Narratives form society and we have to change the narratives to change society.
Humans love storytelling in the same way that the young sunflowers love the sun. This love also expands to hearing stories from others.
Whenever you meet somebody, talk to someone over the phone, or come in contact with others, you start a conversation where you tell stories to each other and hear stories from each other. The story can be about your life, job, school, parents, the recent function you attended, global events, etc. Every religious book is a form of storytelling and the belief in God alone has not kept them relevant over thousands of years; it’s our deep-rooted love for stories that, to some extent, play a role in people being interested in them. There’s no way that the entertainment industry could be so big if the act of storytelling didn’t appeal to us. Heck, we would have never developed language to begin with.
Our relationship with storytelling made possible the formation of narratives that started human civilization and formed the societies we find ourselves in today. Narratives are the foundation of human societies; without them, we lose our ability to coordinate and cooperate globally. Politics, religion, identity, rules, etiquette, laws, jobs, economy, hierarchies, money, ideology, government, etc. - all of them are the narratives that our societies are built upon but none of them are grounded in reality. They all exist nowhere other than in our minds. If I ask you to show me your feet, you’ll do so immediately and effortlessly, but if I ask you to point toward politics or religion, or economy, you’d realize that none of those things exist in reality. All you can do to “show” me the politics or religion or economy is come up with a bunch of sentences that explain what those things are i.e., you can’t point toward them in the same way you can toward your feet.
Everything you can’t show me without making the use of language is a narrative, which means politics, religion, identity, rules, etiquette, laws, jobs, economy, hierarchies, money, ideology, government, etc. are the result of the mental stories we made up and even what you call “me” or “I” is a narrative. None of these things are part of your actual present experience.
If I take away your ability to create mental narratives, you can experience nothing other than what you see or hear, the sensation of air going in and out of your respiratory system, and the feeling of your feet on the ground. You’d be able to see the trees around you but you won’t know what they are because the names given to the things around you are the result of language, which is a narrative. The totality of life becomes limited to what you experience with the five senses if there are no mental narratives. As soon as the mental chatter is added, the things we experience with our five senses (things that are real and make you feel reality as it is) take the back seat and mental concepts become a major part of your life.
A vast amount of our energy is spent on mental narratives while a little, if any, is directed toward objective reality. When was the last time you paid attention to the thoughts arising in your mind? The most probable answer is a few moments earlier and after examining yourself throughout the day you’d find that you spend almost all of your day in your mind. When was the last time you paid attention to the presence of your feet on the ground, the sounds of nature, or the sensation of air going in and out of your nose? The most probable is you don’t even remember.
“Am I looking good? Am I handsome/beautiful? I hate my job. But if I leave it would I ever be hired somewhere again? Why is he looking at me? What he’s thinking about me? I like her. I hate that guy. I shouldn't have done that. What am I going to become? I’ll run my own business. Does he like me? If I do this one thing, my parents and relatives will think good about me. Who’s going to win the final? It must not be that country. My preferred candidate must win this election.”
The mental chatter is endless like mathematical numbers.
The mental chatter never leaves you, unless you have experienced a spiritual awakening. It’s with you on the bus, in the bathroom, at the job, at the family gatherings; the mental noise comes with you everywhere you go. It can make a person happy, sad, scared, suicidal, angry, etc. That’s how much dominance it has over our lives.
Therefore, the people who can control and manipulate our mental voices - narratives - can control our behavior and eventually, our lives. And the history of human civilization is all about the powers that be manufacturing and propagating narratives that serve their rule into the public.
Narratives and stories are so powerful that they can be traded for actual wealth; you can get anything you want by making people believe false narratives. Narratives about love can be traded for sex. Narratives about trends can be used to sell you a new product. Narratives about God can be traded for tithes. Narratives about the muscular body can be used to sell you a gym membership. Narratives about race can be used to make a certain group of people look inferior. Narratives about democracy can be traded for real power.
Not only do we love narratives but we have a tendency to conflate them with reality too. As a result, we don’t even notice that what we spend most of our attention on are just a bunch of immaterial mental constructs that the people around us can use for their personal benefit.
The narratives can be used to influence the way people think about things to varying degrees. Even you, the reader, do it every day to control the thinking of the people in your family, social, and employment circles. Everyone does it to some extent to manipulate the way people think about them. We behave and speak in a certain way and tone to make sure that the ones watching and listening to us feel good about us. How many times has it happened to you that you were so angry at someone that you literally wanted to punch him in the face, but rather chose to speak politely because you had something to gain by doing so? That is, by deliberately not showing your true emotions, you influenced the other person’s way of thinking about you.
The victim in an abusive relationship is convinced through narratives manufactured by the abuser that leaving the relationship is a bad choice. To put it in the form of dialogues:
“If you leave me, no one will ever love you.”
“I beat you not because I hate you but because you do this thing wrong.”
“I love you so much. I can’t live without you, please don’t leave.”
Your boss at the job uses the same power of narrative, either knowingly or unknowingly, to make you believe that continuing to work at the job you hate is in your best interest, not his. Parents, too, use this form of narrative control to convince a child that following their orders would make him better than the children who don’t.
These are the people you meet in your daily lives and they try to make you believe certain narratives to make sure you stay with them even when it hurts you.
Then comes the people who have figured out how the believed narratives can be turned into personal profit. The cult leaders convince their followers to risk their lives for a cause that benefits them in no way. The advertisers convince the public of having certain deficiencies that can only be removed by the product they’re selling; they create demand for the new supply by making use of narratives. The military is another institution that abuses our unique affection for narratives - it convinces the citizenry that it’s “patriotic” and “an act of bravery” to hate and kill the people you never even met in your life. Religion belongs to the same category as it persuades people to fight with each other in the name of God (which is a narrative) while the priests rake in the dough.
Then we have the oligarchs who have figured out that the secret sauce to ruling society is to make people believe in the stories that justify and maintain their rule; they learned to control the narratives that people subscribe to. Back in the old days, the monarchs spuriously justified their wealth and power by propagating the narrative that they have been chosen by the Divine to rule, that they are special to God and it’s their moral responsibility to be a king. People could have taken the crown off of the king’s head at any time and place it on any beggar’s head, but it didn’t happen because of the narrative believed by people about noble blood, loyalty, Divine right, etc.
Nowadays, billionaires and big corporations justify their wealth and power over society by making people believe that they are genius, that they work hard/smart than others, that anyone can become a billionaire if he works hard enough - all of which are fart-brained fairy tales to which the reality shakes its head. Their wealth and power are the results of exploiting the labor of the workers and nature while preying on our emotions by lying about how much struggle they had to go through to reach the top. They use narratives about politics, religion, identity, rules, etiquette, laws, jobs, economy, hierarchies, money, ideology, government, etc. to keep us confused enough to not focus on their immoral and unethical status.
Everything ranging from media to economy to government is controlled by a handful of plutocrats. They control what the TV shows you, they control what you learn in school, they control the stories you hear from people around you, they control what policies the government passes i.e., they control every aspect of your life by giving the illusion of freedom, democracy, and choice. We can collectively overthrow this current system of exploitation and work toward the new one that resonates with everybody, but it’s not happening because people have been convinced that the system they live under is entirely just and free where you, the people, get to decide who comes to power every few years through a voting process which is never rigged. This is what everyone is told by the talking heads behind the TV screens and this is what the majority is a hardcore believer in.
By controlling our mental constructs, they rule society.
The narrative is of momentous importance for a ruler to maintain his parasitic rule. Their kingdoms are built on the foundation of narrative and when someone threatens the foundation, he becomes a threat to the kingdom itself. The power of a ruler depends on the power of prevalent narratives in society and the power of a narrative depends upon the number of people it’s believed by. That’s why when someone tries to push narratives that are not the same as the prevailing ones or don’t serve the powerful becomes an existential threat to the rulers. Those in power do everything they can to mute those narratives by making false allegations about the mediums spreading them.
But it’s possible to break the yoke of narrative and free yourself from unconsciously serving the ruling class. It’s possible, but not easy because in a world where everyone is trying to find ways to satisfy their ego, accepting that you were wrong about pretty much everything you knew about the world is the least ego-satisfying thing. Much of what we call “culture” and “history” is nothing other than the power-serving narratives pushed by the ancient rulers. So you can expect a lot of resistance from your mind as you continue down the path of truth-seeking with logical reasoning as your weapon.
As you march forward on this journey, you’ll become like a mirror. The mirror reflects the image of an object as it is without any distortion provided the mirror itself is not distorted; if you put your hand in front of the mirror, it will reflect back the image of your hand as it is. Just like the mirror, when you no longer have the distortion of the power-serving mental narratives, you start recognizing everything as it is, not as what the powerful want you to think it is. With time, the mirror of your mind gets clearer and you’ll see as least distorted image of the world as possible.
Our entire culture is made up of power-serving narratives, which means that you waking up to the reality that voting between mainstream political parties isn’t gonna solve our society’s problems doesn’t mean that the narrative has lost control over you because there are high chances that you’re still chained in other narratives that are helping the rulers maintain their rule. To completely liberate yourself from the narrative matrix, you have to critically examine everything you were made to believe since your childhood.
I’m not saying that narratives are inherently bad nor am I saying to abandon narratives completely because the formation of society is impossible if we don’t collectively subscribe to some narratives. Just like there are no onions without fleshes, there can be no society without narratives. If narratives form society, that means we can create any kind of society by propagating any kind of narrative including the one that works for everyone. For that to happen, we must first peel away the narratives that form our current society and establish new, better, and healthier narratives spontaneously. The kind of narratives that promote love, not hatred; collaboration, not competition; peace, not war; social well-being, not personal profits; biophilia, not ecocide; appreciation, not envy.
We’re not inherently greedy, it’s the dominant narratives of our society that force us to be greedy. We’re not inherently selfish, it’s the dominant narratives of our society that force us to be selfish. We’re not inherently destructive, it’s the dominant narratives of our society that force us to be destructive. Love is closest to our hearts, it’s only the dominant narratives of our society that force us to be hateful. We’re not separate from each other, it’s only the dominant narratives of our society that make us feel that way.
As long as the old narratives remain in place, the kind of revolutionary change we need to back down from our current trajectory towards either a nuclear nightmare or climate calamity and build a healthier world is impossible. Voting, protests, and movements can bring temporary and small change but not the permanent and radical change we’ve always dreamed of.
We have unknowingly done a lot of damage to the planet and humanity by consenting to the old narratives that only benefit the rich and realizing this should make your eyes watery. After paying homage to the victims of our current destructive-narrative-based society with the salt flowing from your eyes, let the knowledge that we can change our present-day suffering-based society by transforming to healthier narratives build the courage inside you to pick up a handkerchief and wipe out the tears.
Now that you’re ready, LET’S CHANGE THE WORLD.
Thank You for reading the entire article. I would love to hear feedback from you.
Put some coins in my digital hat if you like my work:
Every day, I do my best to bring my best to your screens, but I can’t do it full-time without your support. If you find my work valuable, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account here. Any amount is more than appreciated.
Talk to me on Twitter:
SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE: