What is the value of stories? The primary value of stories is entertainment. One reads stories for one’s own pleasure. Stories that interest oneself provide one with joy, happiness, laughter, tears, and so on. Stories also have a didactic value; they transmit messages, values, and knowledge to readers. In many cases, one reads stories, not to be educated, but to be entertained. But upon completion of certain stories, one realizes that one has learned new things, such as new attitudes, cultures, and so on.

In the context of the anticivilization, stories take on a whole new dimension. What is that dimension? Stories become a vehicle that transports readers out of earth’s anticivilization and into the Civilization of the Universe.

Yes, stories let Earthlings temporarily escape the anticivilization and enter rational civilization. This is one of the most powerful and valuable aspects of stories. Stories use colorful metaphors and playful analogies that let readers escape the anticivilization, at least for a few precious moments. Often, such metaphors and analogies are tightly woven throughout the entire story so they are not immediately identifiable. If such metaphors were obvious to everyone, those stories would be attacked and suppressed by protectors of the anticivilization: dishonest journalists, evil academe, politicians, religionists, and liberal intellectuals.

Rich metaphors and analogies flowing throughout stories are a powerful way Citizens of Earth can understand the differences between the anticivilization and the Civilization of the Universe. Examples of such stories include works by fairy-tale masters The Brothers Grimm, masculine-poet Robert Bly, justice-writer Alexandre Dumas, and the illusion-exposing playwright Tennessee Williams.

Robert Bly is a master of taking Citizens of Earth into other worlds to broaden their perspectives on life in the anticivilization. Bly’s stories such as Male Naiveté and Giving the Gold Away or Iron John are journeys that take the reader/listener to different space-times. Readers/listeners can contrast earth’s anticivilization with other possibilities while in these different space-times. At the very moment of contrasting different worlds, readers can identify the Civilization of the Universe. During this time of unhindered imagining and thinking, readers/listeners can briefly experience the Civilization of the Universe.

Even in Tennessee Williams’ plays such as The Glass Menagerie, viewers can imagine what might happen if anticivilization illusions and self-deceptions collapsed. Those people would have no alternative except to identify, integrate, and act on objective reality. Viewers could then imagine the results of such dynamics: those people would build values, prosperity, love, and happiness rather than illusions, losses, loneliness and sadness.

Such are the values that stories deliver to Citizens of Earth. And fortunately, stories containing otherworldly metaphors and analogies abound today. Stories by The Brothers Grimm, Tennessee Williams, Robert Bly, Gaston Leroux, Alexandre Dumas, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Maurice Maeterlinck, Daniel Defoe and even Gustave Flaubert can temporarily transpose readers/listeners/viewers out of earth’s dishonest anticivilization and into the pristine Civilization of the Universe.