One way to lose Narrative Warfare is to fight like it is a battle over information. One way to win is to get your adversary to fight as though it is a battle over information. We have taken the losing position.
The difference between Narrative Warfare and what the military competes for, “information dominance,” is that Narrative Warfare is not conflict over information; it is competition over the meaning of information. Fighting over who gets the most information, who has the best or most recent information, or who can censor information matters less than who controls the meaning of the information. Having all the most recent, verifiable information is meaningless if adversarial forces decide what it means.
Disinformation is not the problem. An audience hostile to the truth is the problem. Hostility to the truth is not a natural phenomenon. It is a curated. One method of curation is through the weaponization of stories that target the narrative of a culture.
Narrative Warfare is not a battle of narratives. It is an assault on a culture’s narrative, specifically meaning and identity. More specifically, it is an assault on the meaning of information for the identity of the target audience.
Whoever dominates in Narrative Warfare does not simply decide arbitrary meaning, he who dominates decides the meaning of information for “me and mine;” how it matters specifically to the identities under attack.
To understand how this happens, an initial distinction is vital to grasp: Narratives and stories are different things. That separation of concepts is important because narratives and stories operate differently.
Narratives are meta-thematic, culture and identity grounding prototypes (like the common narrative archetype known as The Hero’s Journey), and usually not very conscious. Stories are specific examples of narrative. We see endless examples of stories (like Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, Gladiator) that reflect a general thematic narrative (like The Hero’s Journey). Stories are multiple, specific, and conscious, and reflect the narrative (both in content and structure).
One way Narrative Warfare is conducted is by using weaponized stories to undermine narratives; the conscious and specific is used to dismantle the thematic and unconscious.
Why and how? Because nothing is as persuasive as a story. There is no form of argument, no logical process that can move us the way a story does. Storied assertions get beyond the rational faculty. More powerfully, stories invite people to identify themselves within it. Who one sees oneself as, and the story one sees oneself as a part of, compel action consistent with the identification required by the story. I’ve demonstrated elsewhere how stories are used by extremist recruiters to undermine the cultural narratives of the target audience and then compel action from them.
This narrative strategy has been used by terrorist groups all over the world throughout history, and by all sides of political spectrums. Terrorist recruiters don’t make logical arguments, or put up graphs, or list bullet points to make their case. They tell stories. Why? Because stories fly over the top of the rational mind. Nothing is as powerful as a story if influence is the desired effect. That’s why we tell them. So in a narrative attack, the story triggers then undermines the cultural narrative with which the target audience identifies. This undermining is particularly easy to accomplish when the target audience’s lived experience is inconsistent with their cultural narrative.
For example, the concept of inclusion is arguably part of the American narrative that is referenced by the inscription on the Statue of Liberty and the conceptual apparatus of the Constitution. We think of ourselves as the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are a melting pot. But there is a disjunct between that narrative and the lived experience of some Americans. That disjunct is solved by storytelling that does one of two things: It either stabilizes the meaning of inclusion or it causes further rupture.
Stabilizing the meaning and, therefore, the cultural foundation of the concept would involve connecting the disaffected population to their cultural narrative. On the other hand, storytelling designed to cause further rupture and re-direction involve examples contrary to the targeted concept. That is to say that specific instances (stories) contrary to the general meaning of a concept for the identity of a population (narrative) are enlisted to undermine the latter. There are several logical fallacies involved with doing so (including confusing correlation with causation), but logic is impotent against stories. And this is only one example.
We are all part of the target audience now. What stories are dominating and are they stabilizing or destabilizing our cultural narrative?
