One of the most interesting things about us humans is our strong tendency to think in narratives. It’s how our species evolved to understand reality and how to act in it.
It’s not our only mental “gear”. We can put on our logic hat and do math and perform engineering marvels too. But for the day-to-day stuff, we throw all we see and hear into a narrative structure and that’s how we make sense of the world.
This isn’t just my goofy idea. Neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists will tell you the same thing. Humans think in a narrative structure. We can’t help it. It’s how we are wired.
The ancients knew this well. There’s a reason they always fleshed out archetypal narratives in their myths. It’s like a reference book for human cognition.
You can see how such a thing would be useful. And of course we still do it today. We tell each other stories over and over and over in a zillion different ways as we refine the narratives that shape our lives and our society.
This truth is going to be a common theme on Haman Nature, both the YouTube show and this Substack.
Today I want to use that lens to talk about how we think about conflict. Not so much our own personal fights, but how we view conflict when we see others fighting.
When we see people (or groups of people) fighting, we immediately try to slot the conflict into one of our most powerful narrative structures: the fight between right and wrong, good and evil, white hats and black hats.
This is perfectly natural. It’s essential that we view the world that way. Right behavior leads to prosperity and peace. Wrong behavior leads to misery and war. If we didn’t have a tendency to view the world through that lens, we never would have gotten this far.
So when we see two fellows in the bar fighting, our most natural tendency is to try to figure out “who started it?”. Who’s right? Who’s cause is just? Who’s the good guy? Who’s the bad guy? Should we get involved? If we jump in, who should we fight alongside?
Understandable tendency. Most of us think this way. Unfortunately, it’s often a mistake.
When we see a bar fight in a movie or a TV show (our modern day myths), there’s usually a protagonist (our hero) who is righting some wrong or defending himself or an innocent against an antagonist (the villain).
Again, it’s one of our strongest narratives. White hat versus black hat.
But consider all the bar fights you know of personally. It’s usually just two or more knuckleheads and there’s not a white hat to be found. A whole lot of our conflicts are more like two black hats fighting each other. Often with another black hat standing there who helped instigate the fracas.
Or maybe the hats are dark gray. Reality is usually more muddled that idealized story-telling. Sure, sometimes there is a classic hero and a villain, but it’s very rare that the lines are that clear.
I bring all this up because our natural tendency to see good guys and bad guys really screws us up when it comes to evaluating foreign wars and considering foreign policy.
Do we hallucinate white hats and black hats out there in the world? I submit that we do. Often.
I also submit that the US government is often one of those black hats. In the case of the Russia/Ukraine conflict, we’re the black hat that (largely through NATO) instigated the fight.
We hallucinate that there are virtuous “sides” in conflicts and that we should therefore step in and “make things right”. And of course, it’s no coincidence that the Military Industrial Complex gets rich in the process (and at the expense of ordinary taxpayers).
The hallucinations are obvious. The incentives to push simplistic (and false) narratives are obvious. I won’t go around the globe and backwards in time to show you example after example of this bloody and expensive tendency.
I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
One piece of advice though: Learn history. Also, never forget that every history you read or watch is also a narrative. “History is written by the winners” as they say. So don’t just read one history from one source. Read several. Evaluate. Triangulate.
Here’s one resource I’ve found invaluable. It’s called Liberty Classroom. There are dozens of courses in this “dashboard university” on various aspects of world and American history as well as economics, political philosophy, logic, and even literature.
It’s a treasure trove. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Now go forth and hallucinate no more.
Naturally,
Adam