The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting. Arsen Avetisov
necessarily transformed into an even more ambiguous one – 'to be always right’.
Smaller-scale goals are reserved for environments such as supermarkets, vanity fairs, multi-currency accounting systems, and similar areas to materialise self-identification. To maintain a comfortable existence within these consumer spaces, people are ready to engage in strenuous work, the effectiveness of which is judged by the authorities and society in goals achieved per unit of time, ultimately leading to a dubious system of evaluating these accomplishments.
However, what motivates a person to willingly prioritise the goals of a company, nation, or country over their own? It is the pursuit of meaning that can peacefully lead the mind to compromise with its goal to survive. This is likely the primary factor distinguishing people from the rest of the living world.
In the long run, at every hierarchical level, individuals employ a similar strategy to subdue those beneath them, which involves selling various concepts of happiness. These concepts are replicated, appealing, and straightforward to the same extent as they are unreachable. Perhaps because they aim to blur the distinction between 'I want’ and 'I need’, rendering it negligible and obscure.
How many unnecessary worries from 'I want’ arise due to the fact that what you really need is not always what you want! Therefore, if you imagine that you want exactly what you need, then this already acquires some commercial and political interest. The only task is to convince yourself of this construction. To show that in addition to goals, actions and plans, your 'desires’ also contain the essence of your life.
By the way, if an individual is not persuaded by this semantic framework, then an undesirable situation for the upper levels may occur – when a person wants what he or she already possesses. And it can be regarded as happiness – to want what you have. Yet, this is a different story and a different concept.
Some Cherished Stories from the Bible
How many stories – so many interpretations.
If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way.
If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. ― Jim Rohn
Reading the news, it is sometimes difficult to even imagine a place where such cynical and hypocritical stories can still occur. Although everyone suspects that the place is not so far from them. And there are many, many such stories.
How many stories has humanity managed to tell itself? Do you know how many stories there are in the Old Testament? There are much more than may be seen at first glance. After all, each story can be interpreted in different ways: as a historical description of the people in search of their place in the world, as instructions for each day’s behaviour, or as a manual for managing people and processes. Each story reveals several layers of meaning, depending on the angle from which it is viewed.
What is the meaning of the life story of Joshua, a military commander and leader, or the story of such a controversial figure as King David? How many temptations fell to the lot of King David? The king, who regularly violated the laws, at least moral laws, after all the turmoil, again and again returned to his faith and his mission. Maybe the point is that none of us knows our purpose in life until we take responsibility for events and our own lives.
Or the story of Joseph, the son of Jacob, who later became Pharaoh’s first minister. After his brothers had nearly killed him and then sold him as a slave to the caravan drivers, he forgave them. A story of mercy? Or is it a story about how the path to success always lies through suffering, betrayal, and knowledge? Or in the ability to interpret dreams and that you need to listen to the voice of God or your inner voice? In any case, try to understand what He or it wants to tell you. How many different interpretations! It is like in medicine: how many doctors there are, so many diagnoses they make.
We sometimes trust TV series characters more than politicians because the former present us with a more understandable semantic narrative. And, as history shows, what matters most about politicians is how close their promises are to our desires than to our values. And our desires are not always in full accordance with our model of morality. The world has become so cynical that to achieve their goals, politicians and those around them do not disdain to appeal to the different beings that live in each of us. But more to those beings who neglect their intelligence.
The Meanings of Survival
Life is the choice and refinement of the model in which meanings are tried to be introduced.
Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads
and empty hearts can do that. ― Norman Vincent Peale
Humankind, in fact, has always faced only one question – its survival. Throughout their existence on the planet, people have refined the forms and models of survival, accumulated knowledge, and developed skills. And all this in order to live to an age when they could contribute their unique genetic material to a global planetary experiment they are involved in.
And over time, practising their survival, people have achieved significant success. They tirelessly improved hunting techniques, settled in new homes, cultivated crops, and developed ways to protect themselves from wild animals and neighbouring tribes. Along with these changes, new demands have emerged – to live as long as possible and as better and easier as possible. In other words, the requirements have changed not only for the time a person has lived on the Earth but also for the quality of this time. People’s ideas and the very texture of their behaviour have changed. They transformed the innate biological mechanisms of survival – defensive aggression, stress, competition – into categories and concepts of envy, vanity, greed, adultery, and the list goes on.
People began to devote more and more time to the realisation of their most sophisticated desires, called ideas, the connection of which with survival is still very doubtful. Choosing a suitable survival model and implementing it is what a person does all his or her life.
The survival model includes decisions such as choosing a profession and place of work, graduating from prestigious universities, developing skills, accumulating knowledge, and interacting with the surroundings. The amplitude of relationships with the surroundings often disappoints a person when they feel hypocrisy, servility and grovelling, but they adapt, because it becomes acceptable for them; it is also a survival model.
There is no good or bad model, there is one that suits an individual specifically. Irreconcilable contradiction in any model is just a term. The desire to survive reconciles everything and everyone. Assembling their model piece by piece, with their job, education, skills, language skills, citizenship, and everything else possible, people try to make it work at all levels of their goals and associations.
People allow the goal to determine the means to achieve it. The world is a market. A giant market as big as humankind. The model that people choose, what they do and what they strive for, shape their environment. They choose the environment, and the environment chooses them.
On the one hand, life is a race where the model is endlessly improved to adapt to changing circumstances. This benefits those at higher levels, who are precisely the ones engaged in constantly changing the rules and circumstances. On the other hand, life is a person’s accumulated experience.
People are disappointed. People are afraid that any new ideas, goals and meanings of changes in the social system or their way of life will no longer serve their interests. They are afraid because they are sure that any new social contract between levels carries with it only the possibility of creating a new level of ‘elites’.
At the same time, the exact 'elites’ or groups of influence that have a monopoly on creating and distributing the leading narratives and meanings of such a community system are well aware and take advantage of the fact that when creating any new narrative, there is only one mandatory condition. This narrative must be at least somehow connected