What You Believe is Who You Become: Narrative and the Self
The stories which enter your mind become the life you live. After all, would companies spend millions on advertising if they didn't?
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This cannot be emphasized enough, how absolutely crucial narrative is to everything that we do.
And one thing that strikes me is just how destructive the narratives that are being pumped into people these days are.
Let me give you three examples of these narratives.
The first is from a DMX song from way back when, and I'm not going to quote it, because otherwise it'll be stuck in your head.
But the song is basically him saying that, you know, you people are driving me, driving me nuts.
You are making me lose my mind, and I'm going to chimp out, and that makes me a hero.
You know, that's the story of that song that gets internalized by everybody that hears it.
Another story, another narrative that people have is soak the rich.
You know, that the rich people were just born rich.
They are lucky.
They were just born rich.
They never worked for anything.
They just had a silver spoon in their mouth.
And so the hell with them.
You know, I don't need to deal fairly with them.
I don't need to follow my contractual obligations.
I don't have to have any respect for them because they were just born rich.
And they're entitled, so who cares about them?
And the third one, a third narrative that you see very commonly is the whole feminist patriarchy.
You know, that there's something wrong in a woman's life, and the person to blame is this ephemeral patriarchy that she can never really point to, but it's the patriarchy's problem.
It's their fault that she feels ashamed after having casual sex.
It's their fault that she doesn't feel fulfilled having the career that she was told to have, etc.
These are the narratives in people's heads that they live by.
This is the recurring pattern that they live by.
And each one of these narratives, if you notice something about them, is they're disempowering.
So the first one, you know, you're all going to make me lose my mind, so I'm going to chimp out like an idiot and get into a fist fight.
And, you know, then later on, when they're being booked into prison, you know, that guy's going to be arguing with the other guy about which one was the protagonist of that story.
You know, who was the guy that was having that heroic chimp out?
Well, you know, you're going, you are making me lose my mind.
You have power over me.
I don't have power over myself.
So that's handing out that power, that control, to the outside world.
The second one, the soak the rich.
They're just born that way.
They're just lucky, etc.
Well, if that's the case, then why bother being frugal?
You know, why bother scrimping and saving, you know, and trying to get an investment property or trying to build a business or whatever.
If people are just born rich, there's no point in you saving money, so you might as well blow your whole paycheck on alcohol or whatever.
And again, the third one, with the feminist patriarchy nonsense, if it's some sort of ephemeral patriarchy, there's nothing you can do about it, you might as well accept failure.
So yeah, these are very disempowering narratives.
They are very destructive narratives that people believe in.
They follow them.
They repeat them again and again and again.
They become enslaved to these damn narratives.
And this is what we're putting into people's heads.
All of this is very closely related to addiction, to that's just how I was raised.
This is the environment I was raised in.
You know, because you are going to repeat the narratives and the patterns and the stories of your childhood environment that you pick up from your parents.
Pick it up with your mother's milk.
But when you start getting these bad outcomes, see, this is the point where you have to decide.
You need to choose what narratives you allow into your own head, which script you're going to follow.
You know, Peterson put it quite well.
It's the, you know, you could be living a tragedy right now.
Is that the script you're following?
Is that the story you're following?
Is it a tragedy?
Do you want to be following that story, that script?
Is that the life you want to be leading?
Because every time you follow it, you're choosing to follow it.
This is the lie that addicts use, that I'm addicted.
No, you are choosing to be addicted.
You are choosing to follow that story that always ends in the same place.
You are choosing.
When everybody else drives you mad and you chimp out, you are choosing to let them drive you mad.
You are choosing your behavior.
You know, and as the Hold Sergeant Major said to me once, you know, you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences.
If you want to blame your poverty on the rich, you know, you're choosing that.
You are choosing poverty.
When you're choosing to not control yourself, you are saying that somebody else needs to control me.
And so it's absolutely vital that you find out which story, which narrative you're following.
What are these stories that you're entering into your life, you're putting into your head.
Because if they're bad stories, then you're going to have a bad outcome.
You know, and they're usually there's stories that are useful to somebody else.
Somebody else is getting an advantage.
But you are losing.
So pay attention.
Pay attention to what you let into your head.
Because not everything out there is going to be particularly good for you.
