Myth, Narratives, and the Death of Renee Good

I don’t mean to sound like a conspiracy nut, but we’re being manipulated. By “we,” I mean all of us—you, me, anybody who is exposed to any media at all, but especially social media. We’re not being lied to, exactly, but we’re being force-fed a version of the truth that is intended to control our emotions, influence our reactions, and direct our behavior. The powers that be—and this is very much a part of the rupture between the ruling class and the country class—want to encourage specific social and political responses from us and are doing everything they can to make them happen.

A little more than a century ago, the French engineer and leftist radical Georges Sorel wrote extensively about the most effective ways to motivate large groups of people and commit them to a particular cause. Like many other leftists of the time, Sorel advocated for a workers’ movement that could convincingly wield the threat of a violent “general strike” and, as a result, shut down all industrial production, thereby enabling a revolutionary takeover of the means of production. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Sorel didn’t think that the reality of a general strike was necessary, nor even the reality of a movement that could accomplish such a strike if necessary. Rather, Sorel believed that all that mattered was the idea of the strike, the perception that such a thing might be possible. Sorel referred to this as the glorious “myth” of the general strike, a manipulation of observation and assessment that would be both powerful enough to frighten the capitalists and create heroic workers willing to fight and die for the cause.

Although he is largely forgotten to history, Sorel’s theory of revolution and his idea of the glorious myth became important and effective tools in the leftist arsenal for shaping and directing public opinion. He argued—and history has confirmed—that the creation and promulgation of myths is much more practical and persuasive than are economic theories or obtuse philosophical discussions.

Today, we no longer talk about “myths.” We talk about “narratives”—which are, essentially, the same thing. Like Sorel’s heroic myth, narratives are versions of the truth, specifically cultivated to spur heroic action or, in some cases, non-action. In the case of the latter, almost a decade ago, Ben Hunt—one of the co-founders of Perscient, a narrative-focused investment research company—wrote about the Civil Rights movement and the creation of the narrative that encouraged good, decent, non-racist white Southerners (like his father) to remain unengaged from the fight against Jim Crow and for equality:

Alabama media coverage—the media coverage that my father would have seen—focused entirely on the agency of the NAACP in breaking the law. There was zero assessment or discussion of the law itself. There was an enormous assessment of the de facto illegality of the acts and the intentional use of children to perform illegal acts.… THAT’S the Narrative that my father heard. THAT’S the Narrative that moderate whites all over the South heard. It didn’t turn my father into a segregationist or a racist. But that was never the intent. The intent was to take my father off the political board. By constructing a dominant and immersive Narrative where opposing the status quo was defined as criminal, status quo institutions made it impossible for my father to actively support the civil rights movement.