Three anecdotes:
–One, I remember seeing a TikTok from Tressie McMillan Cottom, who I respect very much as a journalist and writer, the day after the November 2024 election. She talked about being at one of her favorite restaurants and her server, who she knew, asked her how she was feeling about the election results and she answered, gently and civilly, well, not great. He was a LatinX male, and he had voted for Trump, and in getting to know him, Cottom said it was striking, how much he resented immigrants – he called them “migrants.” As an immigrant himself, he felt that he had worked hard and done things “the right way” in the United States, and was now a US citizen, yet he was struggling to make ends meet and working as a server in a restaurant. From his viewpoint, Biden had extended many special privileges to immigrants that he himself had not received. So out of his resentment and his seemingly endless economic struggles, he voted for Trump.
–Two, my elderly mother recently started massage therapy treatments at a Korean-owned business near her home in Pennsylvania and she said that her massage therapist told her how hard he had worked to build up his business since coming to the United States. And he had zero empathy for the South Korean people who were helping to build an auto plant in Georgia and were rounded up by the Trump Administration in Georgia. He felt like he had worked all of his life to build a legitimate business and earn his green card and now all of these engineers had been given special privileges that he had never received. (That their special privileges didn’t do squat to prevent them from being arrested and detained didn’t seem to figure into his thinking.)
–Three, I’ve been struck by a number of people on TikTok and elsewhere who are announcing that they’ve “left” MAGA and are sharing stories of family reconciliation or, in some cases, family estrangement. And what I’m struck by is the phrase, “left.” What have they left, exactly? MAGA is not, as far as I know, centrally located in a physical infrastructure. It mirrors the peculiar way people describe “leaving” a religion – there is so much implied in that verb. I take it to mean, they’ve left behind people, social groups, rituals and routines, and most importantly for this piece, they’ve left a mindset. They have left behind ways of thinking and believing and feeling.
These three anecdotes, the last one in particular, have led me to think more expansively about narrative, and narrative change, and narrative ecosystems. I’ve explained the concept of narrative change as a social change strategy in other pieces, but to shorthand: it’s a type of communications strategy where you are not only thinking about messages, you are also thinking about the patterns of stories that people subscribe to (or don’t) and how those narratives are influencing how they think and believe and act.
Most people are not particularly well-versed or aware of the narrative ecosystems that shape and shift the ways we think, act, and feel. They are familiar, for example, with the narrative trope of Good vs Evil, or Light vs. Dark, but they are most comfortable with this trope in fantastical settings like Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings, or even – dare I say – in movie franchises like John Wick and The Equalizer. But oftentimes, they are not hyper-aware of how their social and cultural and political beliefs and values are interacting with existing narratives to form their own narrative ecosystem because they exist more on the narrative consumption side than they do the narrative production side of things. And when you are consuming, you are not necessarily analyzing, or synthesizing, or thinking through multiple levels of narratives and how they might intersect or not. (The most straightforward example of this is those who consume Fox News as a legitimate news source versus those who do not.)
I am not exactly saying that people these days are more stupid, and ignorant, than they used to be. (Although to be honest, I’ve thought that countless times in the past several years.) Our narrative ecosystems, these days, are far more noisy, far more crowded, and far more treacherous than they ever were. It used to be, for example, that media – newspapers and broadcast journalism and magazines – were far more trustworthy influencers and shapers of our narrative ecosystems but now, the confluence of unprincipled tech moguls and unchecked corporate ownership of media and heightened income inequality has resulted in a very swampy media world, indeed, riddled with bogs and decay. We are so, so far from the days of three networks and newspapers – we now exist within a bewildering multiverse of channels and podcasts and streamers and social media platforms. Few possess the literacy to make sense of the multiverse with ease. I honestly think that more people are familiar with reality television storylines than they are with the Mueller report and that it is not an accident that the current President is a reality television alum.
As a result of our crazy narrative multiverse, we get people tunneling into their preferred narratives, as I tried to illustrate through the anecdotes I shared at the outset. By “preferred,” I mean: narratives that help people make sense of their world, that strongly line up with their emotions and beliefs and values and lived experiences. It infuriates so many of us, I know, that the narratives that many people choose to subscribe to – that led them to vote for Trump – are supported at the expense of and harm to so many other people. Like: if you are convinced that Biden (and Obama before him) somehow granted “special privileges” to immigrants that you yourself were denied, you then have to turn a blind eye to all of the harm that Trump has already done, to so many more people other than immigrants.
But here’s what I am starting to believe about people who subscribe to their preferred narratives: I think they are in a deep, deep, narrative rabbit hole. I think they are experiencing a form of narrative blindness that almost amounts to narrative imprisonment. And I think that they have gone down these narrative rabbit holes for a number of reasons, including: a) it is their only way to make sense of the highly fragmented, noisy, polluted narrative ecosystems we find ourselves in these days; and b) they are weary of their economic struggles, which easily gets weaponized into anger against the wrong people; and c) they have been given permission by their leaders, who have disdained their responsibilities as public servants, to not care about the other people who are being harmed as they stay safely (they assume) ensconced in their deep, deep rabbit holes.
I may not be making much sense, here, but what I’m trying to say is: my education and career have both afforded me the immense privilege of being able to see things more clearly across different subject matters, different disciplines, and different groups. In other words, I DO go down narrative rabbit holes, but I work every goddamn day to extricate myself before I go too deep. Having that set of skills at my disposal, I am feeling a strong desire to break people out of their narrative prisons, so to speak. In fact, I think that’s what social change communications is all about – here, this is a thing that I think you should care about, because it really does affect YOU, and everyone and everything you hold dear. There were years when I wasn’t grasping the critical importance of climate change and environmental injustice – because I was caring about and working on other things, and it didn’t seem especially relevant to ME, at that time. But now I know I was wrong. I broke free of the narrative rabbit hole I was in, the one in which I convinced myself that some issues mattered MORE than others. I wonder, today, how Black people felt when non-Black people were suddenly galvanized to act on racial injustice after George Floyd’s murder. Like: okay, YOU were in a narrative rabbit hole where you could comfortably believe that police brutality and racial injustice were not that bad, whereas OUR world was clearly governed by an ongoing justifiable fear of simply existing in a racist world while trying to go about our business.
Anyway, were I to be designing a narrative change strategy, today – and I hope to dig into this soon, since I’m starting a new job early next year – I think I’d like to do some thinking about people’s narrative prisons. I think some of the queries I’d explore would be along the lines of:
–What narratives are holding you prisoner and preventing you from being a more empathetic, compassionate human being?
–What can I acknowledge about your circumstances and struggle that would make you feel seen, and validated?
–And finally, what narrative would inspire you to connect with others around a purpose and a cause?
I don’t think it’s impossible to break people out of their narrative prisons. I do think that some of the work will feel painstaking and hard-fought, and some of it will feel joyful and uplifting. Even in this grim year we’ve just had, there have been moments when we’ve seen people unite around a candidate, a cause, a story. We just have to string together these moments so they are frequent enough that our narratives line up with the reality we want to exist in, and help make.
Minna Jung Consulting 