This speech by Orson Scott Card articulates the role of storytelling in creating and sustaining a Culture Strong and Good. Of course, Card is a professional storyteller, the author of numerous science fiction books. But he makes the case that
fictional storytelling is one of the strongest, most important parts of culture formation and maintenance. Fiction creates the public moral universe. Fictional stories are still about what they’ve always been about — “hunger, love, and death.” Or call it “reproduction, community, and identity.” In our made-up stories, we fiction writers tell you, usually without actually saying so, what matters. Which actions and motives make a person noble and good, or despicable and bad. In other words, how an admirable person in the culture we’re advocating should behave, and why….
And in the past fifty years, I’ve watched an increasing number of fiction writers turn away from the old values and use their fiction to advocate the ineffective or destructive replacement values.
He calls his audience to a higher standard, a heroic standard:
I think of the lonely voice of Winston Churchill, telling the story of calamity to come, in a time when nobody wanted to hear the warning, when they thought they could have a peaceful civilization just by giving the monsters what they wanted. That never works, but it took a long time for anyone to hear him.
When they finally did, it turned out, barely, not to be too late. But if he had not spoken, when the cost of speaking seemed to be the destruction of his career, then there would have been no story to turn to in order to stand firm in defense of civilization.
You’re not Winston Churchill? You’re no hero, no leader?
Well, why aren’t you? Winston Churchill was only Winston Churchill because he decided to speak, to act. In the world you move in, among the people you know and work with, why aren’t you?