What is the experience of narrativizing like? Taking a short step backwards, why should we even bother with trying to deconstruct what’s happening in the mind as it threads a narrative? Or in other words, what’s the point in coming up with a phenomenology of narrativization? At the risk of gutting the punch out of my primary punchline, I will argue that every matter of moral relevance streaming down from getting involved in an act of narrativization becomes virtually transparent if we get our phenomenological account of said involvement right. Given that a narrative is, first and foremost, a vector for the propagation of a moralistic outlook disguised as a factual portrait of reality, or as a no-nonsense chain of reasoning, or both; any account of its worldly effects must be, a discussion about ethics. That’s what this piece is in its very core, an ethical analysis of narrativization and its vicissitudes.
As it is customary, we begin by defining our terms. Since virtually every step along the ensuing argumentative lines relies on having a shared understanding of the nature of a narrative, we must establish the defining characteristics of this psycho-linguistic entity. Put concisely, the type of discursive item I am designating as a “narrative” for this investigation is one that can be described as a deceitful memeplex of moralistic persuasion. As unassuming as it might seem, that designation has the potential to hoist many eyebrows. The par excellence objection to it might be something along the following lines: narratives need not be deceitful by design because every telling of a series of events as-produced by a subject is a narrative. As such, narratives must, at best, be qualified as accurate or inaccurate only with respect to a hopelessly subjective framing of the events they seek to portray. They come from a standpoint not so much affected by biases, but generated from them, and they can’t shake this pedigree off. Yes, I get that, and I half-heartedly nod to those points. That being said, I can’t bring myself to fully endorse a view of the matter which, essentially, entails a normative injunction to relax the epistemic standards we shall use to evaluate the veracity of every ‘telling of events’ as if all of them share the same congenital ineptitude to represent the world. I don’t think it is commendable to, explicitly or covertly, make it a rule to always make preemptive accommodations to tolerate, and even uphold the reality-warping effects of subjectivity. Thus, on this occasion and as I’ve done elsewhere, I am reserving to myself the right to append a pejorative edge to the noun “narrative”, as one is entitled to do to any form of discourse that’s misguiding by design.
I’ll clarify my position with help from a physics-inspired analogy. Just as Newtonian mechanics offers a perfectly good framework to accurately describe the dynamics of macroscopic bodies, the so-called “correspondence theory of truth” offers an analogously accurate framework to ascertain the validity of statements about going-ons unfolding in the macroworld that narratives seek to address. A ‘higher resolution’ theory of truth might be necessary to assess matters of more subtle factuality (those pertaining to ethics or quantum theory, for example), but certainly not those pertaining to the much coarser factual claims made by a narrative.
In a micro-nutshell, a simple version of the correspondence theory of truth holds that language can be used to construct propositions that mirror the factual state of affairs of a portion of reality. If I tell you that “the snow outside is white” and by looking out the window you confirm that there is snow outside and that it is indeed white, then, my statement is true since what expresses corresponds to the facts of the matter. And that’s it! These lowly truth-value standards all we really need to verify the truthfulness, or rather the lack thereof, of a narrative.
To assert, as I did, that narratives are “deceitful” is to offer a premise, since I count in the category of “narrative” only those ‘tellings of events’ that fail to pass the verification standard set by the naive correspondence theory of truth. Note that although a narrative is deceitful, the narrativizer might not necessarily be. If for whatever bizarre reason the veracity of my story hinges upon me believing that “the snow outside is white” but then an anomalously skeptical mind finds out that the snow outside is actually green, then, although regretfully I am peddling a narrative, I am not being dishonest.
I also characterized a narrative as a memeplex, i.e. an ideatic complex— and in this case almost surely ideological— structure composed by memes. The archetypal constitutive memes that build a narrative are the infamous talking points. A narrative is what emerges when a set of mutually reinforcing talking points form a storyline whose goal is to convince an audience that the series of events it describes is factual, but above all, that it is right. I label narratives as “deceitful” not because I believe that every factual claim staked by their talking points is an outright lie– that is not necessarily the case—, but because narratives marshal whatever factuality is contained within their talking points to paint a strategically flawed portrayal of reality— one that bolsters a fallacious argument whose ultimate goal is to endorse a dubious value judgment. Apologies if that latter point is convolutedly expressed, unfortunately, I doubt that the phraseology can be reduced significantly without covering all the necessary bases.
Let’s elucidate whatever might be obscured in the verbiage by means of an example. Here are two facts:
Fact No.1: in the past, some high-ranking diplomats, George W. Bush, have expressed support for a prospective Ukrainian bid to join NATO.
Fact No. 2: there are some Nazis (or rather neo-Nazis) in Ukraine and they are problematic.
Perhaps, you have become more familiar with these bits of information over the last 5 years, give or take, than you were before that. This is not mysterious or coincidental, these facts routinely perform as the kernels of truth ensconced in talking points forming narratives that defend the proposition that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is justified”, a proposition which is blatantly a value judgment. Now, as undeniable as those facts are, it does not take an inordinate amount of time or brainpower to see why it is disingenuous to use them to prop up such a proposition. Fact No. 1 is deceitful because it ignores crucial additional information that undermines its validity. Admission into NATO must be unanimously favored by all existing members; countries like Germany and France were staunchly opposed to letting Ukraine join the alliance at the time Bush expressed support for the prospect (back in 2008). On the other hand, using Fact No. 2 to justify the narrative is simply fallacious on at least two accounts: first, is there a single country which isn’t home to a deranged contingent of neo-Nazis? Unfortunately, Ukraine is far from being singular in this regard. And second, are we to accept that having neo-Nazi groups within a country’s border is sufficient excuse to invade said country? I don’t think so. This is a glimpse of how narratives operate; they dupe de-contextualized atomistic factual nuggets and re-contextualize them to promote overarching lies and fallacies.
The two-faceted problem of narrativization
Things are about to get a bit intricate as we begin to make headway into phenomenological territory— I am trying to say that it might be a good time to grab some coffee. When we tell a narrative we are essentially trying to solve a storytelling optimization problem. From a phenomenological point of view, however, storytelling optimization appears as a two-faceted problem. It is this due to this ‘splitting’ of what ostensibly is a single optimization problem into two facets that narrativization ends up having the experiential character it has, as we shall see.
We can, for instance, assume an instrumental type of stance; a perspective from which solving the problem of storytelling optimization consists of shuffling talking points and connecting them in such a way that they present our audience with the most compelling version of a story. This we can call the ‘outward-facing’ problem of narrativization, in which optimizing our storytelling is equivalent to maximizing persuasiveness. But, from another angle— the one that is most proximate to our first-hand experience, and which therefore takes primacy in a phenomenological investigation— storytelling optimization presents itself as a maximization problem of a different sort. When we narrativize, we strive, first and foremost, to connect our talking points in such a way so as to maximize our own sense of their mutual coherence. This endeavor is of a piece with what’s known as “motivated reasoning”. In delivering a narrative we are not trying to maximize the mutual coherence between talking points freely—and therefore honestly—, instead, those configurations of talking points constructing a message that deviates from the preset script of the narrative— a script that we have a priori vetted and approved— are simply unacceptable and must be discarded. We narrativize optimally when we arrange our talking points into a maximally causally coherent sequence that tells a licensed version of a pre-ordained storyline. By establishing a “causal coherence” between talking points, I simply mean that they must be arranged along a pseudo-logical chain, so that in laying down a talking point, the following one feels entailed rather than chosen. We can denominate this problem of constrained maximization of mutual causal coherence as the ‘inward-facing’ problem of narrativization.
As we thread a narrative, its constituent talking points operate as a series of ‘thought attractors’. They function as ‘lighthouses’ towards which we must steer our reasoning to weave a path leading to a preordained conclusion. The inward-facing problem the narrativizer must solve is, in a sense, analogous to that of the traveling salesman from the famed mathematical puzzle. While the salesman must visit a set of houses travelling a path of minimum length, the narrativizer must ‘touch base’ on a subset of talking points joining them with a path of maximal causal coherence. Narrativizing unfolds the way it does because of the implicit assumption that solving the inward-facing problem (maximizing causal coherence) entails solving the outward-facing problem (maximizing persuasiveness).
The flatness of our minds and our linear attention
A responsible dose of naturalization is always prudent to avoid turning a philosophical investigation into an ill-fated project of mid-air castle-building. Thus, it would be wise to discuss some key features of the medium of experience itself, the mind, from a more naturalistic standpoint. The credit for the ideas we are about to review must go to the cognitive scientist Nick Chatter; I am happy to assume the role of interpreter and messenger (perhaps of evangelizer as well?).
In his book The Mind is Flat, Chatter puts together various strands of empirical evidence to make the case that the human mind cannot solve a sufficiently complicated problem by breaking it into parts, working each part in parallel, and then integrating the multiple ‘local’ solutions into a final ‘global’ solution. Instead, the mind segments the problem into ‘sub-problems’ which then proceeds to work out sequentially; deducing partial results, adding, subtracting, revising or otherwise modifying them as it linearly progresses towards a solution. According to Chatter, the problem of “neuronal interference” is the insurmountable stumbling block forbidding our brains from acting like parallel processors:
“[I]t is hard to see how a vast population of interconnected neurons can coordinate on more than one thing at a time, without suffering terrible confusion and interference. Each time a neuron fires, it sends an electrical pulse to all other neurons it is linked to […]. This is a good mechanism for helping neurons cooperate, as long as they are all working on different aspects of the same problem […] but if interconnected neurons are working on entirely different problems, then the signals they pass between them will hopelessly be at cross purposes — and neither task will be completed successfully”.
If interconnected neurons tried to tackle more than one sub-problem at once, then a chaotic electrochemical cross-talking would destructively interfere with their tasks.
There is one crucial detail that might be easily overlooked if one focuses too narrowly on the linearity of mental processing, which is that “processing loops” are allowed. Indeed, they are not merely tolerated, they are very much what defines the brain’s processing mode. Chatter calls these loops “cycles of thought”. “What is important”, he writes, “is that the very fact that the brain uses cooperative computation across vast networks of neurons implies that these networks make a giant, coordinated step at a time rather than, as in a conventional computer, through a myriad of almost infinitesimally tiny information-processing steps. I shall call this sequence of giant, cooperative steps, running at an irregular pulse of several ‘beats’ per second, the cycle of thought.’ (his emphasis).
Problem-solving can be described as a dynamic, recursive series of cycles of thought, each one made up of a chain of strictly sequentially arranged operations. Although there is plenty of buzzy neuronal firing powering the vertiginous cycle of thought, experientially speaking, we are aware of only the finalized thought at the end of the cycle. All that is registered in our stream of consciousness is: one thought goes in and another one comes out. “Conscious experience is therefore the sequence of outputs of a cycle of thought, locking onto, and imposing meaning on, aspects of the sensory world”. That makes thoughts the archetypal cognitive item of experience. Each single thought fully exhausting our moment-to-moment attention resources. One could argue that for a thought to be thought of as a thought, it needs to have the capacity to force itself into our awareness and lock it onto itself. Once a thought lures and monopolizes our attention, then that thought becomes the whole content of our consciousness. Chatter writes:
“Beneath the momentary flow of fragmented and astonishingly sketchy experiences and even sketchier recollections from memory, there is precisely nothing. Well, of course, there is a frenzy of brain activity, but there are no further thoughts. The only thoughts, emotions, feelings are those that flow through our stream of consciousness.” (First emphasis mine, second his).
Therein lies the substance of the metaphor about the mind’s flatness. Our stream of consciousness is confined to flow in a plane over and below which there’s no space for conscious ratiocination.
We must contextualize this overview of Chatter’s flat mind hypothesis within a phenomenological account of narrativization. As we discussed, while constructing a narrative we are primordially involved in maximizing the coherence of its backbone of talking points. Given the flat geometry of our mind, our involvement with this task is absolute. As the mind sequentially and cyclically processes one thought after another, it deploys all its reasoning resources to synthesize arguments out of raw talking points without leaving room for anything else to appear in consciousness. The entirety of our attention is laser-focused on making the transition between arguments as seemingly ordained by logic as possible; a task we typically refer to as “rationalizing”. Infamously, rationalization and truth-seeking work at cross-purposes more often than not. The flat mind framework only exacerbates this unfortunate state of affairs. It suggests that the mind has zero resources left to spare on fact-checking our arguments while it is busy rationalizing a narrative.
The Heideggerian casting
Heidegger’s philosophy is traumatically intricate, but there is much in it that is also mesmerizingly brilliant. Ranking high (highest?) among the reasons why trying to commune with Heidegger’s work is so mentally taxing, is the fact that one needs to learn to speak his language. If that statement is hyperbolic, it is only by a thin margin. In order to deliver his corrective account of what Being in the world is like, Heidegger had to invent loads of terminology. This might initially strike one as frivolous, but the more one gets into the ‘groove’ of Heideggerian phenomenology, the clearer it becomes that much of its dazzle would not be expressible without the lexicon he tailored for it. Delving into Heideggerian-speak in due depth would lead us wildly astray very quickly, nevertheless, we need to learn a few terms from his lingo because the concepts they capture are instrumental to make the ensuing arguments intelligible.
According to Heidegger we exist ‘thrown’ into the world where we find ourselves enmeshed in a web of involvements. These involvements are all the variegated dealings we have with all kinds of stuff around us; dealings that, phenomenologically speaking, have the character of handling pieces of equipment. This character, however, remains concealed from us most of the time. We go about our business simply manipulating objects to reach our moment-to-moment goals, without ever stopping to get cognitively acquainted with them; the very qualities that make the objects we manipulate the kind of objects they are, that give them their distinctive ontological identity, remain concealed from the analytical grasp of our minds as we bend them to achieve the goals of our will. Objects are tools for us not because we conceptualize them as such, but merely because we use them as such.
Say, you enter the kitchen to prepare yourself a meal. This “entering the kitchen to prepare yourself a meal” is an involvement— a form of Being in the world (that must be the most glorified way to describe such a chore). You open a drawer; get a pot; put the pot on the stove; open another drawer to get the chopping board; yet another drawer to reach for knives, ladles, etc. All those items exist as tools in-order-to cook, not for a moment you pause to meditate about their status as things or about the properties that grant them such status. While you’re involved, say, chopping away with the knife, you experience the knife essentially as an extension of your own body. Its individuality sort of melts away into the background of your perception. As Heidegger put it “the more [you] seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does [your] relationship to it becomes, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is— as equipment”. The ‘ease of manipulability’ characteristic of equipment, discloses objects to us as entities with a certain readiness-to-hand. Such is the flow of the rawest form of human experience: we move from one sphere of involvements to another; we manipulate equipment which we encounter in a ready-to-hand disposition and use it to pursue our goals.
Alas, the world seems to have endless ways to disrupt this relatively smooth sequence of existential commutes. When equipment breaks down, when objects underperform, when they become defective, or when we encounter them unfit for our purposes, then the world forces us to disengage the autopilot of our phenomenological drive. Here is how Heidegger describes these breakdown events:
“When we concern ourselves with something, the entities which are most closely ready-to-hand may be met as something unusable, not properly adapted for the use we have decided upon. The tool turns out to be damaged, or the material unsuitable. […] We discover its unusability, however, not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by the circumspection of the dealings in which we use it. When its unusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes conspicuous. This conspicuousness presents the ready-to-hand equipment as in a certain un-readiness-to-hand. But this implies that what cannot be used just lies there; it shows itself as an equipmental Thing which looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has constantly been present-at-hand too […] Anything which is unready-to-hand in this way is disturbing to us, and enables us to see the obstinacy of that with which we must concern ourselves in the first instance before we do anything else” (my emphasis).
A damaged object-tool prompts a phenomenological disturbance to the quality of our stream of consciousness; not necessarily because exposure to wretched materials is traumatic, but because when the means to our ends break down, we must reconsider our present task. The moment when a piece of equipment becomes unready-to-hand is often the very first moment its thinghood becomes circumspect. While functional, an object is experienced as a tool we handle as a virtual extension of our own bodies, but when the tool stops functioning, we can’t help to notice that it is a circumscribed object on its own right, that it has this and that part, and has such and such properties. In Heideggerian-speak, the object becomes present-at-hand.
That sounds pedantic, but it really isn’t, just think about it. Let’s consider a potential disruption to my present involvement: writing this stuff. As long as I can type my thoughts out unconcerned with the inner workings of the tools that allow me to do so, I get away with ignoring the materiality of my keyboard. But if it stops performing, then suddenly my perception of the keyboard changes, in fact, that might be the very first moment I actually perceive my keyboard. It intrudes into my experience as an unready-to-hand piece of equipment-for-writing. Its dysfunctionality changes the quality of my phenomenological stance towards it. In its present-to-hand guise, I am compelled to notice its anatomy: its keys are black and with such and such shape and size, they make this clicking sound when pressed… these and other properties have become unavoidably salient. The awareness of my keyboard’s materiality and its shortcomings is the telltale sign that I have adopted an analytical disposition that has thrown me into a new unwanted involvement: I must fix what’s damaged.
That’s all fine and good, but what in the world does it have anything to do with narrativizing?! Let me pose a question that could help to deflate whatever skepticism might be ballooning within you: if a talking point can be thought of as a tool for persuasion which can be rendered unready-to-hand by incisive pushback, is it too far-fetched to imagine that experiencing one’s narrative becoming dysfunctional by an interjection can instigate a Heideggerian shift in the flow of our experience? I think there’s a case to be made here but it won’t spontaneously jump out of the woodwork, so let’s carve it out.
Narrativizing á la Heidegger
So, a narrative memeplex has found a niche in your mind and you are in a social situation in which you can almost feel it gasping for airtime. Hopelessly you submit to its wishes and ignite the first cycle of thought to pick an opening talking point. Before you can say “the deep state!”, your storytelling engine is already furiously charting the course towards the overarching proposition the narrative compels you to defend. And off you go endeavoring to string your talking points along a thread of maximal coherence.
Now, take a moment to appreciate just how lucky you are. Notice that the talking points that you now deftly deploy are in an optimal ready-to-hand state. No need to spend precious stamina powering thought cycles to get them fit for their rhetorical function; that job was already crowd-sourced to the legions of minds that molded them into their current shape of equipment for persuasion. The purpose of the thought cycles you need to keep putting your brain through is more managerial than creative— they are meant to shift and join talking points into the most argumentatively effective sequence you can muster. However managerial this task might be, it is more than challenging enough to get you fully involved in it. If the mind has indeed no depth, then it should be expected that weaving talking points together is a task that hoards your attention absolutely.
Unless you are rehearsing a piece of oratory while safeguarded from potentially dissident minds and their dissenting opinions, say, for example, performing for a camera in a secluded studio, then there is a good chance that your narrative train will be slowed down by an interjection. It might even happen that you must push the brakes hard because the counterargument hurtled at your narrative has effectively damaged one of your talking points rendering it unready-to-hand. This moment could mark the onset of a phenomenological shift. A disturbance, which if noticed, inevitably demands a reaction. A reaction which just as inevitably is of a moral character. Naturally, it could also happen that the breakdown of one’s talking point goes unnoticed; if such negligence occurs, then the ensuing course of action is somewhat closer to being morally neutral.
So, your talking point became unready-to-hand, stay calm and lie banally
While the wreckage of a dismantled talking point might be conspicuous to many, if not most of the witnesses watching the derailment of a narrative, it might not appear so to the person trying to keep it on track. How could anyone fail to recognize a blatantly effective refutation? A memetic analysis which incorporates the flat mind framework can elucidate this mildly puzzling and all too common situation.
Let’s start by observing that deeming an attack ineffectual almost never implies that one ignores it and lets it fly by uncontested. Typically, one’s reflex is to defend the assaulted talking point even while believing it remains unscathed. What typically ensues is a defense-offense back-and-forth which is almost guaranteed to be a rehearsal of a past altercation in an ongoing ‘memetic arms race’ between oppositional talking points. Arms races, even memetic ones, are characterized by improvements on one side in response to improvements on the other. Thus, the assaulted talking point likely has gained specialized ‘means of defense’; strategic alliances forged with other talking points that swiftly come to the rescue in ready-made rhetorical formations. If one is cognizant of these alliances, then a challenge against one’s narrative won’t set off panic alarms, instead, it will sound like a Pavlovian trigger to begin dispensing scripted ‘memefied’ rebukes. Choosing to act in this way is almost like not choosing to act at all, in the sense that turning into a half-witted outlet for a narrative fighting for its own preservation is a very diminished manifestation of agency. One has been essentially reduced to an entity that is very much like an NPC: a non-playable video game character programmed to parrot a few fixed lines when a player interacts with it.
Take, for purposes of illustration, the debate between Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan about whether Crimea was “taken” by Russia or if it willfully joined the Russian federation; a contention nested within a larger narrative “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is justified”. Carlson argues that Putin did not take Crimea because— talking point No. 1 incoming—, in a display of democratic will, “the people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to align with the Russian government”, to which Morgan reacts by asking “when did they do that?”, and Carlson replies that the vote took place in 2015, which is to say “right after they’ve been invaded” as Piers immediately reminds him. Piers’ counterpoint directly undermines Carlson’s talking point No. 1, namely, that the annexation of Crimea was a manifestation of free democratic autonomy. But instead of pushing the brakes on his narrative, Carlson enters into NPC mode and reflexively deploys his talking point No. 2. He says: “I don’t think it was invaded. Russia has controlled Crimea for 300 years”… except of course, between 1991 when the Crimean parliament voted to join the newly independent Ukrainian republic, and 2014 when it was in fact invaded by Russia.
As they mature, talking points become clichés. Tokenized word strings turned into hyper-topical stock phrases and slogans: “Waste, fraud and abuse”, “diversity is our strength”, “just asking questions”, etc. As such, they are some of the most ready-to-hand linguistic blocks in existence. Relying on them excessively is detrimental to thoughtfulness. Orwell expressed precisely this kind of preoccupation when he wrote:
“The invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations of, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain”.
The journalist-slash-philosopher-slash-critic Hannah Arendt famously (or rather infamously) more than just echoed Orwell’s concern; she made it the cornerstone of her diagnosis of the kind of evil that afflicted the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann. In her controversial examination of Eichmann’s testimony during his trial in Jerusalem, Arendt concluded that he was afflicted by pathological thoughtlessness as he went about planning the extermination of thousands upon thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. She arrived at this conclusion largely by analyzing his linguistic habits and patterns.
Arendt noted that “officialese became [Eichmann’s] language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not cliché”. To her mind, Eichmann’s “inability to speak” without the assistance of clichés betrayed his utter intellectual shallowness, or as she bluntly put it, his “inability to think”. Whatever simulacrum of reasoning Eichmann’s mind could sustain, Arendt reckoned, it must have been devoted to pursuing careerist, bureaucratic and expedient goals. In her coarser moments, Arendt argued that Eichmann’s mind was so entrapped in a web of prosaic motivations that he “never realised what he was doing”. Thus, given that Eichmann’s actions sprung directly from a “vacuum of thought”, the immorality of his actions was, at the end of the day, transactional, disowned, merely banal.
It seems now clear that Arendt was not as her finest when she formulated her thesis about the “banality of evil”. In fact, history went on to demonstrate that her analysis, in the case of Eichmann, was faulty beyond redemption. For starters, she seemed to have underplayed pieces of Eichmann’s testimony that offered glimpses of his well-thought-out commitments to ideological Nazism. But, much more devastating to her assessment, was the revelation in the 90’s of a set of tapes recorded from an interview that Eichmann gave to a fellow runaway Nazi in Argentina. Eichmann was remorseless, and he showed himself to be fully conscious of the moral import of his role in the Holocaust:
“‘If it has to be, I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals.’ (‘Enemies of the Reich,’ I said, not ‘Jews.’) I spoke these words harshly and with emphasis. In fact, it gave me an extraordinary sense of elation to think that I was exiting from the stage in this way.”
It is incontestable that Arendt misdiagnosed the nature of Eichmann’s evilness. Those of us who cannot accept that methodically organizing slaughter is an involvement that can be pursued without consciously violating all moral boundaries can sigh in relief. Sadly, Arendt unveiled her banality of evil thesis by grossly misapplying it. However, it does not follow that we must wantonly discard it, for surely we can agree that plenty of lesser evils in this world can be attributed to various degrees of thoughtlessness.
In fact, Chatter’s flat mind framework does a good job at naturalizing Arendt’s insight by helping us to understand how banal evils can materialize from absentmindedness. In a nutshell, when we are involved in all kinds of mundane and instrumental pursuits that do not involve conspicuously high moral stakes, then we are primed to oversee a multitude of collaterals gestating beyond the razor-thin plane of our consciousness. Although we can’t see them, these collaterals remain firmly latched to the actions we deliberately choose to pursue, slowly but surely gaining factuality as we proceed with our dealings.
It seems to me that reflexively defending talking points while being caught in the throes of a narrative is a kind of involvement that propitiates the manifestation of a specific form of banal evil: banal lying. Dispensing talking points, no matter how stocky their phrasing has become, is not a transaction that can be performed without any presence of mind whatsoever, but it certainly skims critical reasoning down to its bones. Leaning on Orwell’s metaphor, drafting and threading ready-to-hand talking points to defend a narrative is an enterprise that can be pursued even with a partially-anaesthetized brain. Insofar as we believe that the propositions of a narrative are true or valid— however misguided that judgment might be—, and insofar as the evils that might materialize as a consequence of spreading it are hidden in a blind spot of our awareness, then we are not purposefully lying, we are merely channeling a lie. This form of lying can be appropriately designated as “banal” in the Arendtian sense, since rehearsing a scripted narrative, or instinctively defending its broken talking are tasks that can become mere feats of habituation.
Did banal lying fail? Last chance to redeem oneself
The path leading to banal lying in response to a challenge, is one along which we are dragged by the rhetorical inertia of the narrative that drives our train of reasoning. The implication being that to lie banally, we must significantly relinquish our agency to the wishes of the memes. That cannot be said about what it takes to follow the two additional alternative courses of action available to us when our narrative suffers a blow that does not go unnoticed. The moment of that realization is an authentic Heideggerian breakdown moment: a formerly able talking point has become unready-to-hand and it is now inadequate as a tool for persuasion. Of course, the inadequacy of the talking point was inherent to it all along, the hostile attack simply exposed it ineluctably to everyone, narrativizer and audience. This breakdown moment forces us to face a moral dilemma. Before us a ‘Heideggerian fork’ is laid down, a juncture where two paths meet, each one leading to an outcome whose moral quality is radically opposed to that of the other.
I like to think of the moment of seeing our narrative getting derailed as a form of payback for our negligence; a moment in which we must hastily make up for past intellectual laziness. If we had been less swooned by the emotional comfort we got from hosting the narrative we were attempting to spread, then we would have been less intellectually lax when we allowed its talking points to shelter and fester in our minds. We must repay in stress— and hopefully some shame— for the cycles of thought we had apparently saved ourselves by outsourcing to the manufacturing mental costs that took to produce the ready-to-hand talking points we uncritically chose to harbor and wield.
Recognizing the Heideggerian fork triggers in us a phenomenological shift by ushering the realization that the current unready-to-hand state of the damaged talking point is irreversible, unfixable. Faced with this situation we could choose to tread along a path of redemption, i.e. by publicly recognizing the bankruptcy of the debased talking point— we stand corrected— and then privately pledge to discard it. As with many things in life, walking the righteous path is easier said than done. Ideally, witnessing the breakdown of our narrative should elicit a suspension of our commitments to it followed by disavowal. We should focus on analyzing the substance of the interjection, weighing it fairly, switching our mind to ‘truth-seeking mode’ and begin to honestly scrutinize our assumptions. To expect this sequence of events to come swiftly to fruition is, of course, naively optimistic. But, to my mind, redemption does not necessarily requires having the clarity of mind and humility to change one’s mind on the spot. Rather, given that disabusing ourselves from a parasitic narrative entails a painful process of worldview readjustment that we are likely to resist, we should expect that reaching the endpoint of the redemptive path will take a while. An unnamed friend of the author Adam Levovitz suggested that arguments are won “a month or two months after [they’ve been] made”. That sounds about right as an estimate of the amount of time it takes to complete the journey towards epistemic redemption. Provided that the triumphant arguments are more factual than the vanquished ones, the ‘ideosphere’ stands a little more sanitized and virtuous than before.
Did banal lying fail? Then lie with conviction
Alas, when the train of motivated reasoning pulling our narrative ahead crashes, we seldom choose to abandon the wreckage even if that means that our integrity will perish in it. We let our integrity die when we choose to consciously pursue either of the two following deceitful kind of involvements:
Deflecting: We resume spreading our narrative pretending that the interjection was entirely inconsequential. We move on to new talking points with the hope to obfuscate or otherwise disingenuously bypass the matter. We call this a “deflection”, with ‘what-aboutism’ being the predominant variety of this species. This is an extra-semantic form of lying since no falsehood is itself expressed in discourse, at least not one pertaining to claims that count as direct responses to the challenge raised; instead, the lying is in the intention to deceive by dodging. (I don’t recommend trying this deflection at home, better just to gawk at the maneuver as performed by a seasoned dodger, but, I know of no more flagrantly shameless attempt at what-aboutism than touting about the Dow index being over 50,000 points, as former Attorney General Pam Bondi did before Congress, to deflect attention away from her defective narrative of working for the “most transparent President in the nation’s history”).
Bold face lying: We summon a set of ancillary talking points dishonestly pretending to satisfactorily patch up the damaged talking point. We know that our repairs are sloppy and ultimately fraudulent, but we act as if they are quality craftsmanship just so that we keep pushing our narrative; a narrative which becomes more and more an epistemological scam as it progresses.
We cannot blame either of those unethical actions on thoughtlessness since, by definition, a breakdown moment cannot fail to be noticed. Experiencing a Heideggerian shift, however fleetingly, disabuses us from the apparent readiness-to-hand of the talking points we were threading together. Once their inadequacies are brought to the fore of our awareness, they become conspicuous present-to-hand tools for motivated reasoning. From that moment onwards, whatever we chose to do next has a moral dimension to it.
The evident one-sidedness of my selection of talking point examples surely makes it redundant to disclose my political leanings, but I’ll do it anyway: I lean more left than right (the shock!). This does not mean that I give a free pass to the disingenuous talking points of the left: diversity is not inexorably a strength, noticing that not all cultural values are equally conducive to wellbeing is not necessarily a manifestation of xenophobia or of a colonial mindset, mass migration is not just a panacea of benefits, a terrorist act cannot be easily whitewashed as an “act of resistance”, and so on and so forth. If nevertheless my arguments shall be used to peddle a narrative, let it be one making this proposition: in our current discursive environment the predominant narratives on the right (broadly speaking) are more cynical, egregious and shamelessly disconnected from reality than those on the left (broadly speaking).
Unfortunately, the nature of the online political ‘ideosphere’ is, in one sense, very claustrophobic. It has been diced into padded hermetic echo-chambers that function as ‘narrative incubators’, in which ideologically sanctioned narratives are nurtured until they gain a level of memetic fitness they would never acquire had they ‘evolved’ in a more ideologically porous environment. These insular echo-chambers are the perfect crucible for the cultivation of the most virulent talking points. Within them, a multitude of highly motivated attendants lodge them into their pet narratives.
Fortunately, the fact that these narrative incubators are a safe space for the assembly of narratives is also their Achilles’ heel. The memetic fitness that incubated narratives possess is fragile: it is not earned, it is bestowed. When unleashed into the informational wildness, nurtured narratives more than ever rely on their emotional hijacking capacity to prop up their fitness since the apparent readiness-to-hand of their talking points is merely that, apparent and ultimately a deception. In the same way a set of mock plastic tools would bend and break if one attempted to repair an iron-and-steel engine with them, these talking points are liable to break down when they rub against the more robust factual accounts that have been kept safely excluded from narrative incubators. Since ultimately their fitness is not vouchsafed by their factuality, narratives and their constituent talking points must count on the lack of integrity of their promoters to live to see another day. Once they’ve been irreversibly rendered unready-to-hand by a collision with reality, they continue to have a zombie-like existence in the minds of their hosts that won’t or can’t let them rest in peace.
There is perhaps a meager consolation to be reaped from these sorry circumstances. Although lies run amok in the frenzy narrativization taking place within every echo-chamber, the vast majority of the lying is done banally. Lying is plenty, but a disproportionate fraction of it is born out of some degree of thoughtlessness given that Heideggerian breakdowns are few and far between within the precincts of an echo-chamber. These are not places where challenges to the narratives d’jour are particularly encouraged. Hold on, is this actually consoling? Well, at least banal lying is less ethically condemnable than its non-banal counterpart. Right?
(If you want to become radicalized against ready-made phrases, just browse through LinkedIn, where you are guaranteed to find hordes of people “thrilled to announce” that they attended some “thought-provoking presentations” and are thankful for the audience’s “insightful comments”).