Narrative Wars

On the 5th of July, one day after America celebrated its 250th bicentennial birthday, pastor Loran Livingston of the Central Church of God in Charlotte, North Carolina gave one of the most unexpectedly viral speeches of the year. “There has never been a Christian nation,” he proclaimed. “You don’t live in one now...A Christian nation would never have killed and displaced 20 million Native Americans...A Christian nation would never have thought that owning slaves was pleasing to god – or that it lined up with Scripture in any way, shape or size…” On its face these words seem obvious, but the unexpected viral reaction shows how far we’ve deviated from factual information in this country. It was an ‘oh s**t’ moment that reminded millions of how deep the cognitive dissonance runs in the collective American psyche and how it’s still intensifying at a compounding rate. It was a reminder of how deceitful the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are, or rather, the counter-narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves are and can lead down dark roads of Manchurian candidacy. One of the most pervasive of these is that the opposite of life is death. When actually, the opposite of death is birth. Life is just an intermediary we segment through in journey form. The only thing that’s truly ours in this life is our journey. Which is why story telling is so central to the purposes and meanings we project upon our paths. Narration is the true and living “God” of our experience. Therefore, understanding and analyzing narrative structure and our place within it is key to navigating the troubled timelines we encounter in the present, past and future. There are 3 rules central to the foundation of narrative structure: (1) there has to be a voice narrating the story, (2) there has to be a place(s) where the story unfolds and (3) there has to be emotions expressed; be it directly or indirectly or an interplay between the two. With these rules in mind, memory and reality play foundational roles in the narrative structure of life. Memories act as a voice and reality the setting. The paradox in these though is in their unreliability unfortunately. The nature of memory is one of constant flux, and modern science has proven that reality is non-local. These 2 unfortunate truths mean that we live life through an unreliable narration and a limited point of view. So it makes our journey an elusive one to portray in an objective way in real time. So out of respect to that disorder, we must always be weary of charismatics preaching unipolar narratives that seek to fold all other narratives into their order. America, and the world for that matter, is a tapestry of multipolar narratives unfolding simultaneously. The genius of America is that it is the first nation to not only welcome narrative-multipolarity but demand it in law. America is not one thing, its many things, so to try to consolidate it into one thing is counter to the founding principles. So anyone trying to enforce an all-encompassing order is working in counter-narrativizing. In ‘Secret Wars’ we discussed how Neo-Liberalism was a unipolar narrative that’s currently captured culture and consolidated both major political parties into its particular structure. It wields an army of charismatic counter-narratives, like MAGA Communism, that have consolidated millions into occult factions. Factions that, unbeknownst to its members, work at the behest of consolidating all of America into the neo-liberal order. The unignorable truth is that we are plagued by a limited vision, so we only see things through the scope of beginnings and ends when the truth is that infinity goes forever in all directions, including the past. So we are mistaken to try to consolidate narratives into one over-arching narrative based in beginnings and ends. The only true unifying narrative is that there are many narratives. To prune them is wrong.