The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting
The goals of families, groups, clans, and gangs are even lower. Conflicts, wars and confrontations between generations may occur at this level despite corporate culture, traditions and unspoken laws.
And finally, the level of personal goals. These are the most sensitive and most important goals for a person, goals that shape most of a person’s daily behaviour, goals that people are not ready to give up, which they are not ready to neglect, sometimes even in the most extreme circumstances.
The challenge of managing people has always been how to subordinate the goals of the lower levels to the upper ones, whether they are family, corporate or state. The complexity of this task increases with the elevation of the goals. One of the reasons is that at lower levels, a person’s behaviour is formed on deep and stable narratives, and at higher levels the meanings of narratives often become less clear or appear unconvincing.
It is believed that the quality of a person’s life depends on the effectiveness and satisfaction from the process of achieving goals. In pursuit of this desired quality, people are ready to unite and adjust. They are ready to change their place of residence, family, profession, place of work, and sometimes even country and nationality. People are willing to redefine their identity to attain the lowest-level goals. This, as it will be discussed in the next chapter, is a natural function of the human brain and is integral to its operation.
Other cases of interest are rare but popular, when individuals prioritise higher-level goals over more immediate ones. And here, striving to achieve these 'elevated’ (in all senses) goals, a person encounters illusions.
The first of these illusions arises when people think that they are pursuing their own goals. But in reality, the goal may have been subtly replaced with tasks imposed by their surroundings. Why is that? At least because for a long time it was believed that people with goals of their own are dangerous, especially if their goals do not align with those of their leaders. Wouldn’t it be better to give these individuals assignments? Substantial, ambitious, life-long assignments.
For example, some nations have introduced a continuous task – a social credit system for evaluating citizens’ behaviour. Score is calculated based on their compliance with the society’s requirements and rules. Quite a goal, isn’t it? History shows that the desire 'to be right’ within the state or nation is gradually and necessarily transformed into an even more ambiguous one – 'to be always right’.
Smaller-scale goals are reserved for environments such as supermarkets, vanity fairs, multi-currency accounting systems, and similar areas to materialise self-identification. To maintain a comfortable existence within these consumer spaces, people are ready to engage in strenuous work, the effectiveness of which is judged by the authorities and society in goals achieved per unit of time, ultimately leading to a dubious system of evaluating these accomplishments.
However, what motivates a person to willingly prioritise the goals of a company, nation, or country over their own? It is the pursuit of meaning that can peacefully lead the mind to compromise with its goal to survive. This is likely the primary factor distinguishing people from the rest of the living world.
In the long run, at every hierarchical level, individuals employ a similar strategy to subdue those beneath them, which involves selling various concepts of happiness. These concepts are replicated, appealing, and straightforward to the same extent as they are unreachable. Perhaps because they aim to blur the distinction between 'I want’ and 'I need’, rendering it negligible and obscure.
How many unnecessary worries from 'I want’ arise due to the fact that what you really need is not always what you want! Therefore, if you imagine that you want exactly what you need, then this already acquires some commercial and political interest. The only task is to convince yourself of this construction. To show that in addition to goals, actions and plans, your 'desires’ also contain the essence of your life.
By the way, if an individual is not persuaded by this semantic framework, then an undesirable situation for the upper levels may occur – when a person wants what he or she already possesses. And it can be regarded as happiness – to want what you have. Yet, this is a different story and a different concept.
Some Cherished Stories from the Bible
How many stories – so many interpretations.
If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way.
If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. ― Jim Rohn
Reading the news, it is sometimes difficult to even imagine a place where such cynical and hypocritical stories can still occur. Although everyone suspects that the place is not so far from them. And there are many, many such stories.
How many stories has humanity managed to tell itself? Do you know how many stories there are in the Old Testament? There are much more than may be seen at first glance. After all, each story can be interpreted in different ways: as a historical description of the people in search of their place in the world, as instructions for each day’s behaviour, or as a manual for managing people and processes. Each story reveals several layers of meaning, depending on the angle from which it is viewed.
What is the meaning of the life story of Joshua, a military commander and leader, or the story of such a controversial figure as King David? How many temptations fell to the lot of King David? The king, who regularly violated the laws, at least moral laws, after all the turmoil, again and again returned to his faith and his mission. Maybe the point is that none of us knows our purpose in life until we take responsibility for events and our own lives.
Or the story of Joseph, the son of Jacob, who later became Pharaoh’s first minister. After his brothers had nearly killed him and then sold him as a slave to the caravan drivers, he forgave them. A story of mercy? Or is it a story about how the path to success always lies through suffering, betrayal, and knowledge? Or in the ability to interpret dreams and that you need to listen to the voice of God or your inner voice? In any case, try to understand what He or it wants to tell you. How many different interpretations! It is like in medicine: how many doctors there are, so many diagnoses they make.
We sometimes trust TV series characters more than politicians because the former present us with a more understandable semantic narrative. And, as history shows, what matters most about politicians is how close their promises are to our desires than to our values. And our desires are not always in full accordance with our model of morality. The world has become so cynical that to achieve their goals, politicians and those around them do not disdain to appeal to the different beings that live in each of us. But more to those beings who neglect their intelligence.
The Meanings of Survival
Life is the choice and refinement of the model in which meanings are tried to be introduced.
Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads
and empty hearts can do that. ― Norman Vincent Peale
Humankind, in fact, has always faced only one question – its survival. Throughout their existence on the planet, people have refined the forms and models of survival, accumulated knowledge, and developed skills. And all this in order to live to an age when they could contribute their unique genetic material to a global planetary experiment they are involved in.
And over time, practising their survival, people have achieved significant success. They tirelessly improved hunting techniques, settled in new homes, cultivated crops, and developed ways to protect themselves from wild animals and neighbouring tribes. Along with these changes, new demands have emerged – to live as long as possible and as better and easier as possible. In other words, the requirements have changed not only for the time a person has lived on the Earth but also for the quality of this time. People’s ideas and the very texture of their behaviour have changed. They transformed the innate biological mechanisms of survival – defensive aggression, stress, competition – into categories and concepts of envy, vanity, greed, adultery, and the list goes on.
People began to devote more and more time to the realisation of their most sophisticated desires, called ideas, the connection of which with survival is still very doubtful. Choosing a suitable survival model and implementing it is what a person does all his or her life.
The survival model includes decisions such as choosing a profession and place of work, graduating from prestigious universities, developing skills, accumulating knowledge, and interacting with the surroundings. The amplitude of relationships with the surroundings often disappoints a person when they feel hypocrisy, servility and grovelling, but they adapt, because it becomes acceptable for them; it is also a survival model.
There is no good or bad model, there is one that suits an individual specifically. Irreconcilable contradiction in any model is just a term. The desire to survive reconciles everything and everyone. Assembling their model piece by piece, with their job, education, skills, language skills, citizenship, and everything else possible, people try to make it work at all levels of their goals and associations.
People allow the goal to determine the means to achieve it. The world is a market. A giant market as big as humankind. The model that people choose, what they do and what they strive for, shape their environment. They choose the environment, and the environment chooses them.
On the one hand, life is a race where the model is endlessly improved to adapt to changing circumstances. This benefits those at higher levels, who are precisely the ones engaged in constantly changing the rules and circumstances. On the other hand, life is a person’s accumulated experience.
People are disappointed. People are afraid that any new ideas, goals and meanings of changes in the social system or their way of life will no longer serve their interests. They are afraid because they are sure that any new social contract between levels carries with it only the possibility of creating a new level of ‘elites’.
At the same time, the exact 'elites’ or groups of influence that have a monopoly on creating and distributing the leading narratives and meanings of such a community system are well aware and take advantage of the fact that when creating any new narrative, there is only one mandatory condition. This narrative must be at least somehow connected with the meaning of an individual’s personal goals. And it does not matter how – with promises or real steps. Everything else can be ignored, and the narrative can continue to be interpreted and supplemented as desired, depending on the need for the current historical moment.
Therefore, not all narratives are accepted by people as long as their personal goals are threatened by issues like hunger, unemployment, hardships, and poverty. Try to deprive any person of a source of income – they will do exactly what they need to provide for their immediate needs and do whatever it takes for this. It is enough to recall the experiments on behaviour mentioned earlier. As long as there is a monetary system and maintained shortages of resources, the defining narratives will be the ones that are most in line with the model of human physical survival.
There is still something that can influence people’s behaviour after they have resolved problems with basic survival. Nowadays, this is a tremendous space for influencing and controlling human behaviour through meanings.
When the term 'meaning’ is mentioned, the last link in the chain of its descriptions is reasoning about the meaning of life. People managed to come up with a lot of definitions and designs for this, in their opinion, important concept. It might be, for example: 'This is who you want to be and what you want to create.' Or: 'To be, rather than to seem.' Thus, by the way, people constantly repeat and calmly continue to seem throughout all their lives, and not to be.
Some people present their true purpose as the mission with which they were sent to this world. And the contents of their last report, which has been taking their breath away all their life, will be presented with awe at the heavenly throne. But many, and most of them, perceive their destiny as a series of important, in their opinion, goals, the end result of which is seen as material benefits, position in society, scientific discoveries or mental balance and self-improvement.
But, thank God, everything is simpler. From the point of view of nature, the meaning of life is in life itself. A person’s goal and purpose is to continue to live. From the formula: 'Plant a tree, build a house, have a son,' for nature, the goal is only the latter. All the rest people have made up for themselves, and not because they are bored or narcissistic impostors. This is because the goals of a person’s brain and life goals are different.
The meanings people find in poems, novels, business, painting, politics, or all of them together exist as part of a chosen survival model to realise their primary purpose – to continue living.
Today’s world is a world made up of opportunities and limitations, but a world where ultimately the choice is always up to the individual. The choice is up to his or her models. Previously, people went through rituals, initiations, mentors, teachers, and universities to make this choice. Now, websites, blogs, groups, and subscriptions are used. The impact on humans has increased by an order of magnitude.
In order to understand all this, people turn to their consciousness. Turn to something that they do not know much about, and much less what it is actually intended for. At the same time, people confuse the concepts of brain and consciousness, and these are not exactly the same things.
The task of the brain, as we said, is survival. One of the functions of the brain is consciousness, which allows a person to adapt meaningfully and accurately to changing circumstances, adjust forms of behaviour and create new ones. This conscious adaptation is the highest ability that exists in the living world.
How did people get this unique tool? What is it and how is it designed?
Paradise: The Story of Abdication
When you point your index finger at someone else,
the other three fingers point at you. ― Anonymous
The unique ability to justify oneself and transfer responsibility to the surroundings has been around since the beginning of time, since the origin of man. The most famous story about this tells how the fruit of the tree of knowledge was secretly eaten in the well-known garden in Mesopotamia. Already in this story, humanity tries not to notice important details that affect the essence and immediately focuses on the ending and characters.
But the details speak a lot. First, Adam had certain duties to perform in the garden. Not picking or eating the fruit of the Tree of knowledge was just a condition of stay.
The second important detail is that after the incident, he tried to hide.
And the third – when asked why he disobeyed God, he answered literally the following: ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’
The classic method of transferring responsibility first to the surroundings – Eve, and then higher – to God himself. Eve has the same method as her husband: ‘The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.’
That was all the Creator heard. No, not confession or remorse. But a justification of their actions, an attempt to explain…
Every day we hear hundreds of such responses – at work, at home, on TV, everywhere.
This is the only thing we were allowed to take away from Paradise – our ability to be seduced and then make our excuses and shift responsibility.
The story of the Garden of Eden is a story of abdication of responsibility.
The Basic Design of the Brain
How the 'triune’ brain came into being and what actually happens in it.
…unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall
have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be
taken away even that which he hath. ― Matthew 25:29
The brain is a complex structure that supports human life. Its configuration reflects the entire evolution of living beings, as it contains structures that share life support functions closely related to each other.
The conditional division of the human brain into functional levels has long been proposed. For example, according to ancient Jewish sources, the brain contains 1) Rauch, the hypothalamus, which is responsible for the needs of survival; 2) Nefesh, what is called the limbic system, which shapes feelings, emotions and desires; 3) Neshamah, the cerebral cortex, i.e. intelligence, strategy, philosophy and control over the other two levels.
The ancient Jewish description generally coincides with the modern view of the structure of the brain. Today, it is also schematically and functionally divided into the 'reptilian brain’, 'mammalian’, or emotional brain, and the cerebral cortex. All these conditional levels functionally correspond to the purposes mentioned by the ancient Jewish researchers.
The first and most ancient level is the 'reptilian brain’. It appeared 150 million years ago and is responsible for three main functions related to individual survival. The first function is security. Instant solutions that determine the degree of danger using the 'fight-or-flight’ algorithm. This widely used formula for responding to danger does not mention another possible option – to freeze.
The second duty of the 'reptilian brain’ is actions related to the search for food.
And finally, its third function is activities aimed at the continuation of the species, which includes finding and identifying objects suitable for reproduction.
The 'reptilian brain’ is constantly in operation, but a person is not aware of its activity, because the main indicator of the effectiveness of this brain, its KPI (key performance indicator), is speed and reliability, and not awareness. Awareness is as energy-intensive as it is slow and ambiguous. You can get eaten before you even think about it.
Above the 'reptilian brain’ is a structure called the 'mammalian brain’, or emotional brain. These structures appeared about 50 million years ago and help individuals survive in the group.
The emotional brain is the brain of social relations that helps structure a herd, tribe, pride, group, or society. Power and submission are behaviours that are shaped by this particular level. This brain is also involved in procreation activities, but in a specific form: to make an impression – to get an impression.
The 'mammalian brain’ is the centre of striving for superiority, seen as a resource for the exclusivity of the distribution of genetic material. Its structures allow a person to 'understand’ pets and be fascinated by 'communicating’ with them, and this 'understanding’ is, in a certain sense, true. It is this level that is responsible for a person’s experience and attention.
And finally, about two million years ago, the topmost level appeared: the structures responsible for the function called consciousness. If everything is more or less clear with the previous levels, then there are various misconceptions about the work and purpose of this level.
Most people imagine that the functions of consciousness include such important abilities as planning, developing military doctrines and scientific theories, writing novels and poems, writing theses and painting, creating movies and gambling. But all of the above and much more are just related elements, a by-product that arises in the process of its main activity and its main purpose – conscious adaptation to changes in the environment.
Explain and Justify
A reluctant lawyer – why a person is never guilty.
Anyone can be put in prison for ten years without
explaining anything to him, and somewhere in the back
of his mind he will know why. ― Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The most significant and primary function of our consciousness is to adapt our abilities to the model that contributes to survival, or to create a new survival model according to our abilities.
The ability to adapt in today’s world of concrete jungle is significantly different from the features of human adaptation in the wild, where they had only to adapt to food chains, pulling out of them the favourite links that satisfy their growing appetite and already suitable for the developing culinary mastery and needs.
Today, adaptation is no longer a situational mimicry or an evolutionary improvement of organs and physiological processes. Today, adaptation cannot be a passive expectation which follows environmental changes. Today, no matter how strange it may sound, modern requirements for adaptation are already a person’s anticipation of non-existent changes and practical interaction in models of the expected future.
Human consciousness is capable of creating a certain image of reality, modelling this image and admitting into it something that does not actually exist in the real environment. The world around us is represented by hundreds of thousands of interconnected processes. A person can adjust and rearrange these processes in their mind, change their essence and detail, simultaneously build a completely different reality in their perception, and create their own virtual mental maps.
Later on, based on these visual maps, it is safe to build your strategies, calculate plans and only then act. All this is the first and foremost ability of consciousness. But not the only one. There is another, and also an important one.
Nature has rewarded humans with a unique ability to visualise and imagine anything. Thanks to this ability, people can plan the actions of an upcoming hunt or the tactics of a football match, describe to themselves the interior of a house or the structure of a business they want to open. People can also recreate in their minds pictures of what happened to them and relive these moments in their imagination. Can imagine and admire or, on the contrary, become frustrated and upset. Can become so upset that they fall into a deep depression and, even worse, bring themselves to the point of wanting or trying to take their own life.
Thanks to imagination, a person can experience emotions and thoughts not only from events that have already happened to them but also from those that have not yet occurred.
A person can feel guilty both for the past and for the future. Guilty of anything, and that makes his condition unbearable. Experience something that does not exist or has not happened, and feel guilty about something that has not happened yet. This ability of consciousness comes bundled with imagination and the ability to visualise.
Nature is not at all interested in the question of who is to blame. Nature does not have the concepts of 'guilt’, 'judgement’, 'moral responsibility’ and similar terms invented by people. Nature has one purpose and meaning, which it puts into the appearance of any living thing on the planet. This is the continuation of life. Suicidal behaviour and depression of a person, according to nature, do not contribute in any way to their reproduction and the fulfilment of this single and most important goal.
Hence, another important function of consciousness is the ability to find excuses and explanations for yourself in any situation. Even after confessing to the most serious crime, a person always finds indirect culprits for his or her terrible action. It can be a dysfunctional family, bad company, government policies, weather, circumstances, and so on and so forth. The unique ability to explain and justify oneself surpasses all other human abilities. A person does not even notice how this happens because it works as perfectly and reliably as it does independently.