Panscription: The Struggle For Reality (part 1)
Tales and traps
[Good news! My new book is currently published! It’s called Rise of the Beast, and it analyzes the meaning of the “Beast” of Revelation from a fresh perspective. If you enjoyed Maybe Everyone Is Wrong, Fire In The Rabbit Hole, or this Substack, I think you’ll really enjoy it. I will be giving away the material for free in the coming days and weeks, but if you’re like me and enjoy having a physical copy, please order one and leave a review telling me what you think. Thank you for supporting my work.]
Today’s topic is a bit obscure, but I need to get it off my chest. Maybe after writing such a compact book on a specific topic, I want to let my writing impulses wander again!
Narrative creatures
One view of mankind is that we are a story-oriented creature, incapable of seeing reality objectively. Stories are always subjective because we need to decide what to omit from them. When does a story begin and end, and what’s relevant along the way? A human mind has to edit reality to make it meaningful. Reality without narrative would be meaningless, infinitely complex and multi-faceted, with every passing moment only compounding the question without providing answers.
But there’s another level to this view of mankind as a slave to narrative, because the ability to tell stories depends on language. Some believe humanity’s ability to even comprehend is limited by the words they inherit. A human without language is an infant, reacting to internal and external stimuli, making inarticulate associations, and using emotion to process everything. Language unlocks the option of distancing ourselves from raw sensory data and emotional instincts. We begin to make distinctions, see things as abstractions, and sort everything into categories, which let’s us theorize and form relationships between ideas. We gain the building blocks with which to construct stories. In other words, language lets us “zoom out” from our own narrow firsthand experience and consider foreign perspectives, specifically because we share words and agree on their meaning.1
Society as conspiracy
Our acceptance of terminology is a form of submission to—or at least cooperation with—a cultural framework. We buy in to their building blocks. If we embrace a term to define some aspect of (our) reality, how can we not be influenced by the implications? For example, the whole phenomena of “wokeness” is about shifting the way we use language to subvert traditional power dynamics in society. This is not even subtle. The word “woke” itself was introduced in order to frame this ideology as a positive shift: they are waking up, which implies everyone else is still asleep and will eventually join them if they become loud and obnoxious enough. Predictably, those who oppose woke ideology agree to use the term “woke”, but do so ironically to point out how deluded they are. The weaponization of language is just one part of the never ending battle for reality, but only now is it becoming unavoidable: we are at the point where governments are politically mandating the use of “pronouns”. What’s next? Outlawing verbs? Taxing nouns? Whoever controls the story controls reality, insofar as reality is subjective to humans, and whoever controls language controls the stories that can be told. Fighting over terms and definitions is something scholars have done in their ivory towers since cross-cultural literature began, but it has now escalated to the point where billionaires are funding psychological wars to control what words people are allowed to say. Of course, this danger was George Orwell’s key insight.
Two storytellers have influenced my own view of civilization more than anyone. They are Carroll Quigley (see above picture) and Rene Girard (Things Hidden Since The Foundation of the World).
Girard points out that civilizations tell themselves stories about how they originated, and that these stories are in fact distortions of real past events meant to reframe an unpleasant reality: that of a violent conspiracy to blame the victims of their guilty ancestors. Quigley, on the other hand, bypasses the origin of civilizations (he says they are always “born in some inexplicable fashion”) and talks about how they expand, stabilize, and balance themselves to protect vested interests. Both reveal how “culture” is little more than an inducement to participate in a conspiracy.
Civilization, to the extent that it gradually builds up wealth and maintains a complex system, requires active support by many skilled people, which in turn requires motivation. Whether that motivation is pride, fear, envy, or some other impulse, all of it gets translated into a story that frames reality and our individual role in it.
Antisocial counter-narratives
It makes sense, then, why telling a contradictory story is an act of rebellion. Wokeness is meant to be a political-social revolution against classic liberalism, just as classic liberalism was a political-social revolution against monarchy. Both are stories about mankind and society. Whatever the ideology may be, stepping out of alignment with society by telling a different story makes you a target of the other cultural conspiracies, which do not want another version of reality. Classic liberalism’s great achievement was folding in multiculturalism into its own view, with tolerance, coexistence, and democratic representation being the antidote to real revolution. Wokeness frames classic liberalism as a dishonest trap, promising equality and representation while actually suppressing meaningful change. Of course, that much has proven true.
In some ways, there is no such thing as “society” at all. There is only a never-ending effort to protect the complicit while benefiting from their crimes. But the existence of this conspiracy is too abstract for us to notice unless it is pointed out. It takes a lot for us to see “normality” as weird, and new language is often the starting point.
As Christians, our frame of reference is the Bible. Wokeness is a doppelganger designed to mimic the profound self-reflection principle that belongs to Christianity. The woke story is traced back to “Critical Theory”, which is a self-destructive cycle of judgment and replacement, meant to destabilize any culture sensitive to give a voice to those who feel grieved; hence, “grievance culture”. The reason it is “critical” is because refuses to promote its own story, so as to avoid having to go on the defensive. They do not defend Marxism, they only attack and censor those who trace the roots of their ideology.
Wokeness recognizes the evil of the imperialism, unchecked privilege, and unquestioned narratives, but it has no center, no standard, and no higher truth. Christianity has always recognizes the same evils in even more potent language, while also spreading the ultimate narrative itself. This is why the figure of Jesus Christ is framed as the cornerstone, the foundation, the rock, etc. while the ignorant are compared to “infants” who get carried away by “waves” and “winds”, which are meaningless and chaotic forces secretly controlled by schemers:
Then we will no longer be infants, tossed about by the waves and carried around by every wind of teaching, and by the clever cunning of men in their deceitful scheming.
—Ephesians 4:14
In the next part, we will discuss how these principles show up in our daily lives as interactions with other people, private thoughts, and the action of the Holy Spirit.
Even if we don’t share the same language as somebody we usually imagine that they have the equivalent terms, and therefore are not totally alien in their thought process.
what kind of stories are humans so desperate to tell and is it conscious or subconscious? Because i honestly don't understand what you mean when you say " humans are story oriented creatures" , is this in relation to our perception of reality , omitting and accepting thing that fit that perspective if so aren't ideologies more important than words ? i find it hard to envision a scenario where words alone or as the focus can change a man.