Why the Narrative Refuses to Die

Most people seek comfort over truth, every time. Those of us who challenge the narrative are able to find comfort in discomfort.

Nothing dies harder than a bad idea. (Julia Cameron)

I read that line about ten years ago (in a book that had surprisingly nothing to do with history or philosophy or current events) and thought:

Boy howdy, ain’t that the truth.

Perhaps never more evident than right now.

I STILL know people that believe:

·         The FDA/CDC/NIH/WHO are uninfiltrated, ethical agencies, filled with truth-seeking scientists incapable of error, devoted to keeping people safe, looking out for their best interests, regulating pharma, and rigorously monitoring human health and the threats to it, and making the best recommendations known to humanity.

·         The intelligence agencies and military (and NGOs on their payroll) had nothing to do with orchestrating the pandemic response—it was all just the agencies from the previous bullet point doing “science”.

·         Lockdowns, social distancing, and masks are 100% effective at preventing the spread of virulent respiratory disease. To the extent they did not work was the fault of the non-compliant. We used to think these things were ineffective, but now we don’t, because the “science changed”. Thanks to the pandemic, we’ve gone from ignorance to enlightenment on these matters. Praise Science.

·         COVID was the worst plague ever to afflict humanity.

·         C19 vaccines saved millions of lives, and ended the pandemic.

·         C19 vaccines did no harm – or “extremely rare” harm—or, in the very least, the “benefits outweighed the risks”.

·         Pharmaceutical companies used to be fraudsters and criminals guilty of harming people for profit, but they redeemed themselves and really came through for the pandemic. (Yes they profited like never before, but this time they EARNED it).

·         Bill Gates used to be a ruthless criminal who profited off of monopolizing tactics and market manipulation, but now he’s a redeemed philanthropist who gives money away to Science for the good of humanity (and expects nothing in return).

·          “Disease” is just a matter of cosmic bad luck, unrelated to nutrition or lifestyle choices. “Medicine” equals pharmaceuticals. “Health” means having one’s meds and shots all up to date.

·         CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, etc., are reputable, unbiased, trusted sources of true information. Independent media is where people go for misinformation.

·         No actual censorship took place during the pandemic. That is just whining and right-wing conspiracy talk. Any de-platforming and banning was just private companies enforcing their code of conduct policies and removing harmful content or “misinformation”. We still have freedom of speech in America, and anyone who infringes on that right would certainly be removed from power for breaking the First Amendment.

·         The greatest existential threat to humanity is Donald Trump. (Followed closely by Vladimir Putin).

They believe these things.

Still.

Do they possess evidence for any of these ideas?

Of course not.

The narrative-believer’s “evidence” is that trusted faces spoke these ideas from their TV screens, or algorithmically-beamed them into their social media feeds.

Which, of course, makes the narrative-believers correspond exactly to the depiction of the prisoners in the Allegory of the Cave.

The prisoners are watching a crafted story depicted in shadow puppets on the cave wall, mistaking it for reality.

And just like in the Allegory, when I or anyone else suggests that the prisoners question the shadows, or examine who is casting them, or what their motives might be, or try to direct their attention to a non-shadow reality that exists outside the Cave… we are attacked by the prisoners.

They cannot stand to have their story version of reality questioned. They would rather silence, or kill, the questioner.

Which suits the casters of the shadows just fine.

The Allegory, after all, was a pro-totalitarian story. It was Plato reassuring the would-be tyrant: don’t worry about those pesky critical thinkers—if you tell a well-crafted-enough tale, you won’t need to mobilize a single soldier, or fire a single arrow—your populace will take care of the dissidents for you.

Props to Plato. When he’s right, he’s right.

You and I can display all the narrative-destroying charts, data, studies, pictures, government documents, patents, and DoD contracts we can think of, we can replay video of villainous words coming out of villainous mouths, we can point to destruction of human life actively taking place (and being criminally covered-up)…

Does any of it matter to the narrative-believer?

Of course not.

All that matters is The Story.

And subliminally woven into the Story like invisible threads are a set of instructions: attack anyone who dares question it.

The Story provides all the ammunition the narrative-believers could ever need, in the form of thought-terminating cliches such as: “nutty”, “paranoid”, “pseudoscientific”, “crank”, “conspiracy” ,“quack”, “lies”, and “tinfoil hats”.

Or, really, whatever cliché implies the questioner’s lack of sanity. “Gone off the deep end”, for example.

All of which, of course, gives the Prisoner/Narrative-Believer the psychological comfort of believing they are on the side of smart people who are too smart to fall for “nonsense”.

So The Story lives on.

The narrative refuses to die.

The thing is, I don’t think this Story is even particularly well-crafted. It is, at turns, ludicrous, nonsensical, inconsistent, pandering, bleak, brutally in conflict with the facts, and blatantly self-serving.

But that doesn’t matter.

The genius of the propagandist is not that they tell a story which is convincing, or logical, or consistent, or even good.

The genius is that it is comforting.

Humans are not a rational animal. We are a comfort-seeking animal.

The main place we seek comfort is in comforting stories.

The Story underlying the narrative is simply this:

Life is a scary hellscape that is trying to kill you and everyone you love at every turn, but fear not, you are well-looked after by an omniscient class who know what ‘s best for you. You won’t be needing that pesky freedom anymore. Indeed, it is the source of all that is bad, scary, and dangerous. Instead, simply lie down in this Matrix pod—we’ll take care of the rest.

Comforting, right?

But there’s an even deeper form of comfort going on here, too.

Safety in numbers.

In a recent conversation, Jordan Peterson explained there are really only two types of fear: fear of death, and fear of non-belonging (which is also, indirectly, a translated fear of death).

Fitting in with the herd is an old, probably evolutionary, impulse. To stray from the herd is to be picked off by predators. Humans survive most things by division-of-labor and social cooperation. To stand apart from society, therefore, is to invite one’s own non-survival.

So when the herd starts climbing into cattle cars everyone else tends to follow right along.

Psychological comfort outweighs reality-orientation any day.

Think of the multiple lines of comfort offered by the narrative:

                1. You don’t need to worry. There are smart people, Experts, who know better than you, who are looking out for you and your best interests, trying to keep you safe.

                2. You don’t need to expend effort. All the toil has been done for you by the corporations. All you have to do is click your handy device and tell us what you want, and it will show up.

                3. You don’t need to think. All the facts are known, and all the research has been done for you, and it confirms everything we’ve been saying.

                4. You don’t need to worry about your young, either. Our education system confirms everything we’re saying, too.

                5. You don’t need to feel alone. You are part of a herd who supports you.

                6. You need never feel the discomfort of someone disagreeing with you. Disagreement, we have decided, is “disinformation”, and fear not, we’re actively working to eliminate it.

                7. The only enemies are the ones who question 1-6. Don’t worry, we’ll tell you who they are, and instruct you to direct your daily Two Minutes Hate toward them.

Now, think about the discomfort we skeptics are offering as an alternative:

                1. The institutions you’ve trusted your whole life up to this point not only do not have your best interests at heart, but are captured by forces that are actively trying to indoctrinate, harm, impoverish, or murder you. AND they are massively powerful, well-positioned, and well-funded.

                2.  You will have to start expending more effort than you ever have in your life. You will have to find alternate (and uncertain) stores for your wealth. You will have to trade with local growers and merchants. You will have to toil to grow your own food. You will have to do any number of massively inconvenient things to step outside the system, since convenience is the currency the system will buy you with. And all of this is subject to your error, miscalculation, and failure.

                3. You will need to do your own research, read widely and deeply. You will need to cast aside many readily available and previously trusted sources of information, and exercise discernment about where and who you get your info from. You will have the discomfort of being wrong at times, and have to correct yourself, toss out your cherished beliefs, and re-think things again from scratch.

                4. You will have to take your kids out of their schools, or find alternate schools, or teach them yourselves. You will have to devote massive hours of your day to this, which will be hard, frustrating, overwhelming, and probably involve some tears. It will be costly, financially and emotionally. And even after all that you might fail to provide them a decent education. And they will find themselves without any accreditation that society will accept, so the difficulty will be passed on to them.

                5. You will face the disapproval of family members, friends, work acquaintances, and anyone else who still participates in the system and who sing its praises like good citizens. They will think of you poorly, and call you crazy. You will have no tribe, no family, no clan to feel welcomed by. You will be outsiders, and have to face life’s challenges alone.

                6. You will have to disagree with people constantly, and argue, and fight, and voice your dissent, and stand your ground against throngs of hateful voices. Welcome to your life of constantly feeling embattled.

                7. You will be the enemy that society is directed to hate. They will speak of criminalizing your ordinary activities, or banning you from public life, or of imprisoning, or killing you. And blinded by the Story which convinces them of their own virtue, they may do more than just speak about it.

Got all that in your pipe? K, get ready to take a big puff…

The tyrants are offering certainty, safety, ease, and belonging.

We are offering uncertainty, possible failure, toil, and rejection.

Any wonder then, that our facts and charts and questions and skepticism are met with thought-arresting cliches and glares and gnashed teeth and threats?

We’re talking about inviting turbulence, change, rooting out corruption in institutions and fighting to form our own alternatives.

Whatever else it may be, it is not a “nice” message

There’s nothing whatsoever comforting about it.

In contemplating this, I began to speculate ways we might soften the dissident message, or turn the comfort-discomfort relationship on its head, to offer people a message of comfort and ease, rather than a coming struggle, and thus entice more prisoners out into the light.

But you know what?

Fuck that.

Every avenue along this line of thought ended up in a dead end. It seemed wrong. And I know why.

Nearly everything I’ve written on this substack, I now realize, has been about some form of embracing discomfort.

Embracing fear.

Embracing courage and defiance.

Embracing uncertainty (including the possibility of being wrong.)

Embracing aloneness (including abandoning tribes which no longer serve you, or are trying to harm you).

Embracing difficulty and effort.

Embracing pain as a teacher.

Our species seems to have lost these qualities somewhere along the way. People in every other age were acquainted with hardship and discomfort. Thus, they knew the importance of a fighting spirit and standing one’s ground.

Can you imagine a Patrick Henry (“Give me liberty, or give me death!”) today?

Is it any accident that a society which has known such comfort and ease is now easing right into global tyranny like it’s a warm bath?

No wonder that citizens of such a society would be elbowing one another aside to see who can be enslaved the fastest, all whilst singing the praises of the Holy Trinity…

Comfort

Security

Convenience

Ease has made us eminently enslaveable.

The dissidents, therefore, are the only hope.

The people that I have come to know and love during this time are those who are comfortable within their discomfort.

They see pain as a teacher.

They know the truth doesn’t have to be comforting. It just has to be true.

They are comfortable in the discomfort of standing alone, if need be.

They are motivated by the massive discomfort we see in the alternatives. They see life in Dystopia as no life at all.

Some of us are comfortable with questioning, arguing, fighting, dissent, defiance, non-compliance.

Some of us just seem to be wired this way.

Some of our nervous systems seemed primed to flight, and some to fight. And we are probably gathered here, considering these words together, because we are part of the latter group.

It’s the likely psychological underpinning that forms the karass described by MAA here.

Letter to My Karass

But what about the rest? And let’s be honest… the majority?

They will not get on board with a message of discomfort, pain, and dissent.

We can be strategic. We can be persuasive. We can be truthful.

We can answer both primary fears. We can show them that they are…

1. better placed for survival by seeking out the truth, by rejecting what murderous “experts” have in store for them, that to mindlessly go along with these experts is to commit suicide by compliance;

and:

2. there are millions (and growing) of us who will be a far, far better tribe to them. That really, the tribe they think they belong to is actually a tiny, elite minority who see the mass of us as cattle to be deceived, used, or disposed of at their whim.

We can show them that they can take control of their own physical and mental health. That the knowledge is freely available for those who will hear it. They don’t need a class of moronic/murderous “experts” for this.

The Antidote to Suffering in the Modern World

We can show them that masterless people can live in harmony, and prosperity, and create beautiful alternatives to the “comfortable” dystopia  they’re currently being offered.

But none of this is going to be easy.

Plato was right. Damn his dark, totalitarian heart.

The prisoners will not be easily wakened.

And that’s okay.

I titled this substack think for yourself for a reason. I think it’s the only hope.

Society needs the critical thinkers, the questioners, the freethinkers, the dissenters—they just don’t know they need them.

Trying to eliminate the dissidents from your society is like trying to rid your body of white blood cells. Just see what happens.

Narratives do change.

Frustratingly, slowly, painfully.

Almost fifteen years or so ago now I eliminated sugar and processed food and restricted my carbohydrate intake to fruit and vegetable sources, and began to notice immediate health benefits. I adopted what at the time was called an “ancestral” diet, which people around me referred to as a “crazy” fad diet. I told them their standard American diet of sugars and sodas and cheap carbs was crazy, since it was linked with every disease known to mankind.

I was told it was dangerous and I was falling prey to bad information on the internet. (Sound familiar? 🤔)

But too many people were trying it and noticing benefits, including ending lifelong pharmaceutical addictions. The ancestral diet became known as “paleo” and “primal” and “carnivore”, which then became known as “keto”, which is now on the lips of everyone and their aunt… and now they all sneer at the unhealthy standard American diet.

Go figure.

Narrative change—though brutal, slow, painful—does happen.

Not everyone needs to be convinced. I think all we need is a critical mass of people, a tipping point, who see begin to see the threat, rather than the comfort, that their masters represent.

And who begin to see questioning and alternative-seeking as smart, rational, and survival-oriented.

Then they will seek comfort in narrative rejection rather than in narrative belief, and before long there will be too many of us to silence.

Now, just imagine that story coming true.

Buy the author a cup of joe. Everyone knows the key to overcoming tyranny is caffeine.

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