The Cultural Narrative

How to Create, Manipulate, and Destroy Our Shared Consensual Reality

Have you ever put any thought into why different societies tend to have shared cultural values and norms? To judge by the number of complaints on social media, it seems like every day people encounter some aspect of society that they would like to change. But most people never actually manage to implement the changes that they would like to see, because few people have really put in much thought into why these norms exist. Societies and cultures are like machinery: it’s very hard to fix them if you don’t understand what all the moving parts do.

Here is a concept that is very important for us to understand: at any given point in time, no society will ever have a perfectly accurate picture of reality. There are always gaps in their understanding: mental blind spots that go unchallenged because nobody even thinks of examining them. For example, do people have a god-given right to have an unlimited number of kids? In the modern world, we don’t even think of asking that question, but in the overpopulated resource-starved future that scientists tell us is coming, this will undoubtedly be a very relevant question to ask. Do corporations have the right to fire employees for any reason that they want? Back in the days of Henry Ford, nobody would even have thought to ask that question, but in the modern world where insane social media lynch mobs can get people fired over a decades-old tweet, this question is being asked more and more frequently. The problem with society having mental blind spots is that they seldom get challenged because people don’t even think about the possibility that these ideological paradigms might be inaccurate. These ideas and values are wrapped into people’s fundamental understanding of the world, and even questioning these values feels strange and shocking to them.

Here are a few questions that are mental blindspots in our current society, but which are now starting to be cross-examined more rigorously.

Does every person have a right to live? What about bad people who exploit others? Does their continued existence really benefit the rest of us?

Is free speech really free if it can be suppressed by social media CEOs or other people with money and power? If so, shouldn’t we describe our society more accurately as an oligarchy rather than a democracy?

If other countries hurt us indirectly through overfishing and environmental pollution, do we have a right to punish them through war and sanctions? Or is it totally OK for other countries to hurt us as long as it is done through indirect means such as environmental damage or negligence?

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. These are moral questions that are seldom litigated in our society, but perhaps they should be. Societies change and evolve over time, and the ideological paradigms that worked well for one era (such as the Industrial Revolution) often prove to be useless and outdated in another era (such as the Digital Age). Periodically, societies go through a period of transition where their mental blind spots get questioned. For example, in 1776, America forcefully interrogated the Divine Right of Kings, an ideological concept that had experienced very little pushback for the past several centuries. In 1789, France relitigated this concept as well, albeit in a more violent way. Russia would eventually follow suit in 1917.

The shared set of values and beliefs that a society holds at any given moment in time is something that I call the Cultural Narrative: a story that every society tells itself to explain why the world works the way that it does. These narratives are never 100% accurate, and every Cultural Narrative has these “mental blind spots” - inconsistent or hypocritical parts of the ideological narrative that go unchallenged because they are useful… right up until they are no longer useful, at which point they get eliminated, such as during the American Revolution or the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. You may have noticed from these examples that a lot of the time, changes to the Cultural Narrative are accompanied by violence. This is not coincidental. Moneyed elites who occupy the top strata of society tend to be thoroughly invested in the status quo, so any shift in the existing paradigm is terrifying to them because a massive ideological change to the status quo means they might lose their position at the top. Thus, instead of trying to adapt to changes in the Cultural Narrative, they use increasingly repressive measures to suppress the inevitable ideological changes that take place within society. This is about as effective as trying to stop a pressure cooker from boiling over by screwing the lid on tightly instead of lowering the heat. It may seem to work for a short period of time, but ultimately all that heat and pressure has to escape somehow, and clamping down on it simply changes the output of this chemical reaction from a gradual venting of pressure into a violent explosion. If our ruling class was smarter about their own self-preservation, they would structure a society where changes in the ideological narrative could happen without violence - but because of the long-term mentally degenerative effects of assortative mating combined with the narcissistic self-delusion of being surrounded by yes-men, most of our wealthy elites are unlikely to win any prizes for intelligence in the near future. Their success usually isn’t due to talent or hard work (as they claim), but simply because their entrenched financial advantages give them such a huge head start over everybody else that it is impossible to dislodge them from their privileged position on the social hierarchy. In a true meritocracy where people genuinely got the outcomes that their intelligence or efforts deserved, most of these people would be dog food by now.

Understanding how the Cultural Narrative works is very useful because being able to identify when you are in the middle of a shift in the Cultural Narrative means that you may be able to ride that wave to power through demagoguery or direct it against your political enemies. In fact, there are some schools of thought that suggest you can even manipulate shifts in the cultural narrative, accelerating them to arrive faster and more violently than they normally would, or mitigating them to be slower and less chaotic than they otherwise would be. The purpose of this blog post is to do a low-level FAQ about these tactics and methodologies, so that you can best exploit the shift in the existing Cultural Narrative that Western Civilization is currently going through.

When do changes in the Cultural Narrative happen?

Changes in the Cultural Narrative begin when the existing social system can no longer provide a reasonably high quality of life for the majority of its citizens. Most people are willing to believe whatever Cultural Narrative is spoon-fed to them as long as the dominant social structure which dispenses this Cultural Narrative is able to provide adequate food, housing, and medical care for them. Once these perks stop, people will actively begin searching for a superior model of reality that may meet their needs better than the existing system, and they will seek to make this narrative the dominant one. Because crisis events (such as Covid-19) make it more difficult for societies to provide for the well-being of their citizenry, they tend to trigger rapid changes in the Cultural Narrative.

How can you gain political power during a change in the Cultural Narrative?

Offer people a superior narrative that will leave them better off mentally, emotionally, and financially than the existing Cultural Narrative. If you anticipate the shift in the Cultural Narrative before anybody else and preach your superior narrative early and often, then there is a high probability that the narrative that you put forwards will be selected to be the new Cultural Narrative, particularly if your narrative can successfully remedy the flaw that the existing Cultural Narrative fails to address. It takes a lot of time and effort to build a logically coherent Cultural Narrative that is superior to the existing one, so getting the “early mover advantage” is very beneficial in terms of making sure your ideology gains traction and mindshare. If your Cultural Narrative ends up getting adopted by society and goes mainstream, you will end up looking like a visionary heroically preaching the truth while your opponents go down in history as evil reactionaries. This foothold in the ideological paradigm can easily be parleyed into political power, either through endorsements or elections.

Here is an example of what a Cultural Narrative shift looks like. In a previous era when poverty was less common in Western Civilization, giving substantial development funds to the developing world wasn’t a big deal. To be perfectly candid, it was the easiest way to pacify the local population enough to extract the minerals and metals needed to maintain a technologically advanced society. It didn’t really matter that a lot of these development funds were appropriated by corrupt warlords, because there was plenty of money to spare. Since every society needs a Cultural Narrative to justify the actions they need to take in order to sustain their continued existence, the Cultural Narrative at that time was that Western Civilization had greatly wronged the developing world through the practices of colonialism and slavery, so contributing these developmental funds was the least we could do to “make it up to them.” This story ignores the fact that the developing world practiced its own forms of colonialism and slavery well before Western Civilization arrived at its shores, and that the developing world is currently the primary perpetrator of the worst atrocities involved in modern day slavery. But that’s OK - the Cultural Narrative didn’t have to be logical or make sense because that isn’t the role of a Cultural Narrative. As a society, we had an agenda that involved giving funds to the developing world, so we needed a Cultural Narrative to morally justify doing what was in our best interests to do anyway. In a way, the Cultural Narrative is just a way for societies to rationalize their own self-interested choices in a way that makes their selfishness sound more moral and high-minded.

Today, living in the economic downturn created by Covid, poverty is far more common in Western Civilization. That makes it a lot more difficult for western politicians to justify giving continued development funds to the developing world, because such behavior creates civic unrest at home where money is already tight. Meanwhile, the ongoing effects of climate change are starting to create waves of mass migration that not only cause competition for jobs but also strain the resources available for the social safety net. This is an unsustainable situation. In times of great prosperity, it is fairly easy for politicians to justify giving resources freely to the developing world, but when people in your own society are dying of preventable illnesses while illegal immigrants are taking their jobs, it’s very hard to make an adequate case for that to voters. Simultaneously, Western Civilization now faces a lot more competition from other great powers who want to gain influence in the developing world, so at the same time that we are under the most financial pressure, the governments that we want to influence are raising the prices for their bribes to astronomical rates. This confluence of events is unsustainable, which means that Western Civilization will have to take more aggressive measures in order to survive the hardships that are ahead of us. Since Cultural Narratives are created to morally justify necessary courses of action, I expect that the Cultural Narrative will gradually shift to become more nationalistic and less globalist, in order to rationalize the more aggressive and authoritarian behaviors that our governments will need to take in order to survive. And indeed, if you look at trends for the past several years, populism and nationalism have been swiftly on the rise. This signifies a shift in the Cultural Narrative.

How can you hurt your enemies during a change in the Cultural Narrative?

A shift in the Cultural Narrative is essentially a shift in all of society’s morals and values. Suddenly, behaviors which seemed normal and reasonable under the old paradigm are viewed as evil and monstrous under the new paradigm. One example of such a paradigm shift was the #MeToo narrative which predominantly impacted Hollywood. While it was once considered normal and acceptable for a certain degree of sexual harassment to take place under the previous cultural paradigm (particularly in Hollywood, a place where ambitious people are often willing to sexually compromise themselves in order to get ahead), such behavior came to be viewed as evil and monstrous under the new Cultural Narrative. People like Harvey Weinstein or Roman Polanski went from being the celebrated heroes of the old cultural paradigm to being hated and despised under the new cultural paradigm.

Because most people are not particularly adept at sensing when a shift in the Cultural Narrative is occurring, they often do not react to these changes with the haste and vigilance that they should. They have a tendency to push the values of the old Cultural Narrative which is dying out rather than the values of the new Cultural Narrative that will replace it. You should encourage your enemies to do this, because the more publicly you can associate your enemies with the values of the older and outdated Cultural Narrative, the easier it is to demonize them and brand them as evil monsters once the new Cultural Narrative is firmly locked in place.

How can you artificially trigger a shift in the Cultural Narrative?

Because shifts in the Cultural Narrative tend to occur around crisis events, setting crisis events into motion is an effective (albeit dangerous) way to trigger shifts in the cultural narrative. Legal ways to do this include spreading infohazards and distributing dangerous advancements in technology (because culture is always downstream from technology), as well as using memetics to manipulate political outcomes in wildly unconventional ways. Illegal ways to do this involve terrorism and revolution. I cannot endorse these latter two methods, for fairly obvious reasons.

Anyway, those are the answers to the most frequently asked questions about the cultural narrative - if you have any more, feel free to ask them in the comments. Hopefully this quick FAQ makes it easier and more fun for you to propagate your undoubtedly great ideas and help them go viral throughout Western civilization. For more interesting tips on how to change the cultural paradigm and spread your values, don’t forget to share and subscribe!