Narrative, Metaphor and Hyper-Novelty (Special Edition)

Entropy, Energy & The 4th Frontier: Chris Martenson on DarkHorse

We are a fish out of water perpetually – flopping from boat to boat.

The following is paraphrased from 34:15 in the above discussion:

Chris Martenson:
We (us humans) are narrative machines. We used to sit around the campfire and tell stories. Stories are so immensely powerful to the point that thousands of years later they are still encoded deep into our psyche and provide valuable lessons and moral frameworks. So, narratives are one layer about the story.

I stumbled across a book by George Lakoff and it’s about metaphors (Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson). It’s that we operate at the level of metaphors and the narratives are a verbal-cognitive layer on top of that. The metaphor is an embodied concept. The concept is vague, but really powerful and drives a lot. So, one of the pieces that they put in there is the metaphor for an argument. In western discourse the metaphor for an argument is ‘War’. We are going to have a battle of the minds. A lot of people are going to shy away from it because they don’t like conflict. An argument is conflict; winners and losers; there’s blood. And he said, what if there are cultures out there where the metaphor for argument is a ‘dance’. And the idea of the dance is that the two parties will try to come up with the best possible choreography given the tempo, the music and the air that night. It’s a whole different metaphor.

The sole sickness we are facing, is that our core metaphors, we have lived by for thousands of years are now broken. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’, ‘have dominion over the earth’ – these are all good things until you reach about 6, 7 billion people…. It’s clear that we have problems. In order to get ourselves cognitively organised and rallied around them we have to have a way of articulating them without it tripping all of our amygdala brain stem land mines – where you can’t do that because it’s too challenging. This is one of the prime tensions we have right now.

Then there’s an overlay on top of all of that. We have people ‘monkeying’ around with our cognitive landscape conducting 5th generation warfare specifically to target our ability to make sense of things. (see Abuse of Language). So, we are already at a sensemaking bottleneck. We have important decisions to make yet we have people trying to hobble us.

Brett Weinstein at 43:00:
The idea of Hyper-novelty is that our speciality as human beings is dealing with novel circumstances and coming up with mechanisms to profit in the midst of them. It’s what we do. Our evolving content is not housed in our genomes, it is housed in our cognitive layer which is passed along as ‘culture’ which is innovated through ‘consciousness’. The creature that adapts really well to new stuff that its ancestors never saw, that’s us – human beings..that’s our specialty. But…our rate of change is so high that we cannot keep up with it. Even our amazing capacity to adapt is outstripped by the rate of technological change and so we are constantly using tools that are inappropriate for the environment we find ourselves in. We are a fish out of water perpetually – flopping from boat to boat.

I love the idea you borrow from Lakoff that ‘war’ (and not dance) is a metaphor that is deeply rooted in our discussions where we have conflicting interests. Dance is not always the right metaphor, but sometimes it’s exactly the right one. Why? Because ‘Dance’ does contain the ability to explore the tension between the cooperative and the competitive. Who are the ultimate dance partners? They are romantic partners and have potentially tremendously overlapping interests, but never perfectly. One of the greater insights of evolutionary biology that we picked up on in the latter half of the 20th century was about these places where we see to creatures that have great alignment, but not perfect alignment and it predicts all kind of things.

I love your point. Are we missing a metaphor that allows us to even think about the puzzle properly? My sense is because of Hyper-novelty we have a language that is hobbling us in our ability to even articulate what it is that we face.

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“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand