The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting. Arsen Avetisov
Samaritan stopped to help a wounded man, while two clergymen, a priest and a Levite, had just passed by. A simple story with a lot of meaning. Psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson decided to test whether religion has any significant influence on empathy and providing help to others. The participants of the experiment were students at the University’s Theological Seminary. They were divided into two groups: one was asked to deliver a speech on the Good Samaritan, and the other – a speech on the possibility of employment in the seminary. The speech was to be delivered in another building, and to get there, participants had to go through an alley. An elderly actor was lying on the side of the alley, faking a heart attack. Different participants were given different times to reach the audience. Therefore, some were in a hurry when passing through the alley, while others were not.
The results showed that students who had prepared a speech on the Good Samaritan stopped to help no more often than those who had prepared a speech on job opportunities. The only factor that influenced the decision of the students to help the man was the time they had at their disposal. Those who were in less of a hurry stopped more readily. And, regardless of the topic of their speech, only 10 per cent of those who had little time tried to help the 'sufferer’. It turned out that morality is time-dependent, which can significantly distort a person’s system of values.
The more time people have at their disposal, the kinder they are and the more inclined to empathise and help. And, therefore, the other way round: if people are in a hurry, they become unkind and indifferent. So, in a megalopolis, the probability of getting help in the street is much less than in the country. In other words, it sounds like, ‘We are kind, but we don’t have time for this’, or ‘We are ill-natured because there are traffic jams everywhere.’
And yet another experiment, although not as well-known as the previous ones. Scientists from the Institute of Zoology, which is part of the Zoological Society of London, together with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, led by Dr Andrew King, showed how leaders can emerge in human society.
Imagine 200 people who are asked to move in a circle. The only rule that applies is that they should not approach each other closer than one metre. One metre in this case could be interpreted as some kind of safe personal space. Suddenly a group of five people appears in the crowd who begin to move not in a circle, but in a certain direction, towards some goal known only to them. After a while, the others do the same. Two hundred people start marching in one direction, without asking where or why.
If one gets the impression that in all these experiments we are talking about a kind of game, then it is worth noting that the boundary between any game and real life is very relative. They transform into each other interchangeably. The case study and phenomenology show that life sometimes acts as a game and a game – as life.
A celebrated English bard once famously said: 'All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.' And if that is the case, the actors do not just play their roles – there is a script, there are prepared monologues and actions.
Everyone has always been interested in the question: who writes this script and how? And, as we will see later, we are the authors of only a small and insignificant part of it.
The Hierarchy of Goals
The hierarchy of goals and communities. How the upper levels seek to subdue the lower ones, and how they manage to do so.
If your working day isn’t perfect, then you work
for someone else, not yourself. ― Anonymous
A person’s life can be viewed as a process of constantly setting goals and achieving them. A person’s daily activity, their thinking, decisions and, accordingly, actions that shape their behaviour, all this is directed and subordinated to the goals that they have. Or the goals that were set before them or that seduced them.
The levels of goals correspond to the forms of people’s associations. The level of goals in this hierarchy determines the category of self-identification of a person in which a person is aware of himself and which contributes to the achievement of his personal goals. The hierarchy is as follows: humanity, state, nation, corporation, group, family, and finally the individual itself. The goals of the upper levels tend to take over the goals of the lower levels. But they do not always succeed.
The highest level of goals is mega goals on a planetary scale, the goals of all mankind and civilisation. The most popular of them are environmental issues. Humanity does not stop trying to somehow solve them, but with varying degrees of success. One well-known example is the Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
Or such a hypothetical goal that would become real when aliens with clearly unfriendly intentions appeared. If there really is a threat of intervention on Earth, then there is no doubt that countries and governments will unite, and all current conflicts, wars and disagreements will immediately lose their relevance. The unification in this case will happen within the category of human identity as a species.
The next sublevel of goals in the hierarchy are initially tribal goals, which later became national and state goals. The categories of a person’s identity are language, passport, lifestyle, and borders of residence. Combining goals at this level allows you sometimes to neglect mega goals. For example, this enables actively cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest and justifying why signing the Kyoto Protocol is not worthwhile.
Below the national level are corporate goals. These are the goals of companies and entire industries grouped into categories of employment and workplaces. The implementation of goals of this level becomes a dominant feature, which occasionally allows industries to dump toxic waste into the environment, neglect business norms, and ignore state nature conservation programmes.
The goals of families, groups, clans, and gangs are even lower. Conflicts, wars and confrontations between generations may occur at this level despite corporate culture, traditions and unspoken laws.
And finally, the level of personal goals. These are the most sensitive and most important goals for a person, goals that shape most of a person’s daily behaviour, goals that people are not ready to give up, which they are not ready to neglect, sometimes even in the most extreme circumstances.
The challenge of managing people has always been how to subordinate the goals of the lower levels to the upper ones, whether they are family, corporate or state. The complexity of this task increases with the elevation of the goals. One of the reasons is that at lower levels, a person’s behaviour is formed on deep and stable narratives, and at higher levels the meanings of narratives often become less clear or appear unconvincing.
It is believed that the quality of a person’s life depends on the effectiveness and satisfaction from the process of achieving goals. In pursuit of this desired quality, people are ready to unite and adjust. They are ready to change their place of residence, family, profession, place of work, and sometimes even country and nationality. People are willing to redefine their identity to attain the lowest-level goals. This, as it will be discussed in the next chapter, is a natural function of the human brain and is integral to its operation.
Other cases of interest are rare but popular, when individuals prioritise higher-level goals over more immediate ones. And here, striving to achieve these 'elevated’ (in all senses) goals, a person encounters illusions.
The first of these illusions arises when people think that they are pursuing their own goals. But in reality, the goal may have been subtly replaced with tasks imposed by their surroundings. Why is that? At least because for a long time it was believed that people with goals of their own are dangerous, especially if their goals do not align with those of their leaders. Wouldn’t it be better to give these individuals assignments? Substantial, ambitious, life-long assignments.
For example, some nations have introduced a continuous task – a social credit system for evaluating citizens’