On the Shortfalls of Narrative, Part I

hear the phrase all of the time, ‘It doesn’t fit the narrative,’ used in news, academia, and in political missives, a phrase that I find curious since so many do seem to yell that the narrative they’ve chosen outweighs even the world itself. Like Marx’s view on history, and the old ‘progress’ fallacy, this thought that we must have stages, advance through them relentlessly, but history won’t hold them up, it doesn’t go by what they say, there is no path man is bound to, just crazy lurchings everyday. Did not 2016 prove this? The narrative was she would win, but things didn’t turn out that way, and folks went nuts, thought it a sin. Screamed about it for four years, it wasn’t supposed to happen, no! Despite the fact, scanning the past, that this is how things often go. I think, perhaps, the first mistake you see in the narrative crowd, is simple overreduction, to pair all human beings down. We saw this in Collectivists, and their misplaced faith in ‘the group,’ but others do this trick as well, simplification hides the truth. Humans are a chaos system, even taken one at time, sure, we do have our old routines, but every so often you’ll find we do something that makes no sense, that no other man could predict, that unseen burst of randomness, is so often what makes us tick. Expand that to the whole species, and you see chaos written large, chaos actors interacting, I think that it's a stretch too far for any human mind to grasp, to think you could is a conceit, too many factors change too fast to be forseen reliably. Add to that the physical world is a chaos system as well, and we’re all stuck living with it, this makes it really hard to tell what causes this, or changes that, to our mind it seems randomness, it’s plain to see that narrative cannot encompass all of this. Our brain simply can’t organize or relate to something that vast, we simplify to understand, and there’s a great danger in that. Some start to think the narrative is objective reality, and act as if denying that is a troubling perfidy. But when has the world ever cared about the thoughts we apes create? The world is not a narrative, that is a fact we can’t escape... CONCLUDES IN PART II.