How to sell a narrative to a society

The question we are all busy asking ourselves is, why is our society struggling ? And the answer isn’t really that difficult. Everything is eventually designed to fail, and so will the narratives that we have sold ourselves. What got us to where we are today isn’t going to take us, where we want to go. Our society is going through a grind, and this process will create chaos before eventually giving way to something else.

So how did we succeed in pushing a narrative to a society, or at least to a large groups of people within a society ? 

 And to answer this question, it is important to consider.

The basis of conceiving the narrative requires understanding of the evolutionary journey of humans. 

 Successful conditioning precedents and what can be learnt from them ?

Religion: Most religious franchises have seen significant growth in members since their inceptions. Today religious literature are no longer considered a conception of a human mind, but a directive from a possible God. People have learnt to rely on religion as their anchor, and without religion some people will struggle to navigate their lives. So religion has been an extremely successful concept, and the continuous condition of a human mind has helped entrenched religious preaching into human psyche.

 Money: An idea that allowed humans to transfer value from themselves to an inanimate object. And money is the most successful human idea to the extent that most humans can’t fund their living without money. People fail to register that money wasn’t around before modern human society came into being, and valuable assets like Gold weren’t really that valuable for our animal ancestors before humans learnt to value them, by transferring value from themselves to money and similar inanimate objects.

 Nation State : The concept of nation state has been to a large extent successful in holding a large groups of humans inside an organised society.

Tribe, Culture & tradition : a successful concept enabling humans to bind themselves to a group, and the same goes for the idea of tribes. 

What is the core assumptions being made here ?

Humans have evolved to become a social animal, and to date humans do display characteristics of our ancestors who developed certain concepts to keep themselves safe and also to sustain themselves.

Our ancestors were quite sure that for survival of humans, they would need to stay in collectives, and to organise a collective capable of binding humans for a long period of time, there will be a need to create supporting ancillary ideas. So the idea of tribes, culture, tradition, language, religion, kingdom and nation states and Gods came along. And over the years, these ideas have played an important role in most humans lives. Today, without these ideas, humans will lose their sense of belonging and also purpose.

 So how can you connect with a human ? 

Well! You need to first understand, how important is religion, tradition, society, nation state, culture etc to a specific human and most likely that human will already be a part of a collective that buys into what that human considers important.

 Recents events and how some people succeeded :

 Brexit: For Brexit to work, people had to create an enemy, and that enemy was obviously the European Union. And to support the narrative, an underlying case was created on how the European Union has disfranchised ordinary people. And people who were already divided and isolated found a platform through which they could exercise their anger and disappointment. The narrative was undermine the enemy by getting out of the club called European Union, and all our problems will get solved. Without painting European Union as the enemy Brexit wouldn’t have worked.

Trump : Mr Trump made the establishment and Washington DC the enemy, and pitched himself as the person who will destroy the enemy for others. Again people were only willing to buy into the idea of us vs the enemy.

 And there are obviously more similar examples.

 So what works ? 

 Well! Firstly, it’s the idea of enemy, which is “ us vs them “. Then, if you are successful in creating a perception of fear and threat, you could get people to follow a specific narrative. And also all the political parties have utilised these tools to get people to vote for them. The prime example is Indian general election of 2019.

And why is it possible today ?

The advent of social media has made it quite easy to understand what people want and what’s the underlying trend, and it has also become much cheaper and easier for those with a narrative, to then continuously create ancillary ideas to keep pushing their narrative. Social media is just a tool.

 Can this be helped ? 

Yes, if people began to realise that, their Gods along with peace, happiness and values as well as sense of belonging are all an inside job. The more you chase happiness outside of you, the more elusive it gets. A person or a society can’t make you happy either. And you will always belong to yourself, you are your own home, because your physical body is a host to an entire ecosystem.

Now some would classify this as enlightenment, but it isn’t. Humans and our society has become extremely complex over time, and we keep making it even more complex by adding to the complexity.