ABSTRACT
We know the world through the stories that we construct; the stories we tell. Within the story, the heroes and events make a whole: a synthesis, so to speak, emerges from the interaction of parts which alone apparently have no meaning. The story, i.e., the synthesis, is merely our understanding of reality. But the story is a paradigm that answers our immediate queries and anxieties. When our story does not adequately explain the world, when new questions emerge, when our anxieties are unabated, then we alter the story. We construct a new one: a new tale that seems to answer the new questions that the old story could not, the new anxieties that have emerged. The new synthesis includes much of the old thesis, its ingredients, ideas and rhetoric, and it also includes the abstraction of the emergent social reality. However, it still is, and necessarily so, transient. The new worldview survives so long as the world does not change, and a new social reality has not made our present synthesis outmoded.
