Human lives are influenced and guided by narratives that are inspired and created by individuals and subsequently accepted as social truths by its adherents. A simplistic layman’s definition of a narrative is that it is a story about something. Stories are the most ancient and potent tools of human communication. Since the birth of civilizations and from distant antiquity, human beings always related and connected themselves through the art of story-telling. Humans have a natural affinity and instinct to identify themselves with the protagonists and characters in a story which causes them to transcend space and time in a phenomenon called the “narrative transport”. They can easily travel between the past, present and future through this self-identification. Jean Paul Sartre, the existentialist philosopher has an interesting passage in his 1938 novel, The Nausea where he writes, “A man is always a teller of tales, his lives surrounded by stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them, and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it”.

Narratives are little more than stories. While a story is a description of an event, a narrative is designed to understand the world around us and gives meaning to the illustrated event. A story tells the reader or an audience about what happened whereas a narrative expounds why it happened and its significance to the society, ethnicity and nation as a whole. A narrative could be a collection of stories interwoven in a social framework with a historicity and timeline of its own: if stories are chapters of a book, then a narrative is the entire book that imparts the reader the freedom to holistically interpret and form concepts by connecting all the chapters seamlessly into his perceptive canvas. If a story is analogous to a scene in a movie, a narrative is the movie itself.

Our lives are surrounded by narratives and forms the bedrock of abstract principles. Take for example the idea of nationhood. If you identify yourself as an Indian, then India is the product of a narrative, the initial cartography drawn in London which included undivided India and provinces which were part of the imperial British Empire namely Pakistan and Bangladesh. The narrative of being an Indian changed with creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh and new narratives had to be constructed to distinguish between a group of people who shared similar racial, physiological, social and cultural identities for millennia together. Most states in India before the reorganization post-independence were lumped together, Gujarat and Maharashtra being classic cases when they were part of a single territory called the Bombay State. Ethnic distinctions between the two, punctuated by separate language, state boundaries and cultural uniqueness are the products of a new narrative for differentiation, powerful enough to trigger “sons of the soil” prerogatives. Recent groundbreaking research on human psychology has shed light on the fact that even sexuality and gender are to be reconceived as narratives and not binary truths inherent in our biological systems.

Efraim Benmelech of Northwestern University and Esteban Klor of Hebrew University are two pre-eminent economists who researched on the correlation between disenchanted youth who self-recruit for the self-styled ISIS and economic hardships, social inequities and political instabilities. Their findings challenged conventional assumptions that poverty has a causal role in young people joining ISIS, but on the contrary, many insurgent foreign extremists joined from rich, wealthy European countries like Sweden, UK, Belgium, Finland and Ireland. The researchers established that statistically an individual is most likely to be radicalized from affluent nations in the European heartland rather than from the impoverished nations of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Sudan where youth are disenchanted by high incidence of poverty and socio-economic privations. Research also indicated that radicalized youth from Europe joining ISIS is due to the fascination of the narrative of their violent extremist ideology and the heavenly rewards of martyrdom it entails. The current Russian war on Ukrainian soil is cleverly disguised in an innocuous narrative “special operation” by the Russian propaganda machinery which refrains from use of the word “war”. This type of framing gives legitimacy to Russians to support Vladimir Putin’s deranged machinations intended to invoke ultra-nationalist sentiments. The NATO narrative on the current stalemate assumes a different dimension by invoking the history of Russian imperialism and the ruthless maneuvers to maintain “Kremlin’s sphere of influence” among erstwhile communist bloc nations. NATO condemns the Russian narrative of defending its territorial integrity through military engagements against NATO’s eastward expansion and the imminent threat of adding Ukraine to its fold. Both narratives have passionate supporters.

Truth becomes relative at the mercy of narratives and the subsequent moral relativism permeating the world constitutes and transforms it into post-truth societies. Narratives are the singular reason for countless wars, genocides and bloodshed in every age, whether ancient, mediaeval or modern. The FARC rebels of Columbia still fighting against the administration since the 1960’s to institute an egalitarian society on Marxist-Leninist principles, the Basque Separatists past insurgencies against the Spanish government clamoring for autonomous jurisdiction, LTTE rebels war of terror against the Singhalese government for an independent homeland for Tamils in Northeastern Sri Lanka, Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution of the Jewish Problem extermination 6 million Jews, Mao’s Long March, Joseph Stalin’s purges, Pol Pot’s Agrarian Utopia to Bosnian, Armenian and Rwandan genocides were orchestrated by conjuring up the dark and brutal powers of narrative frameworks.

Robert Schiller, the Yale University economist and Nobel Laureate has coined the term “Narrative Economics” by empirically concluding that a staid and conservative discipline like economics is heavily influenced by narratives, that forms the foundational aspect of economic decision making by consumers. In a sharp point of departure from conventional wisdom that states that individuals follow “maximizing the utility function” for purchase decisions, Schiller proposed that there are other powerful forces at play which impact and control consumer behavior. The housing boom in the United States was driven not so much by lower interest rates than being intrinsically tied to the American Dream culminating in the narrative of multiple home ownerships fed and sustained by escalating home prices. People jumped into that bandwagon of the enticing prospect of a bonanza and oblivious of the fact that they were being viciously trapped in a speculative bubble. The sub-prime crisis was partially triggered by a new narrative of an impending housing bubble and thereby espousing the futility of investing in US housing sector. The Depression Era narrative of automation replacing human labor resulting in job losses has resurfaced in the 21st century narrative of similar, massive labor displacement owing to the future onslaught of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Robotics. It is interesting to note that machines replacing humans have a long narrative legacy originating from Aristotle in ancient Greece. Bimetallism in 1900’s, the Gold Standard since World War II and currently Bitcoin spurn narratives on the importance of value backed currency systems.

As cognitive beings, human beings have the rare capacity to shape their future by defining the present and by learning from past mistakes. It is within its discretionary power as to what kind of future ideally this dominant species wish to enter. It needs new narratives which appeal to the common good, powerful and penetrative to eschew self-centered past narratives those threaten its existence as a species. The current existential dilemma warrants the best and brightest minds among humans to create brilliant narratives on environmental degradation and climate change, preservation of bio-diversity, against callousness of human greed which spawns deadly viruses and pushing millions into poverty, against racism, casteism, jingoism, bigotry and social inequalities, against anything that divides and undermines the dignity of being a human. In a world dominated by the Internet, World Wide Web, Quantum Computing and explosion of New Age Social Media, when information travels at the speed of light, narratives have contagion effect. Choosing right narratives which helps in the preservation of the species, those that enlighten, empower and ennoble man assume paramount importance as humans stare into the crossroads of existence. May a new discernment dawn on Man.