TrueLife - The Trinoculars: Worldview, Narrative, & Story

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope your day is beautiful. I hope you woke up, did some push-ups, maybe went for a run, took a cold shower. I hope that you got to start off your day with a couple of Ws, a couple of wins, so that you can set up the rest of your day to be successful. Today I want to talk to you about the role of narratives, stories and worldviews, in your personal life, in the life of the people around you, and how those influence your day-to-day week-to-day, week-to-year.

week, month to month, year to year interactions with everything. We're all on this giant journey, and we have so much information around us. There's so many ways that information becomes disseminated. There's so many ways in which we can interpret that information. And you may interpret the exact same set of information incredibly different than I would interpret. that. So that's what we're looking at today. We're looking at the roles of three things. The first one is going to be our worldview. The second is going to be a narrative and the third is in the form of a story. So let me jump in here. I would consider one's worldview as the sum total

of their physical, personal, and social identities. Genetics, foundations, genetics, foundation, instincts, age, gender, ethnicity, lifestyle, personality, spirituality, life experiences. All of that is the foundation of your worldview. So if you can kind of just think about that for a minute, think about all these crazy factors that are the way you see the world. There's a lot of moving parts there. It's very complex. But if we can just start with one, let's just start with genetics.

The way your body works, the color of your skin, the color of your eyes. This, as much as we want to get away from this, it's something that we'll never get away from. Because we're different in that aspect. We're much more alike than we are different. but there are visual audio height weight color there's real differences in our genetics and those can be seen with your eyes so you can't pretend they're not there but we do a good job of pretending that and there's a lot of reasons for that so whatever your ethnicity you're already going to see the world different than someone from a different ethnic background instincts. This is a little different. A lot of people have similar instincts across different genders, different races. It's that unknowable urge that rises up in you. Some of us share very similar instincts when we get angry. Some of us share instincts when we're sad. But our attitudes towards

anger and sadness may be different. The reason I'm bringing all this up is I want you to be aware of your worldview. I want you to be aware of narratives and story. That's why we're talking about those three things right now. Once you become aware of these things, you can have a better understanding of who you are and how you see the world. And you can have a better understanding of your ideas and if they are working for you.

You can have a better understanding of why you think the things you do. So let's keep going with worldview. Age. Everyone's heard the adage. If you're not a Democrat when you're younger, you don't have a heart. If you're not a Republican when you're older, you don't have a brain. I don't necessarily agree with those particular statements, but they do well to explain age.

With age comes experience. With age comes the idea of seeing both wins and losses in being able to manage your thought patterns better because you have more data to look through. Gender, whether you're a man or whether you're a woman or whether you're somewhere in between. That changes the way you see the world. It changes who you see attractive.

It changes how you interact with yourself, the thoughts of yourself, the thoughts of others. It changes your relationship with your parents, with your loved ones, with your kids, with your potential romantic partner. It changes how you see the political landscape. Lifestyle. Conservative versus liberal.

Gay versus straight. Anarchist versus capitalist. You know, the way you choose your lifestyle is also a lens in which you see the world through. personality. Some people are introverts. Some people are extroverts. Both of those people interact differently, not only with each other, not only with people that are similar to them, but with everything around them. And it's that lens through which they view reality. Going outside might be scary, especially if it's in a pandemic and you're an introvert. If you're an extrovert, you may want to go

outside and just to talk to other people to see if what you're thinking is the same thing they're thinking. Spirituality. This almost depends on where you were born. No one has a choice there. However, your understanding of a power greater than you can have radical effects on the way you treat everything in your life, yourself, your family, your friends, your pets, your plants. It can change the course of history if you believe you're going to an afterlife and want to set off a suicide bomb.

It can change the course of warfare. It can change the course of a country. It can drive you down to South America and make you drink Kool-Aid. Life expectations. Here's another lens that people see things through. Sometimes the idea

of life expectations are like mirrors at a fun house. Hey, look at this one. Here's one where I'm fat and happy. Here's another one where I'm so skinny you can barely tell. Here's another one where I can see myself in the future. Here's another one where I don't exist at all. See, these ideas of expectations are like a pathway on which you can walk down.

First, a linguistic pathway that gives way to a pathway of reality. expectations are said to make high expectations are said to make poor travel companions so figure that one out we've touched on what i think are the foundational points of worldview and if you may need to take some time before i move on to the next section it might be a good time to do that now think about all these different ideas we just spoke about each one is well worth some ruminating Each one is well worth a little bit of mental time to figure out where you stand. And think about them as a lens in which you see reality through. And if you go through each of them, find out, are there some things that maybe are distorted in those views of yours, in your worldview?

How do they work together? Do they fit together like pieces in a puzzle? Can you rearrange them? chances are you probably can and it's important to understand your own worldview so that you can begin to understand the potential worldview of others right it's like this giant rubics cube

and once you figure out your worldview you've got one side and now if you want to figure out someone else's worldview you've got to move that cube around and figure out what theirs is and then how do you match your side to their side it can be done and it's fun it's a good exercise for people to participate in and it makes for great conversation let's move on to the second prong here of today's topic and that is narrative this term narrative is something that you hear all the time it is sort of the path or the prefer method of travel from higher to lower.

What I mean by that is that people in positions of authority usually try to provide you with a corridor for you to stay in, a lane for you to stay in. Have you heard that term stay in your own lane? That's the, a good way to describe narrative, a framework almost. And it allows people in authority to provide you, with a set of blinders so that you can do what they want you to do.

That's on one level. Another level would be your own personal narrative. And it's similarly a way for you to stay focused and stay on a path that kind of keeps your own blinders on yourself. And it's the next layer of this three-prong thesis I'm working on. It's common to hear it in academia The applied sciences And the idea of using a narrative

To describe your own personality Has been something we've been doing Since the beginning of time It's imperative to understand narrative If you want to understand Cognitive Behavioral or moral psychology

It's a great way to help people understand their own ways of thinking. If we bring it back to the corridor metaphor, then what you will be able to see is that if you can provide a narrative, you could hold someone's hand and walk them through the valley of the shadow of death. Right?

Think about that as a narrative. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Blessed is he who shepherds the weak to the valley of death, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost souls, and I shall strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger on those who attempt to poison my brother,

and they shall know my name is the Lord. So that particular passage provides you with the narrative of being cautious, but being brave, helping those weaker than you and that there is a sense of justice at the end of time. It's a beautiful corridor to walk down. It's a beautiful narrative to live by, whether you believe in Jesus, Allah, Buddha,

the spaghetti monster, whatever. Narratives are out there that can provide you a framework to build a better life. Okay, so let's take it one step further. Narratives. once you've established the narrative in your life or the multitude of narratives that you live by, begin trying to understand the narratives that other people live by.

And the way you would do that is by going back, understanding your worldview, all those topics we talked about in the first section, and then applying them to somebody else you know or a group of people you know. If you can understand a group's worldview, then you can begin to unravel the narrative that they live by. And when you can do those two things together,

when you can see someone's worldview, when you can understand someone's narrative, now you have a really good window into their personality. This is sort of the first two stages of building a psychological profile, profile on not only yourself and people you care about, but people that maybe you don't care about. In fact, it's this kind of psychological profile that is used by governments, psychologists, advertising firms, large multinational corporations, leaders, all these people in positions of authority, television, media, all these corporations, all these entities.

This is two of the three foundational points that they use to either sell you things, to manipulate you, sometimes maybe to push you into the right direction, like some of the information that Cass Sunstein will give you in his book Nudge. These are some of the techniques people. do use in order to manipulate. And they begin with worldview and narrative. The third pillar of this foundation is story. And I want you to think about story as a shortened version of narrative that brings together

all of the ideas in worldview. Think of a carefully constructed narrative. that brings in the building blocks of someone's foundational instincts, their age, their life, their gender, their ethnicity, the core building blocks of their worldview, together with narrative, and shorten down to some sweet, elegant talking points. And that's the story.

That's the story that is told. That's the story that is used to, act like a wedge and driven into the model of divide and conquer. But it starts with the first two, and it ends up in a story. Stories have been with us since the beginning of time. They're the most powerful way to influence people, because everyone can relate and everyone loves a good story. It's in our genetic code, I think. I think our genetics tell a story. So we can see there that if you have a powerful story, then you're going to be able to break down barriers.

You're going to be able to sell products. You're going to be able to influence people, whether for good or whether for bad. And it's done by combining worldview and narrative into a short, sweet snippet. I want to also add that it's all cyclical. So we've talked about how worldview can lead to narrative. Those two together can lead to story. But here's where I find it fascinating. Story, especially while implemented in conversations.

And think about how many conversations you have every day. So a well-placed story can change fundamentally and radically a person's behavior. So the story helps to organize someone else's worldview, which feeds back into narrative, which feeds back into story. So if you as an individual, as you as an entity, as you as an organization, if you can study a group's or individual's worldview and you can come up with the narrative, then you by default can find a story to feed back into that group that will show. change their worldview. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is called history. You get it? I love you guys.

That's what we got for today. Let's get up and get at them. Aloha.