This sounds incisive, but I'm not really smart enough to follow it. Certainly narrative as "story-telling" seems crucially important. And probably like many, it's hard for me to see a really satisfying story coming out of what we're going through. People screaming madly, people being senselessly maimed and killed. It seems more like tragic chaos.
A rough summary: narratives are a form of lossy compression that enable us to make sense of events so that we can plan actions and coordinate with others. In the past, influential and powerful individuals would compress events into a Narrative (basically an authoritative version of history) which although it might have been "false" in some objective sense, and probably oppressed certain groups of people, nevertheless enabled social consensus. But today, much more of what happens is recorded (on video, on social media, etc) into what the author calls the Database. This makes it easy for anyone to point out the flaws in the Narrative. As a result, there is conflict over which of many narrative options should become the authoritative Narrative. This can play out in various ways like censorship (deleting/blocking entries from the Database), rejecting certain items from the Database as being not true, and even faking entries in the Database.
I'm trying to think of some good historical examples of Narrative Collapse before and all I'm coming up with is the Gutenberg Bible and the Protestant Reformation. If that _is_ the pattern, then I really hope it doesn't take the %40+ death toll that the 30-years-war inflicted on Central Europe.
I don't think that availability of more data than what the mainstream narrative can handle in a coherent way is new, nor the existence of people having an inclination to find them and get into trouble due to their will to point to such incongruous "facts".
The main difference, to my mind, is that we now have more direct connections between people all around the world, so the laymen direct inter-influence is potentially greater – although mainstream propaganda also gained much power in width, depth and granularity in the same time.
Yes, there are a larger diversity of data easily accessible with the internet. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a proportionally larger interest in looking at them, let alone time to consult them, digest, and synthesize.
"Lossy compression" is a succinct description. Humans, constrained by finite time and cognitive resources, cannot understand reality at its full resolution. Narratives are compact maps of the territory.
We're living in a second Gutenberg moment. I think that epistemic ecosystems, like biological ones, have information carrying capacities — the aggregate ability of its members to produce, exchange, and use information. We all live in one or more such ecosystems. Think: liberal university-educated Bay Area millennials in technology and the kind of information they produce and exchange within that ecosystem. When the information carrying capacity is exceeded, the ecosystem becomes unstable (Narrative collapse) and has to stabilise by splitting into smaller ecosystems that can support coherent, authoritative Narratives.
I think it's useful to look at the first Gutenberg moment. The mass production of books caused an information explosion that exceeded the information carrying capacity of the Catholic ecosystem and resulted in its fracture into smaller Catholic and Protestant ecosystems that can exert enough power to control Narratives (new capacities). We can see a similar scaled-up phenomenon today where countless novel virtual communities and ideological factions that don't conform to the traditional Left-Right dichotomy emerge and offer people various new, coherent maps to the vastly expanded information territory.
think of the 'cold war'. it's always framed as a 'battle of good and evil' - this is the narrative. hopefully you might agree that the reality was far, far murkier than that - more senseless maiming and killing, so to speak.
unfortunately, as we see currently, simply dismantling narrative itself doesn't seem like a solution to anything, because narratives are more or less the very thing which have driven so much of our history.
you sort of touch on the vital task: making a satisfying story out of what we're going through. the challenge is always finding ways that this story won't justify or entrench shitty elements of society. (one might even say we are in the process of challenging a narrative concerning the role of police)
Thank you for expressing my first impressions. Just to add my opinion, it is not hard to imagine a small leap from preservation of Narrative, where similar arguments are weaponised to justify limiting instead of encouraging
public discourse. All in the name of Database hygiene.
I haven't seen any public discourse worth sharing with others online or on public television in my lifetime.
I'd argue that those who have a narrative worth sharing with the world that'd rival a book written thousands of years ago like Tao Te Ching, are an almost extinct species, numbering in the thousands, not millions, on this planet.
There have never been more highly specialized experts in narrow fields and never been so few human beings who can combine love, compassionate, understanding, ability to communicate and a willingness to fight for the future of our species.
I deleted my response because I've realized I can't even make sense of what the author was trying say, other than that he's discovered an analogy of database and the disorganized mess that is the internet. Yes, and what now? Now we have thousands of words explaining an analogy that leads to nowhere. Well, great - any fool can point out problems in the world and draw analogies, it's the solution that's the tricky bit.
i highly recommend the work of adam curtis, in particular his documentary "bitter lake", and perhaps "hypernormalisation".
he was influenced by baudrillard's critiques of narrative as well, one of baudrillard's essays that always sticks with me is "pataphysics of the year 2000", in which he predicts the 'news loops' in which narratives are obliterated in the 24-hour news cycle of our information age.
in the Matrix, at the beginning of the film, Neo hides some discs in a hollowed-out copy of a Baudrillard work, which isn't coincidental - baudrillard spent alot of time talking about how narratives often were confused with reality, though this is a very simplified explanation
my favorite essays he did to critique narrative were a series he did in the early 90's:
-"The Gulf War Will Not Happen"
-"The Gulf War Isn't Happening"
-"The Gulf War Didn't Happen"
i might be misremembering the exact titles, but the sort of point he was trying to make is that in our minds, the 'gulf war' is a story about iraq invading a country, and us saving the day. The reality of it was so much more complex, involving centuries of background involving way more participants.
Neither we nor the narrative "weavers" can contain or control the truth. If collectively we reject the truth in favor of wickedness and lies, then this is what we can always expect to happen in the future. Insomuch as the old narrative was made up of lies, this also all has an a side that's good and just.
> If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
> II Chronicles 7:13-14
> Jesus saith unto him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."
Yeah, but can you reliably discern garbage that better fits your narrative than truth does? What good is a truth set free in an ocean of lies and half-truths? The truth isn't Good or Just, it just kinda awkwardly IS. If you pursue those NARRATIVES of "Good" and "Just" that have been woven for you, you will find truth only by luck.
> The truth isn't Good or Just, it just kinda awkwardly IS.
To be more specific, it's the truth without a God that "just kinda awkwardly is". It's the absolute truth (which is to say the truth with God actually in the picture) that's without any shadow of a doubt "good and just". The Greek word "LOGOS" provides us with a fantastic description of this idea:
> Logos is a term in Western philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, and religion derived from a Greek word variously meaning "ground", "plea", "opinion", "expectation", "word", "speech", "account", "reason", "proportion", and "discourse".
It's perfectly commensurate with the bible to say that God is truth, logic, reason, speech, order, logos, and that he is good (i.e. not evil).
> In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
> John 1:1-4
We also happen to have free will though (in addition to our sinful, limited human natures), and so he sometimes allows evil to befall us for our own good... Catholic scholar E. Michael Jones has some extremely prescient insights on the "Narrative Collapse" that's currently occurring, and how God can use it all to work for good. :')
> The Coronavirus and the Culture War - E. Michael Jones
In a sense I agree with your point as I read it. I think that pursuing the cultural ethic/narrative you may meet bits and pieces of the truth. But you only meet the truth itself if you pursue it, and it is not always easy to tell the truth apart from what you wish to be the truth.
I think people are forgetting a very basic human deficiency that Jeff Bezos has all his execs understand, and that's Narrative Fallacy.
We put too much pride and ego into what we know, to create a narrative from the data points we see that might or might not have anything to do with reality.
We should put less ego into what we know and acknowledge that we know very little and start from there.
The most powerful thing I have learned in my adult life is this: "Don't cling to your narrative"
Making narratives is a survival technique. We simplify and reduce the truth of our world to abstractions like "narrative" in order to be able to fit them into our brains and operate on them. Mostly it is a lossy compression.
When we observe facts that contradict a narrative, at best they cause us anxiety and doubt, for the narrative is a safe place who's shelter is now known to be a weaker place. At worst, our minds protect us from those facts by not even allowing our eyes to focus upon them.
If you do you best to admit at a gut level that every narrative you have is probably wrong, it gets easier to handle it when new facts emerge, and helps you update your new "working narrative" faster. Don't stop using the tool of narrative, but don't get attached to this one, they break easy and they are easy to replace.
Hmm. Your last paragraph sounds like an OODA loop.
I think the "orient" phase of the loop can be viewed as either fitting the observations into your existing narrative, or else deciding that they don't fit and constructing a new one. The second option is more expensive, so people try to make the first one work even when the observations don't really fit.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] threadI'm trying to think of some good historical examples of Narrative Collapse before and all I'm coming up with is the Gutenberg Bible and the Protestant Reformation. If that _is_ the pattern, then I really hope it doesn't take the %40+ death toll that the 30-years-war inflicted on Central Europe.
I don't think that availability of more data than what the mainstream narrative can handle in a coherent way is new, nor the existence of people having an inclination to find them and get into trouble due to their will to point to such incongruous "facts".
The main difference, to my mind, is that we now have more direct connections between people all around the world, so the laymen direct inter-influence is potentially greater – although mainstream propaganda also gained much power in width, depth and granularity in the same time.
Yes, there are a larger diversity of data easily accessible with the internet. It doesn't necessarily mean there is a proportionally larger interest in looking at them, let alone time to consult them, digest, and synthesize.
We're living in a second Gutenberg moment. I think that epistemic ecosystems, like biological ones, have information carrying capacities — the aggregate ability of its members to produce, exchange, and use information. We all live in one or more such ecosystems. Think: liberal university-educated Bay Area millennials in technology and the kind of information they produce and exchange within that ecosystem. When the information carrying capacity is exceeded, the ecosystem becomes unstable (Narrative collapse) and has to stabilise by splitting into smaller ecosystems that can support coherent, authoritative Narratives.
I think it's useful to look at the first Gutenberg moment. The mass production of books caused an information explosion that exceeded the information carrying capacity of the Catholic ecosystem and resulted in its fracture into smaller Catholic and Protestant ecosystems that can exert enough power to control Narratives (new capacities). We can see a similar scaled-up phenomenon today where countless novel virtual communities and ideological factions that don't conform to the traditional Left-Right dichotomy emerge and offer people various new, coherent maps to the vastly expanded information territory.
unfortunately, as we see currently, simply dismantling narrative itself doesn't seem like a solution to anything, because narratives are more or less the very thing which have driven so much of our history.
you sort of touch on the vital task: making a satisfying story out of what we're going through. the challenge is always finding ways that this story won't justify or entrench shitty elements of society. (one might even say we are in the process of challenging a narrative concerning the role of police)
I'd argue that those who have a narrative worth sharing with the world that'd rival a book written thousands of years ago like Tao Te Ching, are an almost extinct species, numbering in the thousands, not millions, on this planet.
There have never been more highly specialized experts in narrow fields and never been so few human beings who can combine love, compassionate, understanding, ability to communicate and a willingness to fight for the future of our species.
I deleted my response because I've realized I can't even make sense of what the author was trying say, other than that he's discovered an analogy of database and the disorganized mess that is the internet. Yes, and what now? Now we have thousands of words explaining an analogy that leads to nowhere. Well, great - any fool can point out problems in the world and draw analogies, it's the solution that's the tricky bit.
I posit that Terry Pratchett also has a lot to say about narrative causality as it applies to IRL.
he was influenced by baudrillard's critiques of narrative as well, one of baudrillard's essays that always sticks with me is "pataphysics of the year 2000", in which he predicts the 'news loops' in which narratives are obliterated in the 24-hour news cycle of our information age.
in the Matrix, at the beginning of the film, Neo hides some discs in a hollowed-out copy of a Baudrillard work, which isn't coincidental - baudrillard spent alot of time talking about how narratives often were confused with reality, though this is a very simplified explanation
my favorite essays he did to critique narrative were a series he did in the early 90's: -"The Gulf War Will Not Happen" -"The Gulf War Isn't Happening" -"The Gulf War Didn't Happen"
i might be misremembering the exact titles, but the sort of point he was trying to make is that in our minds, the 'gulf war' is a story about iraq invading a country, and us saving the day. The reality of it was so much more complex, involving centuries of background involving way more participants.
> If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
> II Chronicles 7:13-14
> Jesus saith unto him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me."
> John 14:6
To be more specific, it's the truth without a God that "just kinda awkwardly is". It's the absolute truth (which is to say the truth with God actually in the picture) that's without any shadow of a doubt "good and just". The Greek word "LOGOS" provides us with a fantastic description of this idea:
> Logos is a term in Western philosophy, psychology, rhetoric, and religion derived from a Greek word variously meaning "ground", "plea", "opinion", "expectation", "word", "speech", "account", "reason", "proportion", and "discourse".
It's perfectly commensurate with the bible to say that God is truth, logic, reason, speech, order, logos, and that he is good (i.e. not evil).
> In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.
> John 1:1-4
We also happen to have free will though (in addition to our sinful, limited human natures), and so he sometimes allows evil to befall us for our own good... Catholic scholar E. Michael Jones has some extremely prescient insights on the "Narrative Collapse" that's currently occurring, and how God can use it all to work for good. :')
> The Coronavirus and the Culture War - E. Michael Jones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pKxa_5dIfY
> Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMTfBPw6M5c
> E. Michael Jones - The History of Logos and the Logos of History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4cWZ_6myL8
We put too much pride and ego into what we know, to create a narrative from the data points we see that might or might not have anything to do with reality.
We should put less ego into what we know and acknowledge that we know very little and start from there.
Making narratives is a survival technique. We simplify and reduce the truth of our world to abstractions like "narrative" in order to be able to fit them into our brains and operate on them. Mostly it is a lossy compression.
When we observe facts that contradict a narrative, at best they cause us anxiety and doubt, for the narrative is a safe place who's shelter is now known to be a weaker place. At worst, our minds protect us from those facts by not even allowing our eyes to focus upon them.
If you do you best to admit at a gut level that every narrative you have is probably wrong, it gets easier to handle it when new facts emerge, and helps you update your new "working narrative" faster. Don't stop using the tool of narrative, but don't get attached to this one, they break easy and they are easy to replace.
I think the "orient" phase of the loop can be viewed as either fitting the observations into your existing narrative, or else deciding that they don't fit and constructing a new one. The second option is more expensive, so people try to make the first one work even when the observations don't really fit.