The new Director of Cognitive Advantage is tasked with winning the battle for influence, perception, and decision-making, “in an era where foes don’t need tanks or missiles to shape the world, they just need a meme and bot farm.” There is, of course, nothing new about influence in warfare. The ancients had quite a lot to say on the topic. The subtitle of a recent article takes a look “Inside America’s New Cognitive War and how the US is Getting Inside the Minds of Our Adversaries.”
In order to get inside the minds of our adversaries, it is imperative to understand their cultural narratives and the conscious stories that reflect those less-than-conscious narratives. But what I mean by “narrative” is not that of common usage. As a philosopher, with specialization in Narrative Identity Theory, I use the word narrative is similar to the way Aristotle meant the concept of Poetics. That understanding and usage is different from the commonly understood usage of narratives: as interchangeable with story, or as propaganda, or in opposition to truth.
Rather, narrative is to poetics as journalism is to history.
Aristotle said that there is a sense in which poetry has higher truth value than history. What he meant was poetry addresses the nature of its subject while history addresses particular events, for example, poetry speaks to the nature of War with a capital W while history addresses the specifics of a particular conflict, complete with dates, places, and specific people.
It follows that disagreements over a historical account can result in accusations of inaccuracy, but the same accusation cannot be made about poetry (and narrative).
A poem may not touch the heart. It may not resonate. But it cannot be accused of being wrong.
To say that a poem is false is to misunderstand the nature of the beast.
From the perspective of Cognitive Advantage, there are at least two broad problems with accepting the definition of narrative in the manner of common usage. One problem is that we lose our intellectual history and continue to unnecessarily reinvent the wheel. The second problem is that our influence operations will ignore the unconscious aspects of cognition and the cultural influences that impact it.
One cannot know oneself, nor one’s adversaries, if one doesn’t comprehend the effects of unconscious cultural assumptions on identity, behavior, and decision processes.
I define narrative as a cultural product that becomes internalized by individuals within the culture, as identity. More specifically, narrative is a cultural product that simultaneously demonstrates and shapes the way we understand the meaning of our context and our place within it (identity). Cultural narrative is internalized by individuals socialized within that narrative space as personal and social identity.
The way a culture has historically understood the meaning of its environment and its place within it is the narrative space into which individuals are socialized, without consent and without alternative (with few exceptions). A very large part of human narrative inheritance is unconscious and shows up as assumption.
The way our culture has socialized us to process incoming information will determine which incoming information will be cognitively categorized as alarming, or alternatively, as so unimportant as to be dismissed (not consciously received), depending upon the meaning map one has inherited from one’s culture.
Aristotle, and Plato before him, addressed the national security risks associated with what is being called cognitive warfare, what I call more foundationally, Narrative Warfare, but they were more aware than we are of the unconscious (what they thought of as irrational) part of it. Plato was alarmed at how even the untrained could influence what is unconscious.
We want more than just to “get inside the minds of our adversaries.” We want to influence their minds, so we need to pay attention to their narrative influence on the cognitive process. It will be less than conscious, but not for those looking in from the outside.
The definitional distinction between narrative as used in common parlance and the way professionals tasked with any kind of warfare should define it is not just an academic distinction. Our ability to “get inside the minds of our adversaries” will require a deeper understanding of narrative.