Transcript:
In the collection of “harmful underlying narratives” shaping human common sense, there is a story that we tend to leave unchallenged, and accept, although it is very arbitrary in its framing: “Things have never been so good for humanity” “There’s never been a better time to be alive” “We’ve never had it so good than right now”. These couple of lines are very meaningful because when we accept this narrative as a truth, we open the door to a legion of story monsters that invade culture and society’s common sense.
My name is Camille, you’re listening to Cosmic Dynamics, 5 minutes of exploration on art, change, & the music of the universe.
Ironically, I am not even considering the COVID19 Crisis here, so we can imagine we’re a few months back if you want, when everything was… normal, and start from that perspective. For the simple reason that these narratives sometimes come from psychologists, Harvard professors or the tech gurus, we take them in without even questioning them. We just say “ahh right, yea things have never been better, what a great time to be alive”. I do like to think that, it makes me feel good.
Clearly, most indicators that are used are biased or framed in a way that benefits the speakers’ business interest, or their ego construct, or maybe it’s just a way to feel good into denial. For the audience it’s a pleasant story to buy into, it removes guilt from the equation, {meanwhile most change advocates load their communications with guilt…} and this turns into a harmful underlying narrative that will make all the next unfolding narratives acceptable!
It might be better for you to forge your own resistance to these toxic stories by developing a good collection of arguments for the cocktail party, it’s a good exercise to learn how to target toxic narratives, and undo them.
I’ll give you one example to start us off, and maybe you can share yours as you build your own list? “Life expectancy has never been so high”. Here the arbitrary framing is on what is considered “life”: the physical body only, the heart is beating, he’s alive! Don’t pull the plug yet! A dear friend of mine use to say: Most people die before they turn 30, but are not buried before they turn 80. It asks a critical question: what is being alive? A slave worker exploited by some kind of multinational extractive industry in the Global South is considered “well and alive”, when this guy was actually better off a couple of centuries ago, before colonization… right. “Ah but there were wars before, and violent kingdoms and slavery - that’s another common behavior of the mind: when it feels threatened it quickly looks for the extreme opposite story to counter the point. Ah, but there were wars, and violent kingdoms, and slavery, and famine, and ...plagues... Ok, you get the idea. It will be fun at dinner tonight, let me know how it goes!
Today I am featuring the work of Scott Listfield, who’s known for his paintings featuring a lone exploratory astronaut lost in a landscape cluttered with pop culture icons, corporate logos, and tongue-in-cheek science fiction references. It’s a great way to reflect on the present, the past, and the future maybe? Remember it starts with the words we pick, and the stories we chose to tell.
Cheers.
