“Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains” the first sentence of Rousseau’s “The Social Contract,”   can be applied as a universal metaphor for the human condition. The “chains” that bind us are our minds and relate most closely to the stories or narratives that we have accepted as the precepts that govern our reality and determine how we view ourselves and others in society. From a cognitive perspective, these chains cause cognitive distortions that frame the perceptual landscape of our individual and cultural identities.

These stories are adapted into our cognitive framework, or our psychological operating system, driving our thoughts, emotions, and feelings.  From an intrinsic human perspective, our minds operations are guided by the narratives that we have accepted over the course of our development and in our everyday world.  What is most problematic with our attending to these narratives, is that we accept them without testing their validity. Since they are woven into the tapestry of our identity, we have not obtained the psychological and scientific tools required to test them. From a pragmatic perspective, the acceptance of false or untested narratives biases our thoughts, often shaping how we feel, think, and act in our everyday lives. Oftentimes, these narratives are self-serving, as they provide a rationalization for feelings, thoughts and actions that are part of an individual or cultural landscape, where there is a shared interest. Unfortunately, what appears to be a “safe” story, can bias and factionalize our society, rather than achieving its parenthetical goal of creating understanding.  In today’s complex world, with an abundance of narratives that are circulated on almost every facet of civilization, there is a smorgasbord of rationalizations that we can feed our minds. We fill our plates, rushing to the table, with the fare that fits our identity. We gorge ourselves on information that fits our schema, without regard for the nutritional value of what we are consuming.  Acknowledging that we live in a country with an obesity epidemic makes this metaphor an even more salient comparison, as we do not watch what we consume with our gut or our minds. We fail to see how our consumption affects our health on both physical and psychological levels.  Given the current “state of affairs” in this country, it would be simple to write a book assessing the litany of narratives, that lie at the core of much of the negativity and fractionalization of our society and follow it with an additional book explaining how these narratives play out, in the power dynamics of society.

Next- Who do our narratives serve? Power, control, factrionalization…