Vulnerability shakes the fabric of the narratively organized world

Vulnerability shakes the fabric of the narratively organized world. It is no longer the most resistant who wins, as in the tragedies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the one who is attacked the most, in the double sense of being attacked and being vulnerable.

— from Takeoff Into Chaos · Narrative Brain: the Stories Our Neurons Tell by Fritz Breithaupt

In the book

In fairy tales the hero is almost always the weak one — the youngest child, the small animal, the overlooked servant — precisely because vulnerability is the point. The tale carries that fragile figure from danger or even wounding to a rescue that arrives at the moment of maximum peril, and what wins in the end is never sheer toughness but the one who stays open and attentive when everything is shaking. The story closes with a careful balancing, everyone meeting more or less what they deserve. — Takeoff Into Chaos

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