The fear is that introducing all these stories into the discourse will create narrative chaos, a land of false equivalencies, disinformation and conspiracy theory where we all get to choose our own boutique truths — one that closely resembles our current moment.

To make sense of all this conflicting anecdotal data, you’d have to turn to statistics — dull, fusty, dramatically inert statistics — which tell us, without embellishment, that the planet is warming up fast, that the percentage of demonstrably false rape allegations is in the low single digits, and that if you have a gun in your home you’re a lot less likely to repel an intruder than kill yourself.

Unfortunately, stories are far more compelling than statistics: Most people don’t think — or, more important, feel — in numbers. But they do have an inborn hunger for stories. Good politicians (meaning savvy, not virtuous) understand this instinctively: Ronald Reagan’s welfare mother buying vodka with food stamps and Donald Trump’s Muslims dancing in the streets of New Jersey as the towers fell told people something they wanted to believe, that they felt was true, and so were impervious to the feeble, dweeby rebuttals of fact.

But the big one, the Great War for the narrative, is being fought over the story of America. Most foreigners would probably be appalled, or maybe envious, if they were to grasp the extent to which even their saner American friends are living a mythic narrative. Whether you were born here or became a citizen or somehow just sneaked in, you are a part of it — the great experiment, Arsenal of Democracy, the City on the Hill.

I suspect one reason American life spans are plummeting is a deficiency of meaning: We’ve lost the thread of our story. We need someone to tell us a new one, a new Gettysburg Address or “I Have a Dream” speech — but is there one we could all agree on anymore? Is it going to be the one about a divinely ordained white man’s paradise, a bulwark of Christendom, uniquely blessed among nations; or the one about how we whupped the Axis and then the Commies and became the Greatest Country on Earth; or how we forced this nation to grudgingly become what it claimed to be, truly free and equal, gradually admitting more and more people into full citizenship and humanity?

In the introduction to his novel “The Magic Mountain,” Thomas Mann cautions, “Not every story happens to everyone.” Not every story needs to be a referendum on your worldview, either validating or refuting it. Looked at closely enough, any story becomes a world in itself, too big to be encompassed by any ideology, defying any slogans or morals.

In principle, I’m for every story being told, irrespective of its implications, because erring the other way threatens to lead to the sort of censorship-for-the-greater-good you see in totalitarian states. And I have some dumb idealistic conviction that every awkward, heterodox, contradictory truth adds up to create a larger, truer picture of the world.