sitting outside ‘society’, swooping in now and then to save everyone with the power of ‘story’, the fact remains that storytelling is how humans coordinate and cooperate. It’s what makes human culture tick. The question facing practitioners isn’t whether we’re doing social intervention. It’s whether our work is actually maintaining that capacity – or whether we are, despite our best intentions, actually part of weakening it.

When Narrative Does the Work of Infrastructure

Last time, we touched on how storytelling evolved as sophisticated social information sharing – gossip that enforced cooperation without violence in small communities. But as societies grew beyond the reach of gossip, something remarkable happened: we developed shared narratives and myths that could coordinate strangers. Stories became the social technology that allowed people who’d never met to cooperate on unprecedented scales.

So what does storytelling look like when it still has to do that work – when formal institutions aren’t there to maintain cooperation?

In 2017, researchers studying contemporary hunter-gatherer societies made a striking discovery. Working with the Agta people in the Philippines – alongside data from six other foraging societies across Southeast Asia and Africa – they found that skilled storytellers were twice as likely to be chosen as neighbours. Not just liked, but actively preferred as community members.

Notice that: skilled storytellers. Not the storyteller. Storytelling isn’t a specialized role in these communities – it’s a distributed capacity that everyone participates in, with some people better at it than others. And those who are particularly good at it become especially valued community members.²

Why? Because in these communities, storytelling creates the space for maintaining social norms and coordination. It’s not entertainment, and it’s not purely instructional – it’s how the community keeps itself functioning.

The researchers analysed 89 stories from these seven societies and found that 70% touched on themes of cooperation, equality, and fair dealing. When they tested cooperation levels across 18 Agta camps using resource-sharing games, camps where more people engaged skilfully in storytelling showed significantly higher cooperation.

This matters because these societies lack moralising gods, formal laws, police, courts – all the institutional apparatus that larger societies use to coordinate behaviour. In their absence, storytelling performs that function. It’s not art for art’s sake, neither is it explicitly instrumental; it’s civic infrastructure in narrative form.

Now consider industrial societies. Our most visible storytellers – movie studios, streaming platforms, bestselling authors – function as an elite, working primarily for commercial gain or personal expression. The stories that reach the most people are optimised for profit or shaped by individual artistic vision. Both legitimate pursuits, but neither is maintaining the civic function that storytelling once performed.

One of many reasons for this is that, as societies scaled up, the storyteller’s role – simultaneously artist, educator, mediator, norm-transmitter – fragmented. That unified function was distributed among specialists, and over time, three distinct modes of artistic practice emerged.

So what was lost in that progression? And where do practitioners like us fit in?

Three Modes of Contribution

People make art for three main reasons.

The first and most obvious is in order to make: both in the manner of fabricating something and also in the sense of making a living. The commercial artist thus utilises their skills in a transactional capacity. The term artisan is often applied in this context and can be used broadly to recognise the artistry in a range of professions. There may be social utility in the work they create, they may draw on deep inspiration and derive satisfaction from the work, but the fundamental goal of this type of artist is the creation of something that someone else is prepared to pay for.

The expressive artist conversely creates to fulfil an inner desire. The work they produce seeks to reify experience, share perceptions or lay bare internal contradictions. The art produced may well be of interest to others who take inspiration or learn from it. The artist might sell the work or be commissioned to produce it, but ultimately the driving force is the need to create, to express, to bring out what is experienced within.

For the citizen artist the work is a means of practicing citizenship, of fulfilling their social obligation as member of a functioning democracy. Their art may encompass the bringing of issues to light, passing on the skills of rhetorical and aesthetic agency or it may provide cultural spaces for democratic engagement. The citizen artist may be salaried, work to commission or volunteer. They will likely invoke their own artistic vision, aesthetic sensibilities and be drawn to issues they are interested in but this type of artist will always be motivated by the shared impact of the work and its contribution to society.

And note – all three are political. All three shape society. The distinction isn’t between political art and apolitical art, it’s about different modes of political contribution.

The Commercial Artist: “I work for you”

This isn’t an insult – it’s a legitimate choice. The commercial artist creates what the market demands, what audiences will pay for, what keeps the lights on. They’re craftspeople, delivering a product or service to specification. There’s honour in this work, and significant skill required to do it well.

But commercial art is profoundly political. It doesn’t just reflect the status quo – it actively reproduces it, makes it feel natural and desirable. When Netflix invests millions in a series, when algorithms optimise for engagement, when brands attach narratives to products, they’re not creating neutral entertainment. They’re reinforcing existing power structures.

And yes, I know – you’re reading this whilst your own Netflix subscription renews automatically each month. So am I. That’s rather the point.

Building on last week’s argument: commercial art increasingly operates as storyselling rather than storytelling. It produces consumable information – content optimised for engagement, designed to be registered briefly and replaced. Stories become products, emotions become metrics, narratives fragment into the very information overload that’s destroying our capacity for collective sense-making.

The Expressive Artist: “I work for me”

This is the romantic ideal we’ve inherited from the 19th century: the artist as singular genius, pursuing their unique vision regardless of audience or market. They create from inner necessity, seeking authenticity and self-expression above all else.

This tradition has given us extraordinary work. When an artist makes visible what’s been rendered invisible, when they give form to what’s been dismissed as formless, they shift what’s thinkable. This is genuine social change – it expands the realm of possibility.

But when artists frame their practice as fundamentally personal expression, they’re making a political claim: “My truth is mine, yours is yours, and never the twain shall meet.” In small doses, this challenges conformity. In large doses, it fragments the possibility of shared meaning entirely.

The Citizen Artist: “I work for us”

This is the artist as inheritor of traditions where storytellers were essential social infrastructure. For the Citizen Artist the work is a means of practicing citizenship, of fulfilling their social obligation as a member of a functioning democracy – not by telling us what to think, but by developing our ability to think together, to collectively imagine alternative futures, to co-create rather than simply choose between pre-existing options. This art may encompass the bringing of issues to light, passing on the skills of rhetorical and aesthetic agency, or it may provide cultural spaces for democratic engagement. It’s about cultivating in audiences and participants the very capacities that make democratic life possible. It practices democracy rather than depicting it.

This is why citizen art can feel at odds with the evaluation metrics funders demand. There’s no finite outcome, no promise of change as product. What’s offered instead is the creation of conditions – cultural encounters that create the potential for change. Citizen art is infinite practice, not a problem to be solved and ticked off.

Maintaining the Capacity

Very few professional artists will fit neatly into these categories. The reality of making a living and adapting to prevailing contexts means that we move between all three modes across different projects, or indeed, within the same one.

But understanding which mode you’re operating in for any given project – not as fixed identity, but as conscious choice – helps you navigate the question at the heart of this piece: is this work maintaining storytelling capacity, or undermining it?

When you’re working commercially or expressively (and we all do), you can still ask: Is there room here for genuine cultural encounter? Am I creating space for collective meaning-making, even within these constraints? Or am I just delivering content and calling it conversation?

The Citizen Artist mode isn’t about moral superiority. It’s about maintaining something humans have always needed: the capacity to coordinate and cooperate through story. The question isn’t which type of artist you are, but how you keep that capacity alive in whatever mode you’re working.

What’s At Stake

Look around at our current moment. Populist narratives thrive precisely because our capacity for collective sense-making has weakened. Political polarization makes it harder to hold multiple perspectives, to negotiate shared meaning, to distinguish between genuine stories and calculated manipulation. We’re drowning in commercial narratives designed to sell us things, saturated with personal expression that atomizes rather than connects. And the cultural encounters where people could practice democratic capacities? Those are increasingly crowded out by work that fragments rather than connects.

When information displaces narrative, we lose our capacity for shared meaning-making. Commercial art treats us as consumers of information. Expressive art treats narrative as personal property. Only citizen art insists that storytelling is a collective practice we must actively maintain.

So when you’re sitting down to fill out that funding application, you’ll still have to navigate frameworks that demand measurable outcomes and proven impact. You’ll still need to speak the language of ‘stakeholder engagement’ and ‘transformative change.’ We are all tired of it. Tired of the justification, tired of the evaluation forms, tired of the gap between what you know the work does and what you can claim it achieves.

Knowing what you’re actually doing – creating cultural encounters where people practice being democratic together – won’t change what funders demand. But it might give you something more valuable than the perfect funding pitch: clarity about which compromises you can live with and which ones would break the work itself. Clarity about when you’re maintaining the capacity and when you’re just playing the game.

Storytelling as civic infrastructure isn’t optional. It’s not a nice thing to have when budgets allow. It’s how humans coordinate and cooperate. It’s breathing – necessary, distributed, something we can’t stop doing just because it’s hard to justify on evaluation forms.

The question isn’t whether we’re doing social intervention. It’s whether our work is maintaining that capacity or undermining it. Democracy doesn’t deal in grand finales. And now, at least, you have a framework for answering that question honestly – not as judgment, but as navigation.

This is the second part of a mini-series on storytelling and citizenship. Read part one here.

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To cite this article:
Burns, B (2025) Stop Selling Stories: It’s breathing not intervention! The Philosophical Theatre Facilitator: www.philosophicaltheatrefacilitator.substack.com

© Brendon Burns 2025

Sources:

Kim, Y., & Ball-Rokeach, S., 2006. Community Storytelling Network, Neighborhood Context, and Civic Engagement: A Multilevel Approach. Human Communication Research, 32, pp. 411-439.

Lew‐Levy, S., Milks, A., Lavi, N., Pope, S., & Friesem, D., 2020. Where innovations flourish: an ethnographic and archaeological overview of hunter–gatherer learning contexts. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 2.

Migliano, A., Battiston, F., Viguier, S., Page, A., Dyble, M., Schlaepfer, R., Smith, D., Astete, L., Ngales, M., Gómez-Gardeñes, J., Latora, V., & Vinicius, L., 2020. Hunter-gatherer multilevel sociality accelerates cumulative cultural evolution. Science Advances, 6.

Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K., Dyble, M., Page, A., Thompson, J., Chaudhary, N., Salali, G., Mace, R., Astete, L., Ngales, M., Vinicius, L., & Migliano, A., 2017. Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling. Nature Communications, 8.

1. Which isn’t to suggest the work itself is meaningless, but it is hard to escape the fact that how we describe what we do, consciously or unconsciously, shapes expectations - not just of others but of ourselves.

2. The research also found the skilled storytellers irrespective of relative wealth, had more children than anyone else. I’m not totally sure what we can infer from that for this article, but it’s an interesting statistic!