Humanity dominated by narrative

6 min read CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

The more inner work you do and the more awareness you bring to your own internal processes, the more you understand the extent to which human consciousness is dominated by mental narrative. And the more you understand the extent to which it is dominated, the more aware you become of how much power someone could gain over other people by controlling those narratives.

Those who haven't done much inner work tend to assume that everyone perceives reality as it really is, and then form good or bad views about that reality based on how good or bad they are as human beings—here, defined as “good” is “closely aligned with one's own worldview” and “bad” is “distant from one's own worldview.”

But, the more inner work you do, the more you find this position unsustainable. After a while, you begin to understand that no one sees reality as it is. Not even you. What we are perceiving are a bunch of mental stories that we have formed about the world, based on information that we have absorbed through prescriptive filters greatly distorted by our conditioning, prejudices and cognitive habits.

Psychonauts Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson called these filters “reality tunnels”. His theory is based on the belief that people never experience objective reality, only the inside of their own tunnel.

What is clear is that humans are very far from the role of rational actors that we attribute to ourselves. We are not creatures who execute rational actions of our own volition in response to logical understandings of our world. We are confused little primates with a bunch of fairy tales about reality resonating inside our skulls that whisper to us our own highly conditioned interpretations of the information assimilated by our own highly conditioned perceptual habits. And we react to them based on highly conditioned subconscious driving forces within ourselves that we do not understand.

When one sees and understands this clearly, one also understands how easy it would be to manipulate those confused little primates for one's own benefit. All you would have to do would be to exert some influence on the stories that govern your consciousness.

And of course, that's exactly what happens. Some humans who are a little smarter and less empathetic than the rest find that they can use psychological manipulation to bend the stories in people's heads in their favor, whether it's for money, sex, loyalty, or obedience.

The most powerful humans in the world are those who have come to understand that real power lies not in who has the most votes, money, troops or weapons, but in who controls the narrative. They understand that power is controlling what happens, but that absolute power is controlling what people think about what happens.

Once you control the stories in people's heads, you can control the direction of the flows of votes, money, troops and weapons. As humans are story-dominated creatures, if you can master our stories, you can master us.

So these clever controllers set out master the stories propping up narrative control at every opportunity. buying media, manipulating news, funding think tanks corrupting, modifying algorithms, classifying inconvenient information, imprisoning independent journalists…

All of this means that they can choose which are the dominant stories about what happens in the world, what we humans think, what we talk about, how we work, act and vote.

And the more inner work you do, the more it makes sense that everyone is so influenced by these manipulations, and the more it makes sense that the world is in the mess it is in. Because you understand that while these dominators are a little smarter than other humans, they are no less confused. They themselves are still dominated by mental stories and interact with the world with a high level of unconsciousness, driven by internal forces they do not understand.

The dominators are still confused little primates who walk blindly through life, like the rest of the humans. And they are just as scared and miserable as anyone else. The problem is that they also control the world, and are leading it toward annihilation through nuclear war and environmental collapse.

And the more inner work you do, the clearer it becomes that that doesn't have to happen, as you come to conclude from your own experience that humans have the potential to become a conscious species that is no longer dominated by mental narrative. It is clear that we have the ability to bring to consciousness the subconscious forces within us for healing and integration.

The ability to change our relationship with the mental narrative, from one in which thoughts dominate our experience to one in which thought is just a tool that can be picked up when it is useful and put down again when it is finished.

It is evident that the egocentric experience through which most humans interact with life is based entirely on a psychological illusion that can be seen and set aside.

And the good thing is that ordinary people who have done a lot of inner work can see all this for themselves, while dominators whose lives are wrapped up in ego and mental narrative cannot see it. There is something going on behind the scenes, in the quieter spaces of our species, that the dominators know nothing about and couldn't understand anything even if they did know something. And it poses a direct threat to your entire control system.

If humanity can stop being dominated by mental narrative, then the psychological strings that dominators pull to manipulate us will evaporate. They will no longer be able to dominate the way people think, speak, work, act and vote, because the entire framework they have been using to do so will cease to exist.

I don't know if our species will emerge from its trance in time to choose between the dilemma of adapting or dying that is clearly asked of us at this crucial moment in history. But I have no doubt that we have the potential in us to do it. With enough inner work, anyone can recognize this for themselves as well.