The World as It Isn’t: Narrative Failure and a New Vision.

The old world is spinning apart. In the UK, the end of faith as a unifying story gave rise to a new race for meaning. A race that has since abandoned objectivity, fearing we no longer know who we are, what we want, or what we can be, has seen politics co-opted by narrative in service of power, blinding the country at the worst of times. We are crying out for a new vision, competent leaders to unite us, and a new approach to this challenge.

A Personal Journey: Losing Faith

The year is 1995, I was an impressionable teenager, wholly absent the perspective of the knowledge that the subsequent years would yield.

At the age of 17 there were reports of things happening in the local churches that defied explanation, these things intersected with my own insecurities of what life was about, and I soon found myself on a journey that would consume the next decade of my life.

As a practicing Christian, I immersed myself in the traditions and dogma of the church, and began to explore the world I had entered. My spiritual journey’s focus moving from the exploration of meaning in scripture, to the idea that the spirit of man could be in relationship with that of the divine creator of everything.

This was a consuming enterprise, viscerally real, with years of exploration, of attempting to engage honestly with the questions posed as a result of faith.

Over time, this became increasingly difficult to sustain, and I ran into questions that had no meaningful answers, or answers that were not prescriptive ideas formulated by others, who had satisfied themselves that their own arguments had veracity and impact.

This continued until 2006, when there was a symposium called ‘Beyond Belief’. It was the beginning of the ‘New Atheist’ movement, and, at this event, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the irreplaceable Christopher Hitchens discussed matters that had not till then been framed as they together framed them.

The narrative was concise, refreshing, and compelling and offered clarity to a generation tired of unanswerable questions.

Even now, 19 years later, those discussions are, I would argue, the crystallisation of the ideas that mark the end of a phase of Christianity as it was for the British in Christendom, and the step into the search for meaning we see today.

For me, I spent a decade chasing divinity, only to trip over a Bible verse; the issues raised, my own experience, and my own reading coalesced around Isaiah 45:7, which reads:

‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.’

This translation from the King James Bible is the closest to the Hebrew, and uses the word ‘Ra’, which translates both to ‘evil’ and ‘calamity’. Later translations to Greek align to ‘evil’.

This verse, beyond challenging biblical inerrancy, revealed a core issue for me: why would a God, knowing humanity’s fate, create mankind at all?

Why would a perfect being choose to create, to create the opportunity for evil, and thus to create evil, when that perfection needed nothing adding, by definition.

This realization shattered my faith’s foundation, leaving me to abandon the church with whatever integrity I could salvage. As a consequence, my marriage ended, I lost most of my friends, and my life, as it was, changed fundamentally.

Introspection and Its Consequences

I learned some notable lessons; firstly, that the church, and society, is an in-group / out-group community, where people construct a narrative of what their life is, and where they associate with people who reinforce that story and worldview.

Human groups and families form the bedrock of social order. Ejection from them harms wellbeing, and fearing such disruption, people would rather expel ‘heretics’ than wrestle with the dissonance of conflicting realities.

This is the social glue, and it is central to the cohesion of societies.

Second, as facts shift, we must adapt, otherwise we risk twisting reality to fit our narrative instead of facing the world as it is.

As the years passed subsequently, I began to realise two more things; firstly that the psychology of my experiences in the church was not limited to religion, but is a universal pattern shaping how we think as humans; we are all meaning seeking creatures, we all use narratives to create meaning, and to explain events, and so we are all inherently given to a measure of religion.

Secondly, and incidentally, I have lately revised my views on faith to reflect the deep meaning and archetypes in scripture. These archetypes, rooted in historical traditions, are preserved through the ages as critical stories mankind uses to characterize existence.

On this, I recommend two books to everyone: Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson, and Dominion by Tom Holland. These two books are a counterpoint of the underlying story telling nature of humanity, and the exploration of how Christianity has become so embedded into Western thought that it is in fact a lens through which everything is now simply assumed.

Thus exists a fundamental point in respect of the British, and much of the West; our tradition and heritage is fundamentally derived from and inextricably linked to Christianity. This perspective is one that has slipped from collective memory, and with it a vital link back to our identity as a society.

For me, this is an elegant completion of a circle, and in my experience, life is all about circles.

For all of us, I think it is a helpful rejoinder; The New Atheist movement was a body blow to the soul of belief, of an increasingly non-religious society. It left society adrift in the sea of meaninglessness, unable to create coherent stories.

The West has been trying to regain a story for decades, trying many things that are not working, and more often driving division. And yet, we can be reminded that fundamental truths still exist, and are not only relevant to the West, but can encompass all humans, because we all share the same fundamental soul; the desire for meaning, purpose, belonging, story, and ultimately love.

This is not only not trite, I would argue that if we are to come together in future, to look outwards into a seemingly quiet universe, it is the only thing that we can draw on. As such, and in the absence of anything better, it seems like a good starting point today.

The Modern Narrative Trap

This search for meaning, once anchored by faith, has now been replaced by a chaotic battle over truth itself; a battle intensified by the modern tools and the power struggles that define our age. What began as a personal reckoning for me finds a corollary in the broader crisis of how we navigate reality today.

The world is undergoing seismic changes, and unless you are connected at the highest levels of power, what you know for certain is limited. Even for these people, recent events with in the White House Oval Office and Europes immediate response, show also that a position of power is no guarantee that assumptions reflect reality.

What you do know depends on the borders of your world, your knowledge, and your willingness to transact in the information landscape that the internet, and AI, has now opened up to us. For that is the medium via which we can attempt to discover what is true about the world.

Navigating it is treacherous, like oceans were to early explorers, demanding time, curiosity, honesty with sources, and flexibility with evolving ideas.

This manifests in the sense that most people know very little about most things, and are reliant on narratives to give them talking points at a simple level, and frameworks of ideas as knowledge grows.

At a basic level, it is perhaps helpful to consider that the world simply is as it is, all the time there are things just happening, and these things are uncomplicated, unemotional things. Events themselves simply take place.

Complexity arises when events are woven into stories; a departure from events in order to make sense of them and their personal impact. Narrative becomes the dominant form of information pertaining to events that exist in the world; for all intents and purposes it is the water in which the fish lives. The fish is not cognisant of the water, but it has impact, from gentle current, to a raging torrent.

From the perspective of the individual, wherever narrative intersects with an individual, it will be first be weighed as to whether it aligns to or contradicts their own story of how they explain the world around. If it aligns, it’s embraced to bolster the group. If it conflicts, it’s seen as a threat and dismissed.

Invariably when narrative intersects with identity, it therefore becomes inherently emotional.

Secondly, this mechanism of control is now a lever of power in the most visceral sense. Those who formulate the stories, influence people, and in doing so influence events.

In this regard, the implications are clear:

If we are to live in the world and to seek truth with integrity, we have by necessity to acknowledge first that our biases are aligned to our own worldview.

That this is something we are inclined to validate and reinforce with severe prejudice to the possibility that basic facts might invalidate prior assumptions, and undermine our perspective.

Where this happens, that we may be forced to reject it, and so be rejected by those who still hold to it.

That to seek truth, with integrity, we must be prepared to change as the facts change, and stand ready to rebuild the narrative we have thus far formulated.

This may seem to be self-evident, but as I have laid out, the reality of this can be quite extreme in its implications, and I would put forward that when one looks at the information landscape (by which I mean any source), one quickly notices the delineations of perspectives breaking out into now familiar in-group / out-group splits, where perspectives on events polarise with an intensity that has gathered in volume, leaving people unable to engage objectively.

When acting with integrity would undermine values or interests, and the consequences of heresy are unacceptable, humans become masters of holding two mutually exclusive ideas at once, multiplying the danger of the consequences of ignoring reality.

This is now pervasive throughout the political sphere.

Narratives and Perspectives

Once one accepts this facet of the human condition, the navigation of the information landscape becomes open to the opportunity for introspective engagement in the pursuit of truth; that I consider my own position, fears, alliances, and biases as I consider what is unfolding before me. And that they are directed at me with the intention of influencing me, capturing me, and co-opting me to their purpose and intent.

Below are some of the dominant narratives being fought over in the information landscape today, in no particular order, and listed by observation without stating any position on each. One must remember that any one of these will have an implicit perspective baked in to the language used to describe it, as there are two sides to a coin.

COVID Vaccine Safety: Initial claims that the mRNA vaccines were ‘safe and 100% effective’ were championed by health authorities and political leaders, yet emerging data on side effects and waning efficacy contradicted this absolutist stance. This gap reflects a narrative of societal control and reassurance prioritized over transparent, evolving scientific reality.

Ukraine War: The dominant Western narrative asserts ‘Russia is solely responsible for the war’, downplaying NATO’s eastward expansion, and the role of the US in destabilizing the region. This framing serves geopolitical power interests, obscuring a more complex truth to rally unified support against a singular enemy.

Climate Debate: The push to silence ‘climate deniers’ frames dissent as heresy rather than legitimate inquiry, despite uncertainties in climate models and the interplay of multiple environmental factors beyond CO2. This narrative prioritizes ideological conformity and corporate agendas over the open debate essential to scientific progress.

Each of these represents a top line summation of something that is either live or recent in the information space, and each one of these is a microcosm of contradiction when one starts to look deeper.

Certainly it is the case that each of these issues is not as straightforward as the top level narrative idea implies, but this rationale is exactly what groups employ in judging them, and therefore why one can predict, with relative ease, most of the beliefs a group has on the basis of where a person sits in respect of the above.

In these examples, and others a listed in the appendix, it’s a real struggle to find any uniting vision that coherently binds a given ‘side’ in to a coherent, logical, rational thread of intentionality that will deliver a desired outcome.

Instead, what we witness is the incoherent lurching from one crisis to another, not born out of events, but born out of a failure to engage with the world as it is.

Power, Politics and the Loss of Truth

Narrative and politics have therefore become synonymous; narrative is adopted and wielded as a function of identity, which is explicitly linked to perception of the world, and in turn to core beliefs and assumptions. Politics has become the telling of, or living out, of stories, unbounded from the assumed necessity that the story need reflect reality.

We therefore find ourselves in need of some questions:

If politics, and engagement in the sphere of the political, is essentially the weaving of narrative, where is the intersection of narrative and truth? How do we conduct ourselves where narrative and truth diverge? And, what does this mean?

A short history; Thomas Hobbes and Leo Strauss, the 16^th and 20^th century political philosophers respectively, had something tangential to say about this; Hobbes took the view that politics should serve the production of order via strong power, to deliver security for people.

Strauss on the other hand took a different view, that politics should be maximally aligned to ‘Truth’ in order to stop society sliding in to chaos and tyranny. However, he also seemed to consider that the idea of a noble lie in support of ‘Truth’ was acceptable.

Strauss’s thinking was significant in 20^th century politics, influential in US politics from Reagan onwards, with the presentation of the USSR as an evil foe, and the neo conservative justification to war in Iraq.

The problem is that it’s impossible to get away from the dichotomy between ‘Truth’, and the ‘noble lie’ as justification for action. These things are exclusive, and so I would characterise the state of affairs differently; that politics has evolved from an enterprise to derive order, in to the use of narrative to derive power.

For wider context, there is a Nietzschean idea of ‘will to power’; in the absence of purpose, the pursuit of power is the replacement for the pursuit of meaning, and power cares little for truth.

The world has moved on from Hobbes and Strauss; the political flavours of liberalism, populism, globalism, nationalism, and technocracy have evolved as the dominant in-group / out-group alignments that predict the continuity of narrative adoption. And, in turn, the mechanism by which any given group attempts to claim a stake on power.

The sacrifice of truth leads to snowballing contradictions where narratives, pursued for power, follow paths that are incoherent in respect of practical reality.

To take an example; the assertion ‘Russia is evil’, leads ‘we must rebuild our industrial base’, which we are simultaneously degrading via globalisation and the pursuit of ideological NetZero and concurrently rising energy prices, in the face of rising global hegemons that are offsetting our own emissions by multiples.

You cannot have your cake and eat it. And yet this is a key political thrust of effort at work today, and people defend the execution of this strategy absolutely, with no hint of irony at the inherent contradictions. The result; disillusionment, uncertainty, wasted effort, failure.

This goes to the heart of the critical issue to which we must find a solution; the old lines of politics matters little in any historical sense, and now that narrative has homogenised those differences.

As such, democracy, as we imagine it as the representation of the will of the people, is now ineffective; political parties produce manifestos, and then they immediately throw them away once they attain the requisite number of votes.

The process of democracy effectively lets groups attain power, then reinforce narratives to tighten their hold, while self interested groups like NGOs and civil servants pursue their own agendas.

For the citizen, this is the veneer of democracy, where absence of accountability (or transparency), leaves room for those with power to pivot as narrative needs to change in order to support their grip on power, or the benefits they accrue as a result.

The results, disengagement, unrest, reactionary change, degradation of institutions and governance, and the circle repeats.

A New Vision, Rooted in Reality

As a result, individuals feel increasingly powerless. We risk unraveling as a society, our culture, forged in Enlightenment reason and Christian roots, slipping through our grasp.

We are at risk of being driven mad as a result, that madness is being revealed where our chosen narrative diverges from the others.

If we do not learn from history, then we are doomed to repeat it. So a new approach is needed.

We must put in place a mechanism for establishing what is true, where plans can be derived to address the most accurate representation of reality.

But in order to put the primacy of truth at the heart of a movement, we must also agree on some basic principles of what we want the future of our country, society, and culture to look like, and that should also be rooted in a maximal elicitation of what is real; because what is debatably ‘right’ is very much dependent on the outcome desired, which must also be realistic.

After we have done this, the challenge we face is to align with the reality of the human story driven mind, with the characterisation of rational narratives that can be later judged with accountability enforceable on those outcomes, and this forms the scaffold on which we can hang a new approach to politics.

What does this look like?

Firstly, there must be an effort to characterise reality with integrity. This is harder than it looks, because of the biases we have. But claiming victory off a simple understanding, and argumentation over matters, is counterproductive. The approach must be to gain deep understanding, to build meaningful maps of the world, to hold lightly to what we believe is true, and to be ready to reimagine the paradigm where the facts change. And this done in the absence of engaging in the sunk cost fallacy.

Prioritize first-principles reasoning. Strip away dogma, partisan framing, and emotional noise. Ask ‘What is the raw data?’, ‘What is directly observable?’ For example, evidence based healthcare and the counterpoint of diversity, equity, and inclusion to improve health outcomes.

This grounds effort in reality versus narrative.

Incentivize transparency and accountability. Truth erodes when power hides or distorts. Make primary sources such as data, documents, and unfiltered voices, accessible to all. Effort can focus on filtering signal from noise, and rewarding people who show their work (data, logic) over those who shout the loudest. Democracy’s messiness thrives on open access; truth dies in backrooms, as we saw during the COVID period.

Embrace adversarial testing. No idea should get a free pass, everything should be subjected to scrutiny. This mimics science: hypotheses survive or die based on evidence, not feelings. In practice, this means fostering real debate, not echo chambers.

Decentralize the process. A single gatekeeper, be it media, government, or big tech, bottlenecks truth and invites bias. Messy democracies work best when power is diffuse, where citizens, not just elites, can wrestle with the evidence. Tools like citizen journalism or open-source data analysis (think GitHub for policy) could amplify this.

Truth-seeking isn’t free, it takes time, literacy, and a tolerance for uncertainty. Most people don’t have the inclination to, or may not want to engage; they’ll outsource to narrative (party lines, influencers), but in this paradigm, narrative becomes flexible, in pursuit of a better signal from which to derive action.

In lieu of this, a key function of a new politics, must be to invest in this process of characterisation formally, and with the utmost honesty, transparency, and integrity with the aim that anyone can improve a model, and that aspects of perspective that run counter to a thesis are characterised properly. All things should be able to be resolved in respect of either what is true, or what is desired as an outcome.

Currently, this is absent.

As this work is done, we will have a series of propositions of the world as it is and as we want it to be, a new politics must create narratives that are shared, discussed, and agreed on. Not asserted in service of power.

Herein is an intersection where representative democracy can regain meaning in lieu of the tension between the wielding of power to deliver desired outcomes, with the citizenry whose story is engendered by this effort.

It is here that we can have accountability through real transparency.

For people to come together, and for the above process to be viable, we must start with a vision of what we want to achieve, one that we can all buy in to, and which must be positive in its statement.

For my part, I believe that the narratives we see pushed today are largely born out of the dominant power paradigm, which is progressive social policies, globalism, and ever more expansive state intervention. This is not an essay in service of the assertion that these are failing, but I do assert that they are not fit for purpose at this juncture in history, and in the fact they have done nothing to address the underlying problems that have taken us to where we are now.

I also think that the pursuit of truth over narrative for power can lead to a blending of ideas that come from both the right and left of the old politics. There will always be a need to protect the weakest in society, to defend people from aggression, and to balance the interests of today with those of tomorrow.

My vision would be something along these lines. I would like the future United Kingdom to be a country:

• That proudly embraces its past, and doesn’t make excuses for it. That celebrates the unique character of its constituent native parts.
• Where the efforts of people to be rewarded in proportion to what they risk.
• Where people have enough to build a secure environment for their family, have the certainty to have a family, and are able to build adaptable self-reliance.
• That pursues peace first, and maintains peace through strength, where excellence is considered a virtue and meritocracy is the only metric for facilitating progress.
• That is clean; where the environment is cherished, protected, and where energy and water are not ideologically forced to become limiting factors, but engineered to be cheap and abundant.
• Where native traditions hold pride of place and are strengthened in our society. Where we protect our historical traditions and keep politics free of dogma.
• Where access to society is a privilege based on shared values, and a love of British history and culture.
• That respects the privacy of the individual, and does not seek to control private life and choices through over regulation, financial weaponisation, or narrative coercion.
• That preserves the wealth of its citizens, and of future generations, eschewing indebtedness as an acceptable outcome.
• Where work is the default for all, and that the state does not push people in to dependency, or inaction via incentives, or overweening nannyism.
• Where the state does not undermine critical food security, or facilitate the destruction of critical industry.
• That is a high trust society, where criminality is treated with prejudice, where justice is not unequal or partial, but where it is fair and proportionate.
• That ends lying and spin in politics, via real consequences in eligibility for re-election. Where success reinforces the opportunity to exercise power.
• That returns to maximal truth seeking in all things, because without that, we have no useful base to hold the ground in a changing world.

The old things that bind us still do so, but in a more abstracted way than they used to. Literal belief has faded, but the basic truths and the roots of our shared history remain as strong as they ever did, even as purpose has frayed in the intervening decades, spinning out in to the corruption of truth in favour of narratives.

But with a shared conception of the future, with a focus on deriving a useable, reality driven approach, the result can be the capability to speak with authority to an embattled people, and create a new approach to politics where narrative in pursuit of power can be replaced with power in service to shared vision.

In this vision for a better future, rooted in a strong sense of history, political reform can begin accordingly; a stand to for all citizens that they can buy in to without the threat of a rug pull later, where inaction would otherwise see the interests of the many diverge once again from the interests of the few.