Morals of stories

A few of the examples of stories that Tyler Cowen gives are really morals that might be drawn of stories. He gives far more story tags than story morals but it is our tendency to draw morals from stories that bothers him the most. He doesn't like "stories" such as "we have to get tough", "it's a conspiracy", "it's good versus evil", "my job is really important", "it's good guys against bad guys", "buy this car and you will have beautiful romantic partners and a fascinating life".

He has three kinds of objections to morals we draw from stories:

1. They are too simple.
2. They have to serve too many purposes
3. They can be used to exploit us in advertising and propaganda

I'll take these one at a time over the next few posts. But first a reminder, none of the above are actually stories. There are a lot of conspiracy stories. The number of possible conspiracy stories may be infinite for all we know. We never tell the conspiracy story we can only tell a conspiracy story. We never tell the good versus evils story we can only tell a good versus evil story.