Seeing Past Narratives

Life is full of narratives. They're how we make sense of the world.  But narratives exist somewhere between truth and nonsense. The challenge is to see past the narratives, aligning our lives with that which is true. I discuss the technique needed to see past the narratives in our lives.

Transcript

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Life is narrative. Doesn't matter what it is. Everything we encounter is a narrative. There's always a story that is being told because that is the only way that we can make sense of the world. Everything from a conspiracy theory to a news story, to something that you take as absolute fact. Something in science could be research. It's always a narrative because that is how we communicate. I've talked about how we don't create the weight we consume. Right? Creativity is often ad hoc and messy and nonlinear. You bounce around the space of possibilities, and then what emerges has to then be transformed into something that people can consume. And what it gets transformed into is a story. All of life as we understand it, as we contemplate it, is a narrative. It is a set of facts that have been strung together to tell a story. And there was a basic structure to that. There was always some kind of intro, and then a bit of a rising tension, some kind of climax. Then it kind of settles down into a way forward. Of course, there are better stories than others. Some are a little more structured than others. But in any truth or information in general that you think about the world, it is going to be loosely, at least if not explicitly, structured into a kind of story for you. It will be stitched together in a way that we see kind of the rising and falling of the facts of the situation and what it supposedly means about our world. And then, of course, that folds into our worldview and how we think of things. But that is life. That is everything. If you go read a scientific article or maybe a journal article, maybe a news story about a bit of scientific research, and you might say, okay, studies have shown that, and maybe it's a big pool, maybe it's a social study, maybe it's even particle physics, whatever it is, something even as supposedly rigorous and factual as physics about a situation, maybe it's something about a black hole, you're still being told a narrative. It is not something that you can just take at face value. By its very nature, science, at least when it's going properly, is supposed to be constantly updated. It is not something that is factual. Scientific fact is actually a bit of an oxymoron, because it must remain falsifiable. That's its power. When it's being used properly, science must remain falsifiable, always open to new conjecture and questions and hypotheses and testing. And only by what survives over a great deal of time do we tend to think the story being told is closer to the truth. But it's still a story. It's always a narrative. So one of the things I want to really stress in this episode is the recognition of that. And it might sound obvious, but I think a lot of people assume that whether they're hearing something in science or in the news or on Twitter or X or wherever, from their parents as they grow up, from some institution that they're affiliated with, from their friends, we tend to think that this is the way it is, or that we're hearing facts. And we obviously want to rest our worldviews on what we know. But what we know is always a narrative. It is always a set of facts that have been stitched together to tell a story. And that story is going to have some distance between the true truth, between the truth and itself. There's going to be a proximity to it. Some stories are more true than others. Some stories are better told than others. But it is always a story. And I think this creates a lot of challenges in life, because a narrative is always going to sit somewhere between the truth and complete nonsense, somewhere between truth and a lie. And we know that we can tell a very good story, and it could not align to the truth at all. Maybe because it isn't actually composed of facts. But more often what it is is it is composed of facts, but it's been stitched together in such a way to tell a lie. And I've used some of these examples before. Conspiracy theories are usually a pretty good example. Not to say that they're necessarily all wrong, but if you take a conspiracy theory that doesn't stand up, it's not that. It's not necessarily standing up to the facts. It's just that the way the facts have been stitched together doesn't lead to a likely outcome, doesn't really seem to conform to the world that we live in. But this is what is difficult. And most of what we're dealing with in everyday life are not things like conspiracy theories. It's, you know, what is healthy and what should we be doing? Where should we be orienting our efforts? Who should we be listening to? What do we consume for food? Is that war that's going on over there correct? Is this politician saying something that's worth believing in? Is this policy that is getting passed something to invest energy in, or should I not believe in it? When a certain group is complaining about something in society, is it a valid complaint? Should I support that group? Or is it a narrative that has been twisted in order to bring about change in the wrong way, or not bring about the right change and so on. And so this is a challenge in life to, one, recognize that what you are seeing and hearing is a narrative. Always. There's no such thing as it not being a narrative. It's not about something being real or fake at that point. It's just about. That's the way we process information. Humans require narrative to arrange the labels and categories that we create in our mind in such a way that we can think about them, that we can contemplate, and more to the point, that we can communicate them. We need to arrange them into some sensible order. But this is challenging as we go through life, because that means if everything that we hear is narrative, one and two, a narrative always sits somewhere between truth and a lie, then the challenge is to assess that somehow. How do we know if the narrative that we are listening to and seeing is valid, is something we should put our efforts towards believe in or not believe in or fight against, right? Because this gets into the purpose of our lives, right? If I want to go get a job somewhere, I'm listening to the narrative of that job description. I'm listening to the narrative that society tells me that this is what it means to have that job, and this is the impact it has on the world. Are those true things? Is that the real description? Does it have that impact on the world? Well, it's a narrative, and there's probably some truth to it. There's probably some twisting going on as well, either on purpose or not. People don't necessarily purposely try to twist narratives. Sometimes they do, but often they are giving, let's say, a bit of a false narrative because they themselves simply believe it, not because they think they're twisting the truth. So you have to, again, one, recognize that the narrative is there. But two, start to develop techniques on how to assess that, how to validate that, how to move through life in a way that you can land on better narratives, because it's always a narrative. So if you're taking a job, if you're going to work with a group of people, if you're going to go make a podcast episode, if you're going to join an institution, if you're going to get a degree, if you're going to go on a date, get married, invest a certain amount of money, the big decisions in life, all decisions, but more importantly, the big decisions in life, come down to assessing the narratives that you're hearing and seeing. And you have to develop a way to assess this, not just hope for the best, not just think that, well, I'm a good person, and I hang out with good people. And therefore, whatever my group kind of thinks is probably more or less right, or I'm a smart individual and I'm affiliated with this institution or this religion or this whatever. And these are all people that are like minded. And so that's kind of the tribe that I join, and that's what I believe. Now, some of that is inescapable. Tribes exist for evolutionary reasons. They're important. The group dynamics that happen, the truths, quote unquote, that are settled on by a group are there for a reason and obviously worth paying attention. But again, it is still a narrative. And narratives need to be updated, they need to be reinterpreted, and they need to be assessed as to whether those narratives are surviving over long periods of time or whether they tend to kind of fall away, whether certain narratives tend to lead to damage either in your own individual life or something at a societal level. So the grand challenge in all of this is in life, we need to see past the narrative to get at the truth. We need to find ways to see past the narrative. Now, we got to be careful with the semantics here, because, again, everything in life is a narrative. So in some sense, you can't see past it. But what I mean by seeing past it is to rise above the narrative and know that there is something beneath it. Not to say that you're going to be able to attach a label to the thing that's beneath it or past it, but to know that there is something past it, that's the critical point, to know that whatever you're hearing or seeing is a narrative, and that somewhere in there, there is an ultimate truth, and to remain focused on that. And it's not always easy to remain focused on something that doesn't have a name, doesn't have a label. Now, you might think you have the name for it, right? Religious people think they might have a name for what that truth is. Scientists or atheists might think they have a name for what that truth is. I think it's better to not actually give the ultimate truth a name other than truth, to keep it a bit ephemeral, because that allows you to stay in a state of constant reinterpretation, to always have the willingness to update your stance, to update your opinion, a willingness to see past the narratives. Now, again, the way the word narrative gets tossed around in society is as though it means, like, fake or false. That's not the case. Everything is a narrative. So it's going to have some proximity to truth, and it's the challenge in life to figure out the proximity of those narratives that we encounter. So when I say we need to see past the narrative as the grand challenge in this episode, the challenge that I'm talking about in life, it's not that you have to give it a label and you have to put it into a category. You just know that there is something more ultimate than the narrative that you're consuming. And this is true for everything. And you have to be intellectually honest about that. No matter how much you believe in something, you don't have the labels, you don't have the words. There is no articulation for that ultimate truth, because ultimate truth cannot really be expressed in words. Why would it? Words are just kind of a bastardized version of us trying to articulate something about life. But the reason why we keep telling it in so many different ways with so many different narratives is because there is no ultimate way to articulate that. Truth is kind of a silence, right? It's something that maybe can only be contemplated under tranquility, or however you want to say that. But the point is, there's something beyond that narrative. There is some ultimate truth, and it's our task, it's our duty, maybe even in life. If we're going to be good citizens of society and we're going to live by what we purport to live by, which is hopefully the pursuit of truth, then we have to hold that as true, that there is something beyond the narratives that we are hearing, regardless of how good or bad you think they might be on the surface. And it's our job in life to spend our lives contemplating what might lie behind those narratives, to learn to see past. Now, let's give some examples, and I'm going to start with the conspiracies, because I think they frame it in a good way. But this isn't just about conspiracies. This is about everyday things as well. So if you're not someone who thinks about conspiracies, that often bear with me, because it's going to be very relevant to everyday things as well, a common one is this idea that the moon landing was faked. Right? 1969, people are watching the television, they see the moon landing, and unsurprisingly, I guess, a group of people, probably just because of the profoundness or fantastic nature of the thing that you would be looking at, they tend not to believe it. Kind of like the JFK assassination, right? This idea that such a powerful, prominent figure could be wiped out by a nobody just doesn't sit in people's minds very well. They kind of have a cognitive dissonance about it, and so they need to attribute it to something else, like a higher power being at the helm. But with the moon landing, you have this fantastic event, right? Far away, been able to land on it, America wins the space race, whatever. And so a number of people would say, well, I think that's unlikely. There's no way this happened. It just cannot compute in their head. And so they kind of invent this other narrative now, like anything else, it's a narrative, right? Let's say we're talking about. We could just be talking about the moon landing itself. That is still a narrative. I mean, I wasn't there. You weren't there. Speaking for myself, I don't have any expertise in the audio and visual equipment used in the late sixty s. I mean, I just wasn't part of that situation. So when someone says, this is a moon landing, here's the videos, here's the stories, here's the astronauts being interviewed and talked about, talking about it. It is still a narrative, because that's all I can do, is consume that story that's being given to me, okay? And also this idea that it would be fake is itself a narrative, but also that it's real is a narrative, okay? And so if we look at this example, well, that's all I want to say right now. Before we get into the techniques and the solutions, I just want to say, if you look at the moon landing, you might say, well, it's a conspiracy theory. It's ridiculous. There's no way this is true. But let's just appreciate for a second, before we get into the rest of it, that is still a narrative. The moon landing is a narrative. Most of us would probably agree it's true. It probably happened, but it's still a narrative. It's still a bunch of facts that have been strung together to tell a story. Flat Earth society or flat earth theory, whatever you want to call it. Same thing, right? Most of us would agree, I think. Pretty sure the earth is a sphere or a sphere like object. That doesn't seem to be very debatable, but it's still a narrative. I haven't been to space. Have you been to space? I haven't been with the people taking a picture of the globe. Right? I haven't run all the experiments that supposedly add up to say that this is obviously a sphere. It is still a narrative that I kind of just accept. It makes a lot of sense. I think there's a ton of reason to accept it. But, yeah, it's still a narrative. The earth is a sphere. I haven't literally been to space to take a look and taken a rocket around the globe to see it. Okay, now, if you don't like these examples because they're conspiracy theories, let's deal with something a little more maybe realistic. Are fruits healthy? Is eating fruit a healthy thing to do? Most of us would jump and say, well, yes, of course they are. We could back it up a little bit, too. Maybe they got these, like, polyphenolic compounds and antioxidants, and some of them that have those high antioxidants counts are maybe superfoods. And the goji berries. The blueberries, right? Yeah, of course fruits are healthy. How could they be bad? They grow on trees. They're natural. They've always been there. Right, but that's still a narrative. You've been told fruits are healthy. Do you know? How do you know? And even if you're a scientist who's done the study, you're still buying into narratives about what health means, about what the markers of health are. Are vegetables healthy? What about daily exercise or intense exercise? Well, of course that's healthy, right? I mean, our bodies should be moving. We should be exercising, but it's still a narrative. You're still listening to a narrative about exercise being healthy. How much? What type? If you really dug into it, another way of thinking about this is you can ask someone, are fruits healthy? And then they say, yes. Then you say, okay, tell me why? How many people could actually do it? Oh, well, antioxidants this and that. Okay, there's another narrative there that antioxidants are healthy. How do you know? Well, maybe they mop up free radicals. What's a free radical? You're going to keep kind of going into these narratives and ultimately realize that you're essentially believing a story. Now, I'm not here to say it's right or wrong. I'm just saying, appreciate that it is a narrative. Vegetables, exercise. And so what these examples are showing is that, look, as we go through life, I think we take for granted that we assume a lot of things are true, but at the end of the day, we are still being fed a narrative, either deliberately or not. Again, it doesn't have to be someone kind of trying to socially engineer the narrative necessarily, although I'm sure that happens sometimes, too. Although often I don't think that is what it is. I think people tend to just believe what they believe and then they promote what they believe. But there's a difference between listening to what someone promotes, what they believe, and kind of taking that at face. There's a difference between just taking that at face value as though it's true and then actually assessing it and asking yourself with some critical thinking, well, is this true? Or to what extent is this true? How are we supposed to think about the stories that we hear in the news? How are we supposed to think about the vaccines that come into society? How are we supposed to think about the Russia Ukraine war? Okay, I've used some conspiracy theories and kind of the fruit and veggies as some simple examples, but the stuff that we really face every day are the news stories and the vaccines and the Russia Ukraine wars and immigration and not even know the kind of geopolitical stuff. It could just be stuff that we're purchasing at the store and the price that's being charged. This says it's a quality thing. Is it a quality thing? What do we mean by quality? This is a good group to be associated with. Why? Because you've been told that, or because it is? This is going to help me? Because it helped that person. Are you the same as that person? Everything that we are faced with in life is a narrative. Doesn't mean it's right, doesn't mean it's wrong, but it is a narrative, and it exists somewhere between the truth and a total lie. Somewhere between truth and nonsense is this thing that you are consuming. And so I said at the beginning, everything in life is narrative, everything we encounter. The reason is because it's the only way your mind can process the categories that we make, the mental constructs that we make. We have to stitch them together in a way that makes sense. But the challenge here is that the narrative is always somewhere between truth and complete nonsense. So the grand challenge in life when it comes to narratives is we need to see past the narrative to get at the truth. And in some sense, you never get at the truth fully, but you need to see past the narrative. Whatever you see in here doesn't matter if we're talking moon landing and flat earth things that are kind of full blown conspiracy theories, 911 inside job kind of stuff, JFK shootings or other stuff like what's healthy to eat is exercise, health. How are we supposed to think about news stories and vaccines and Russia Ukraine wars? That's what it comes down to. And so we need a technique to deal, to be able to see past the narratives. And so I'm going to offer and put forward what I think is a technique to really handle this in any given situations, either whether it's a conspiracy theory or it's what to eat or how to think about global conflicts or the price that you're paying for so called quality, whatever. And it comes down to that. The technique to see past the narrative is to think about the likelihood of a given situation, given the facts, and to choose the best narrative. Now, it sounds maybe a little bit obvious, but let's think about this as an explicit thing that we do anytime. If we talk about the moon landing, at the end of the day, none of us were there. How do we know whether that likely happened or not? Well, if you just think about the situation, what is the likelihood of being able to keep the moon landing secret for over half a century? What would that entail? To actually keep that under the wraps? To never have a whistleblower or enough whistleblowers to come out and say, look, this isn't real. To never have enough evidence come forward. We have presidents giving speeches. We have astronauts dedicating their life to the space program to be a part of this. We have, obviously, the footage, but not even the footage and the evidence. It's more just the number of people that were involved would have to have kept that under wraps. The likelihood of that being the case is extremely, exceedingly low. I could still be wrong. I don't know. I wasn't there. But it's unlikely you're going to convince me that the moon landing was fake, barring any other dramatic evidence that I haven't seen. Because the likelihood of that being kept under wraps just doesn't add up. It doesn't conform to the situation, to the. To the things that we know about life, to the way that people interact, to entropy, the way that things tend towards disorder. That you would have been able to somehow lock all that down to this day is unlikely. Now, you might think this example is a bit silly, but it maps to all the other things in life. Let's do one more of the conspiracy, the flat earth thing, right? I mean, I don't know. I wasn't there. I'm not traveling around space to look at a globe. I'm not taking the pictures literally. I see these pictures. I don't know. Maybe they're fake, yada, yada. But we know that objects form spheres. We know. And you can do this yourself or look at experiments that look at drops of water in zero gravity or something that has more viscosity than water. It doesn't form flat things. It likes to form spheres or sphere like objects, because this is an energetic minimum. And if we think about space and we think about the lack of gravity and we have molten rock swirling around, what would you expect that to form? Well, of course you would expect that to form a sphere. And I don't think it takes much more reasoning than that. That doesn't mean I'm right, but it is the most likely narrative. Okay, so let's use more real world examples. You take the fruit. Is fruit healthy? We know we're still hearing a narrative. And look, I can say that many of today's fruits are not the same as 100 years ago, right? They're definitely more sugar. That's definitely the case, because there's no way you haven't been artificially breeding fruit for this long and not making it sweeter. But we wouldn't make fruit less sweet, right. So it's going to be a lot sweeter than it used to be. We also know fruit has never been this available. Now, that doesn't mean fruit is unhealthy, but it does mean that maybe a constant ingestion of fruit on a regular basis every day to a high extent is probably not good. That's a reasonable thing to say because we never evolved to eat the sugar we're eating today. We never evolved to have that much consumption again. Doesn't mean fruit is bad. But if you're trying to say, is eating lots of fruit healthy, which is kind of a running narrative, I could say that that isn't that likely. It doesn't seem to be the most likely narrative given what we know about evolution, about sugar. Right? What is the likelihood that a news story is true that's being reported? What is the likelihood of a vaccine being safe, or a vaccine being needed, or this particular vaccine being needed? What is the likelihood of the Russia Ukraine war leading to better outcomes? We're never going to know the ultimate answers, but life is always about probability. It's always about a probability assessment. And I don't mean running actual calculations, I just mean doing as a technique what I said, always assess the likelihood of the situation. Are we going to die if we drive to work? Because you can die in car accidents. There's a lot of car accidents, but it's not likely I can make real decisions in life by assessing the likelihood. The technique to use to see past the narrative is to just assess the likelihood of it being the case, given the facts that we can find or that we have at hand. And in some sense, this seems a little bit obvious, but I don't think people do this on a regular basis. I think that they tend to believe the narratives that we hear and see are either true or fake, true or false. And they kind of leave it at that. Okay, so, understand that everything in life is a narrative. It doesn't matter what it is. Doesn't matter if it's science, doesn't matter if it's religion, doesn't matter if it's the news media. Whatever it is, it's always going to be a narrative. But the thing about a narrative is it can't be the final say, because a narrative will always exist somewhere between truth and nonsense. And so the grand challenge as we go through life is that we need to see past the narrative to get at the truth. There is something there. You don't have to have a label for it, but there is something past that narrative to remain cognizant of it. And everything from conspiracy theories to the everyday things that we have to deal with have this challenge to it. And we need a technique to be able to see past those narratives. And the technique is to always ask yourself, what is the likelihood of this being the case? It's still going to land you on a narrative, but hopefully, that will be the best one. And as long as you're always willing to update that, keep assessing the likelihood of a situation for all the important things in your life and choose whether or not that is the best narrative that you have at hand. And that's how you can go through life on a regular basis and assess or see past the narratives that come our way. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. Until the next one. Take care. You, Samuel. You our channel.