One of our bugbears is excessive narrative. What do we mean by this? The tendency for our species to construct stories, myths and tales that cease to explain our situation and start to displace and eventually overwhelm reality.

This happens at every level - the personal, the family, the community, within political parties, movements and religions. We touched on this last week in considering whether nations could be said to have minds.

This is not to argue against story-telling as a way of honing and creating our identities and giving cohesion to a community that gives functional benefits to its members. There are too many facts out there, many of them inconvenient, that tend to chaos - ordering them is how we humans survive.

Using Propp's analysis of motifs in Russian folk tales, Misia Landau (in Narratives of Human Evolution, Yale, 1991) showed how the great nineteenth and early twentieth century thinkers in evolutionary studies, from Darwin onwards, wrote our 'human story' along folk story lines.

Scientists tell stories (though they try to deny it). Religious figures tell stories. Historians tell stories. Politicians tell stories. Hitler and Stalin told stories - and stories are told about Hitler and Stalin. But, like young children, we can listen too much in awe, accept too much authority.

Sometimes the way the story is told, the repetitions and exact wording, become more important than the content. It is not only that we forget to question the facts behind the story but we demand that the facts are set in a context that is also unquestioned. We like cohesion and cohesion is constructed.

We are talking here about ideology and these thoughts were triggered by a recent use in a modern business context of a story about Stalin. The story is an old chestnut. During the Yezhovschina, so Solzhenitsyn relates, a party meeting is held and the Great Tyrant is applauded but no-one dare stop.

The applause goes on and on until, eventually, the independent local paper factory manager stops and everyone else does. The factory manager is subsequently purged for showing too much independence of thought.

There is some truth behind the hysterical culture of clapping in Soviet Russia and certainly much truth surrounding the climate of fear. By 1944, a bell had been instituted to stop audiences clapping and it is said that Stalin was becoming increasingly irritated by the custom.

But we have to ask whether what really happened is becoming dangerously confused with exaggerations of single incidents for effect in order to make a narrative point.

By the time we reach Martin Amis' Koba the Dread, there are rumours of an eight disc recording of a Stalin speech that contains one disc entirely of applause. True or false? No-one has yet replied to the enquirer on the internet forum who asked for evidence.

Solzhenitsyn's story is brilliantly written. But it fails to mention the name of the hapless factory manager, the district in Moscow Province or the secretary of the local party.

And then he closes with a punch-line, "But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”" So, either the factory manager or the interrogator survived to tell the tale? Or did they?

And that's the point - the events may have happened precisely as Solzhenitsyn stated but this is not history, it is narrative, no, it is a parable with the deliberate structure of a joke with a punch-line. It is as analytical of real circumstances as a satirical routine at the Comedy Club.

It is certainly neat for the moral of the tale. The tragic hero is a practical man. The politician is a coward. The story is simple. The complexities of life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s are swept away by an angry man with a different vision of Russia and many friends in the West.

Clapping must have been frequent under Stalin. Clapping must have stopped equally frequently eventually. We have seen no evidence yet that, like some dark game of musical chairs, factory managers across the Soviet Union were automatically removed every time Stalin visited.

At each visit, someone must have been the first to stop - or else they would have been clapping until he left the building every time, perhaps until 1953.

In fact, most factory managers (assuming basic competencies) were removed in a power struggle over industrial development policy in a climate of fear of subversion and of political collapse that may have been cruel and probably thoroughly wrong-headed but it was not irrational.

The Solzhenitsyn story pre-empts the hard work of thinking and enquiry. It allows us to avoid facing what we would have done during the Bolshevik experiment. As in any fairy story, the story is simplified into one of moral choices and horrified empathy looked at from outside.

As Whiteboard noted, this was a regime that is increasingly understood by historians to have been inconveniently popular because it delivered the goods for the many at the expense of the few. It managed, like the Nazis, to construct some very workable narratives of its own. 

There is the story of Stalin's cruel running joke with his wartime Head of Shipbuilding where he would look surprised that he thought he was still there because he thought he had sent him to the Gulag. This lasted for years, it is said. Terror through bullying black humour. The man, in fact, lived - but in fear.

Watchers of Season 7 of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' will know that Buffy says that narrative is not reality. She is right.

The 'clapping' story is often shifted today out of context to suggest that you will be harmed in conditions other than the extreme ones of Stalin's Russia if you stand out and even (like the boogy monster under the bed) that Stalinist techniques might somehow 'work'. Up to a point, Lord Copper.

The story, even if proven true (I suggest neutrality as to the truth-claim), as a parable, teaches down from on high as generality whereas life is learnt up from experience as a successions of particulars.

Is it true that 'not clapping' nowadays (which we take to mean not accepting, say, the general enthusiasm for this or that aspect of the new economy or some other unpopular stance) means exclusion from the 'system'?

Well, yes, to a degree but a modern free society permits dissidence. It is just that there is a more reasonable risk/reward ratio in compliance while the herd is hurtling in a certain direction and special interests soon emerge with a stake in defending a particular narrative against criticism.

The Kuhnian paradigm applicable to science is equally applicable to politics. The 'right' analysis is actually the one that works and forced change means the chance for a new model and new people, To take another concept from science, society changes in a process of punctuated equilibrium.

The dissident may well survive and prosper during a period of 'creative destruction' in a free society (once everything finally starts to unravel) whereas a dissenter in a closed system cannot easily survive a period of 'actual destruction'. This is why free societies are ultimately 'more effective'.

Why not just say all this more simply - if you go with the crowd in any stabilised culture or society and suspend your critical faculties and/or do not put a case for, say, caution or for another way, you may well survive, so long as the crowd and its leaders survive. The risks are actually quite calculable.

If you become a critic or show doubts about the direction that the crowd or its leaders are taking, you can expect to be sidelined - fatally in extreme circumstances.

But, in a free society, you can also marshal your resources, play a long game and come out ahead of the crowd. Indeed, as Alexandre Dugin showed, you can even do this if your timing is good when a closed system starts to break down.

The 'wisdom of crowds' and the 'wisdom of natural leaders' tends to make all those who have doubts and do not express them complicit in compounding error - whether invasion to the East, economic sclerosis, support for easy credit that results in a crash or overhyping of new media business models.

This is what we call 'group think' and its twin poles (perfectly symbolised in modern Western governments) are populism and control of patronage. Modern Western Governments create mass media narratives and then consolidate their hold through the redirection of taxed resources to allies.

The game is a gamble - can a busted system be kept going long enough to stash the cash and leave the problem to the next generation or will the point of crisis in our system of punctuated equilibrium come just when you are able to exploit it and leave the others standing or falling? It is all about timing.

In Western liberal culture, we behave no differently from Communist Party officials because it is the human condition to fear the consequences of defying convention and the crowd. The consequences are only far less brutal because of our level of economic development but the instincts are the same.

The 'game' does not suggest that one is 'right' to be brave at all times - at some times, it is honourable but very stupid to be brave. At other times, it becomes wise to exploit the 'stupidity' of others. Solzhenitsyn's story and similar narratives have little to teach us that is not sentimental.

It is about a place and a time - of its writing and not of the story's setting. By all means use narratives to find one's place in a stable system or to mobilise new forces to overturn the system but never ever confuse these with the 'truth of the matter'.