Narrative

In the beginning there was the Word.

Our world begins as language, thoughts, symbols, scraps of meaning communicated between the scattered identities that make up each individual. To live we organize them into coherent structures, forms, sequences, patterns. We call these structures stories or narratives, and from them we construct the meanings of our lives.

Everything is a story, a narrative arc from beginning to middle to end, inciting incident to rising action to climax to falling action to resolution. Everything, from the new blockbuster movie to the report on the evening news to our daily routines, is a story. That is to say, it is not reality that is made up of stories, but our interpretations of it. Our world is language, which become stories.

Society is flawed. This is not in and of itself cause for alarm, for society will always be flawed. Communication is asymptotic, but so is everything else. Everything approaches purity, perfection without reaching it, and so everything is flawed, people perhaps most of all. The great cause is not to reach perfection but to always progress towards it--also impossible, as is any absolute, any perfect record, but we must try.

Some recognize that the current society is perhaps more flawed than it was before, that we are falling backwards away from perfection. Some--I--might even say that society is broken, soon to be in pieces, toppling off a precipice with no hope of returning to the way it once was. (But this is not news, for nothing can return to the way it once was. We can only move forward, never back. The failing of Michel Duval, the wisdom of Hiroko Ai.)

Some therefore attack society, seek ways to subvert it and overturn it and perhaps even destroy it in order to raise up a new order to replace it. Some foolishly believe they can go right where everyone else went wrong; they are arrogant and stupid. But they are right to try. Unfortunately they do not understand how deep the problem runs.

The most naive attack with their idealism at politics and government, the supposed savior of the people and preventor of injustice. They cannot see that any institution, given enough time, given enough power, will cease to pursue the principles on which it was founded, instead pursuing only its own self-preservation. The same is often true of people, but not always. It is true of all people who become loyal to a symbol instead of an ethic, to a god or a nation or a leader instead of the principles which they represent.

The less naive, then, attack the institutions. They see the great institutions as perpetuating their own power--or, more precisely, the power of those in control of the institutions--at the expense of everyone else, a small elite destroying the world of the common people. This is the common subverted myth, the story of the cynics and the radicals, that the implements of control must be overthrown and a new government established in the interests of the people. But they too are wrong.

There are only a few who recognize how deep the wound cuts, how much we bleed, how great a feat it would be to save us. For the institutions that control society are merely symptoms of a larger problem, a systemic disease, a fundamental failure of the fundamental shared narratives and stories that make up our common worldview. It is in these, the foundation of our culture, our society, our world, that the flaw burns, and as long as it persists no revolution will be able to save us, to prevent institutions identical in intent if not in name rising up to replace those lost.

Changing the narrative--changing a culture--would a Herculean task. Perhaps even impossible--perhaps the flaw is in the most basic narrative, the narrative encoded into our genes and shared by all human beings, the true common factor that binds us all together. If that is flawed, nothing short of genetic engineering can save us (and then we would not be us anymore, but something different. Transhumans, posthumans, metahumans.) But if it is not in our genes, if it is the result of millenia of cultural build-up and syncretization and evolution, then it may be possible to change it.

It will not be possible to fix it, to repair it; it is likely that it was never unflawed in the first place, and we cannot go back in any case. To change it we must break it, tear down the old narrative and create from the basic fabric of humanity a new narrative with the contribution of all humans. It would be messy, almost certainly doomed to failure, but we must try, and try, and try again, forever; for we will never fully succeed. Always the narrative will be corrupted, and always we must be vigilant to create a new. That is the ultimate narrative, the hero's journey, the human narrative: the creation of a new order to replace the old, to maintain the fragile balance of life and death, freedom and safety, power and not-power.

Speaking in such abstract terms allows us to conveniently slip by the matter of actually defining how we can go about breaking the narrative. Perhaps this is why the revolutionaries do not directly attack the narrative, and instead attack its symptoms: the task is simply to vast to conceive, too difficult to change such a monolithic and gargantuan construct as human culture. Cultural change is glacial, after all, on the order of decades if not centuries. Technology has accelerated change but not in any way that can be directed.

Besides, is it even right to think of such things? The narrative is the most fundamental element of our culture. Is it right, moral, ethical to attempt to change our culture, to direct the driving force of millions (billions) to purposes of a few? If we could accomplish such a feat, would we not be no better than those we seek to defeat? Perhaps worse, for surely while they have manipulated our culture, created obsessions (witness the coolhunting fabrication of marketing, and its expanding hold on us) and scapegoats (the Litmus issues of gay marriage and abortion, the wars, even the political parties themselves), they have never affected society on such a mass scale as we hope to. They have slowly morphed culture, added to it, shifted it slightly to add profits to themselves. We intend to overthrow the narrative, destroy it and replace it with something altogether new and alien.

If they are sick, is it not their right to refuse a cure? Who are we to impose our morality on others, even if their current morality is also not their own? We must not act to control. We must not act for power. We must act for ourselves, as individuals. We must each individually take actions to break the narrative within our own lives. We may speak to others, but only of the truth as we speak it. We must not lie or manipulate or rhetoricize. These are systems of control, and reinforce the narrative of control. We cannot induce others to be individuals; they must witness us and choose to break the narrative themselves. It will not happen quickly; for many it will never happen. Our revolution will likely never overturn the majority. Those in control will remain so. But we may create a vocal minority, a dissident sect that refuses, fights back, throws of the shackles, and that may be enough. It will have to be enough. From such seeds may rise a new narrative, to infect the greater culture and overturn the old; but likely not. We must be content only to save ourselves, and hope that others may save themselves as well, seeing our example. That is the only hope we have.

Break the narrative. Escape control. Live without constraint. (Carpe diem?)