🤯Unknown Unknowns #133 - I Saw The Sign

From Life, the Universe and Everything (The third book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series). 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has been one of my favorite books since I was a kid.  It combines amusing wordplay and narrative with interesting thought experiments and metaphors.  I’ve long thought that if there was an apocalypse and we had to start over from remnants of libraries, mankind would be lucky if Hitchhiker’s became the new bible of the emergent civilization.

The above passage always made me think of how it doesn’t matter who is in charge, the unfortunates in the middle always end up on the losing side.  People in power use narratives as a manner of control.  Of course, it’s important to realize that when the shoe is on the other foot, the other side gleefully manipulates narratives as well.

This is why I try to be as objective as possible.  But I’ve come to understand that narratives don’t just control the masses, we’re also controlled by our own internal narratives.  We constantly bombard ourselves with stories of how we should act and feel.  The stories that we tell ourselves are just as powerful as the stories others tell us.

“Flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative.” - Daniel Kahneman on the Narrative fallacy

Every religion and philosophy calls to remove the influence of internally generated narrative fallacies.  In Catholicism, there’s a call to subsume your motives to God’s.  “Not my will, but Thine be done.” (Luke 22:42).  Buddhism removes suffering through examination of samskaras.  Stoicism, Logotherapy, Landmark, IFS - all have a process of identifying the stories in your head as just that - stories in your head.  The meaning that you give the stories is what gives them power.  Understanding that the narratives in your head are just stories frees you.

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing,” he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable “the truth” can be. - Princess Irulan, Dune

Do we need to eliminate narrative fallacy?  Is this even possible?  Should we just be aware that it always exists?

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📝 Writing of the Week:

I’ve been writing unpolished, around 100-word mini-essays.  Just reflections on ideas from podcasts or things on the news.  Here are the latest:

1️⃣ Eminent Domain

2️⃣ Dominion in Life

3️⃣ A Shibboleth for Leaders

4️⃣ New York Times Games

5️⃣ Rock Bottom

6️⃣ Foaming Soap

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🔍 Discoveries:

1️⃣ Is there a way to identify and harness the power of narratives? 

Jim O'Shaughnessy

believes you can.

🔗 The Thinker and the Prover

2️⃣ Glen Powell demonstrates his acting range in Hit Man, a movie about an ordinary guy who stumbles into being the frontman of a sting operation to suss out murder-for-hire criminals. His character has to assume different personalities, which leads to an interesting question - can his own personality change because he’s taking on other personalities?

🔗 Hit Man

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💬 Quote of the Week:

If people want happiness so badly, why don’t they attempt to understand their false beliefs? First, because it never occurs to them to see them as false or even as beliefs. They see them as facts and reality, so deeply have they been programmed. - Anthony de Mello

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And one way to help me:

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You can find more of my writing at chr.iswong.com.

Questions, suggestions, complaints?  Email me at [email protected].  

Feedback welcome.

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Leaving you in peace,

Chris