Caitlin Johnstone — Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

It's actually more than this. All of us have a world view, but we don't all share the same world view. Everyone takes their own world view to be "reality," and rejects other world views as erroneous, deceitful, degenerate, primitive, or uneducated, or primitive view of reality.

Culture, including early upbringing and education, and especially group think heavily influence the formation of one's world view. Group think is fostered by narratives. Whoever controls the narrative controls the view of reality in that group, whether it be a subgroup or an entire society. 

America and Britain as doing their best to impose their joint world view on the world in the name of liberal globalization based on "freedom and democracy."

In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.

Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it’s psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it’s narrative.

Society is made of narrative like the Matrix is made of code. Identity, language, etiquette, social roles, opinions, ideology, religion, ethnicity, philosophy, agendas, rules, laws, money, economics, jobs, hierarchies, politics, government, they’re all purely mental constructs which exist nowhere outside of the mental noises in our heads. If I asked you to point to your knee you could do so instantly and wordlessly, but if I asked you to point to the economy, for example, the closest you could come is using a bunch of linguistic symbols to point to a group of concepts. To show me the economy, you’d have to tell me a story.…"

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.
Caitlin Johnstone

Davide Battistella — Were Democrats Beaten By Their Own "War Of Narratives"?

I read a quote somewhere last week that went something like, “JFK put a man on the moon, Obama put a man in the ladies room”. This got me thinking about President Obama’s oft cited, “war of narratives”.

Who says something like this? Well, it’s people who believe that as long as they control the narrative, as long as they control the story, then they are winning. The facts don’t matter, the actual events, the situations, the way things unfold, these are also the things that do not matter.
What matters most to a person who believes that the world is based on a “war of narratives” is that their ideas and world view are the only possible alternative.Isn’t this what doomed the Democrats in the Election? Did they not just believe that they had a superior narrative to the one that was being proposed by Donald Trump? So much so that they practically hid their candidate while waiting for her pronouncement as president. 

With a president and leader, who holds a belief that the “war of narratives” is all that matters, Democrats have slipped into a very narrow (albeit progressive) world view....

From this perch, you ignore what is going on around you and it is your job and the job of your party to push any given issue through the filter of a given narrative. So take any issue and run it into the ground to convince people your narrative is the only acceptable one. You can blame people for falling down this slippery slope because it usually involves, at some point, the absence of using common sense. 

Sure, Republicans push narratives as well, but they don’t seem to do it with such zeal and with the world view that whichever particular narrative du jour is the only plausible, logical story that exists.

This is a worthwhile read about controlling the narrative. 

I disagree somewhat with the author about this being more a problem for the Democrats than the Republicans. It may seem that way now, since the Democratic establishment is a victim of its own narrative during the election, first, to marginalize Bernie Sanders, and then Donald Trump. They started to believe their own BS.

But I think this also affected the campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney was just a sure that he was going to win as was Hillary Clinton, right up until the final hours of the voting. Mitt apparently got over it, but I don't think that John McCain ever did.

Zero Hedge
Were Democrats Beaten By Their Own "War Of Narratives"?

Davide Battistella