The Power of Narratives
The power of belief has guided mankind since the dawn of evolution. Yuval Noah Harari argues that the power of belief is what elevated homo sapiens to become the most dominant species on our planet.
As a species, homo sapiens were able to coordinate with each other under frameworks of trust, belief, and cooperation. The idea that you could help me if I help you, or even that we could advance towards a common goal by helping each other, is something uniquely inherent to the species.
Belief is what characterizes our species, and human beings have a tendency toward abstraction. This inherent tendency towards belief systems gave rise to religious as well as other institutions. However, the tendency towards abstraction exists at the individual level as well.
Most of our interpretation of reality is composed of simultaneously comparing what we experience with the internal representations that we have crafted since the beginning of our lives. These internal representations are products of conditioning as well as genetic factors.
We are composed of all the beliefs that we’ve adopted — and just like religion, a tendency toward belief is an inherent part of the human condition. Most of these beliefs comprise narratives that help guide us to make decisions and effectively rationalize uncertain situations. In essence, your life ultimately becomes the story you tell yourself.
It was Nietzsche who proclaimed that God is dead, and that we have killed him. What he meant by this is that the progress brought about by the age of enlightenment had diminished our faith in the institution of religion. What Nietzsche also predicted, however, is that the death of God can inevitably lead to nihilism if someone were not able to establish their own set of values to live by.
Nietzsche quite accurately predicted the rise of totalitarian ideology that dominated much of the 20th-century, as political identity superseded dogma. The absence of religion did not lead to further enlightenment, but was replaced by Bolshevism and subsequently communism in the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, and parts of South America. The result was disastrous.
The message that I’m conveying here isn’t that you should become a priest at your local Church, or that religion is inherently necessary to live a moral life. What I’m saying is that you should be aware of the belief systems that shape the course of our lives.
The way you interface with reality is influenced by your beliefs. But where do these beliefs come from, and why have you chosen them?
Most of us passively accept the belief systems that are rooted in culture. If you’re from the United States, a belief in individual hard-work and discipline finds itself tacitly rooted in culture. If you come from Europe, especially Germany, this type of belief system isn’t as ubiquitous within a culture predicated on a social system that ensures things like healthcare and education for all.
If you’re suffering from a sense of nihilism due to a lack of meaning in your life, it’s implicit to believe that life has no meaning when things aren’t going your way. However, nihilism is a belief system, and just like all others, you need to consciously ask yourself why you have chosen this one in particular.
Nihilism can stem from one of two paths: a psychotically depressed person who has no future vision for themselves, or a person who simply believes that there is no meaning to the madness that we call life.
The problem is that the latter might think he engages in a sort of moral atheism, yet every choice he makes in his career, relationships, and life in general is predicated on a system of beliefs that are deeply ingrained in him.
I’m going to offer a variation of Pascal’s wager here and say:
It’s better to believe that there is meaning in life rather than no meaning at all. For if there is no meaning in life, then what have we lost? But if we do believe there is meaning, we can move closer to self-actualization.
It’s easy to become nihilistic in today’s society. There is a perverse form of absurdism on the internet amidst news of a Russian invasion in Ukraine, 8% inflation rate, massive homeless/opioid crisis, rising income inequality, and a pandemic that is still very much going on.
Nihilism is the easy route to go when everything seems fucked. But nihilism is also a nail in the coffin, a fatalistic admission that there’s no point in trying since all hope is lost. This is why the negation of meaning is so automatically felt in times of crisis and mental anguish. It is extremely destructive at the individual level.
A friend told me a story yesterday about a promising young law student who was taking the train home in Chicago and got hit in the neck by a stray bullet. Now he is paralyzed from the neck down. The last thing he needs is someone on medium telling him just to change his mindset.
The difference here is recognizing the mental prison that we unconsciously create, and from which we cannot escape. The first step is realizing what is within your control and what is outside of your control.
I’ve written extensively about painful certainty and living in the comfort zone, and it’s no exception that nihilism can be a comfortable belief that requires no further mental effort. It’s easy, there’s no meaning to life, what else is there to think about?
Painful certainty and living in the comfort zone can lead inevitably to nihilism. Someone who has been in the same job long enough to be afraid of any change whatsoever subjects themselves to a lack of free-will. In essence, their fear of uncertainty, or more specifically, the fear that they aren’t capable of anything else, cements their fate to one of a mundane 9–5 job.
I heard a similar analogy from Nassim Taleb, who was writing about a McDonald’s that he saw in the Milan Central Station. While he was working on a chapter for his book, Skin in the Game, he noticed that the McDonald’s there had a disproportionately larger number of patrons than the other restaurants.
He lamented that it would be an insult to Italian culture to pay that much money for a plane ticket to Milan only to go to a McDonald’s. However, people usually choose the option they’re most familiar with, albeit a poor option, over uncertainty. For this reason, you choose the familiarity of a Big Mac over the unknown.
If you suffer from anxious thoughts or feelings, oftentimes it is your psyche trying to communicate a necessary change with you. The problem is, however, that our unconscious isn’t able to tell us “You’re doing something wrong, you should do X.” It can only signal to us that we are doing something wrong.
Our primitive minds cannot communicate certainties to us about things we’ve never experienced. A desire to be or achieve something that we envision is often built upon narratives that we’ve constructed for ourselves as well. Being in a bad relationship or job subjects you to idealizing over a perfect husband or career in the future as a coping mechanism to distract you from current suffering.
The belief that enough introspection will bring you clarity is absurd. Clarity is only brought about by doing many different things, which in-effect will subject you to different paths. Jung said that you are an ideation of your future self, which basically means that your future self is calling you into existence. The feelings of regret you feel is a beckoning to change and become someone better.
If you choose to live your life according to the narratives you’ve constructed for yourself, you are subject to all the psychological limitations of the mind. This means that you can only experience the world as far as your anxieties allow.
If you don’t reveal yourself to yourself, you will never be able to reveal yourself to others. Better put by Nietzsche:
“If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss will stare back at you.” If you live long enough afraid of uncertainty, it will come to ultimately come to decide the narrative of your existence.