The Power of Narrative
nautil.us
nautil.us
His argument reduces to separating people from "reality," then placing himself and his ideas as the centre of the ensuing chaos, and managing the conflicts his network has caused itself. He has a zero-sum view of the world based on power actuated by language. He's really bad news. They should call this The Nihilist Manifesto.
Reality is a consensual process. Societies are continuously negotiating and renegotiating, amongst themselves, the borders of the map we call our worldview. Sometimes this process involves wiping the slate clean as we completely re-imagine the territory.
This is not a value judgment of this piece, or of this process as a whole.
No. It is the exact opposite of that. Reality is what, when you stop consenting to it, does not go away.
Your delusions can't hurt you if you don't react to them. (Unfortunately, other people's delusions only depend on them reacting to them.)
Yep. The reference is not the referent, the map is not the territory, etc, etc. A hallucination of a witch can't hurt you; a mob of hallucinating witch hunters very much can.
The belief that meaning is exclusively socially constructed is in effect that it does not exist. WEFs mission is to impose a new order, not to create a new society. Further, the "but, this is just a critical tool," argument is only a justification for a solvent for ideas that doesn't produce anything and destroys what it is applied to. They just want your stuff.
What I don't understand is how so many world leaders could be taken in by such a tawdry mesmerist. If I have to be the first to stop clapping to say it I'm willing to take the risk: his followers are marks.
This was the same tactic used by Mao to promote the Cultural Revolution. He spoke of freedom from the shackles of Chinese tradition, and blamed his opponents every time his policies failed by saying that if only everyone listened to him, and there was no dissent, utopia would be the result.
A lot of people fell for it.
When his leadership lead to 10's of millions of dead Chinese, his response was, "Our policies are 70 percent good, and only 30 percent bad."
Is this not the construct that modern political parties have? Every new thing we try is basically granted on this idea, sometimes lazily pointing to other implementations and saying, "see, it worked here!" while being measurably different in circumstance.
Which thinker is that from? Foucault? Marcuse?
The climate narrative is just one movement his organization has co-opted and used as a host - one that originally opposed him when it was a part of the progressive anti-globalization movement of the 90s that specifically called out his Davos cronies. Now, climate is just the logic of an idea, it is an exogenous threat that can be used to justify literally anything once you have decoupled narrative from accountability to truth. Most of it is just a bunch of gibberish theory designed to confuse, pacify, and above all, neutralize criticism and opposition to the underlying action behind it.
I would ask: Why should central banks be accountable to him and the organizations he controls? Why are he and others so indexed on zero-sum redistribution of carbon "rights" instead of investing in developing new energy technologies and efficiencies? Why did he coin the phrase "great reset" in his rambling book of the same title, designed to leverage a global crisis to reshape the world in his vision? The answer is always the same: because it puts him and his network in the center of the chaos they create, and invents new conflicts for the sole purpose of managing them.
It's straight political infiltration and demolition of existing successful economies using a network of fifth columnists he has groomed and orchestrated the installation of - which he has openly bragged about. His appeals to climate narrative are straw men, they have nothing to do with the technology and economics of energy use, and they all resolve to central global governance and a zero sum view of power over the entire planet. He, and his acolytes also believe there is no accountability to truth in discourse (I live in one of their countries), and they use words mainly as a distraction and a kind of perfidy.
Who is going to "make" those companies and central banks factor in his agenda to their decisions? Sounds like a technocratic rule by people who have seized the underlying service mechanisms of the economy, and one that cannot be left or escaped.
We live in a post-totalitarian world, and that means guys like this are going to periodically rise and be an ongoing threat to our species' ability to live and thrive. It is our responsibility to challenge them and call them out for what they are, because the 20th century showed us the consequences of ignoring them until it was too late.
> he asks us to step away from thinking of our lives -- and our messy, complicated irrational world -- in terms of a simple narrative.
https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_simpl...
Arguably in recent years narratives have become the dominant form of management communication to the extent that factual bases are a not really required sometimes. Such kind of philosophical claptrap should be avoided and given a wide berth, I think, because it seeks to replace "reality" with something closer to "religion".
In particular - how much of our identity is tied to, or even dependent on, our digital footprint? To what extent do we judge someone based on their Twitter bio, and whatever carefully curated selection of photos they have decided to expose to the public?
...and what of those who have dutifully abstained from social media all this time, sounding the alarm bell _almost a decade in advance_ of Cambridge Analytica and 2016? Are these people now without identities, personas - digital vampires without a reflection in the black mirror?
How accurate is the reflection, anyway? Online personas, identities, are a construction; I would even go further to call them participants of Baudrillard's "order of sorcery" - mere brushstrokes, assemblages of pixels suggesting an actual person behind them, but on one extreme are faithful representations up to the fidelity of the medium (e.g. candid photos), and on another are pure personas, people acting out a role (e.g. an actor on screen). VTubers [1] are one particularly salient illustration of this logic taken several steps further.
From the article:
> Narratives shape our perceptions, which form our realities and influence our choices.
Is it possible to seize hold of one's personal narrative, and thereby reinvent the self?
> You can be whoever you want to be. You can completely redefine yourself if you want. You don't have to worry about the slots other people put you in as much. They don't look at your body and make assumptions. They don't hear your accent and make assumptions. All they see are your words. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTuber
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
Debord, Baudrillard, McLuhan, Althusser, Deleuze
The larger movement which investigates these ideas is referred to as "poststructuralism".