In the information age, it is difficult to make sense of events. Endless amounts of information do not necessarily coalesce into a coherent narrative with explanatory meaning. The breakdown of the international order is precipitating the emergence of different narratives that engender competing truths.
The German writer Goethe said: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.”
If we look at our present time through the lens of this statement, we could say that we are in the midst of a changing epoch. The previous era saw the rise of absolute individual subjectivity, in which there was no truth other than each one’s own. This was a worldview that led to the emergence of a power structure predicated on it.
By the same token, the primacy of absolute individual subjectivity led to the disintegration of social coherence, which is built on a shared narrative that gives meaning to events. Facts and information, according to the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, are met with a pervasive suspicion that things might be another way. Bits of information do not congeal into a narrative and might have the opposite effect: they might darken the world instead of making it clearer.
“Truth, unlike information, has a centripetal force that holds society together,” writes Han, who also says that narratives provide truth. “Pieces of information do not coalesce into knowledge or truth, which are forms of narration.” Pure information, thus, becomes conducive to increased individual subjectivity, whereas narratives are conducive to a shared objectivity. Han says that the era of democracy has become the era of infocracy.
During the epoch of the internationalization of Western liberal values, roughly until the beginning of the 21st century, there was a clear hegemonic narrative. There were other narratives, but none with comparable power. They were judged acceptable or unacceptable in relation to the hegemonic one. The hegemonic narrative created truths out of information.
A government was a pariah, or an organization a terrorist, if it acted against the liberal hegemony, regardless of whether the attack was moral, economic or political. A change in the power structure of a country was deemed a “freedom revolution” or a “tyrannical dictatorship” according to the same measure. There was a shared reality created by a narrative which offered, to those who bought into it, a common objective truth.
This narrative included statements such as: democracy is the fairest political system, capitalism the best economic organization, science the arbiter of truth, morality an individual choice, and human rights an international truth. Reigning above and looking after them was the State, with a capital S. These were non-negotiable truths.
Now they are not. The hegemonic state that enforced them – every right requires a sovereign – has lost its power and is itself undergoing a narrative change. Other sociopolitical narratives, ones that were competing for space before, no longer feel the need to mutate, even if just linguistically, to appear acceptable to an international consensus.
The discourse now is of multipolarity, of civilizational states with different values. It could be said that nations are becoming subjective, that each nation is forming its own narrative and its own truth. This, according to Goethe, would indicate an epochal change.
We have multiple examples of this. Ukraine is one, Palestine another, Venezuela and Taiwan others. In all these cases there are competing narratives wanting to shape information into truth. Not only are conflicts being shaped by different narratives, but so too are social values and political organizations.
To be clear, I am not passing a value judgement on either tendency, only trying to point out a dynamic of change. The U.S. power structure is morphing on the back of national conservative movements that are impacting the social fabric and rewriting social values. The Western world is following.
The collective West is where this inertia is more prevalent because it was the leading order and therefore the most affected by the disorder. But other nations are also ditching Western values and institutions, favouring indigenous ones. China, Russia, India and Türkiye are clear examples.
Media, both mainstream and alternative, has become a field of battle. What before was a conspiracy now is mainstream. Tucker Carlson releasing a series of videos questioning the narrative of 9/11 shows how far this has come. The monopolization of media companies in the hands of David Ellison, son of the oligarch Larry Ellison, or Trump’s threat to sue the BBC and calling it “fake news” is another indication.
Alternative media outlets and commentators offer different versions of the same event. Was the 12-year war against Bashar al-Assad a regime-change operation or a war of liberation? Are the monarchies of the Gulf legitimate actors or absolutist tyrannies? Is Taiwan an indivisible part of China or a nation with the right to self-determination?
As the Japanese director Kurosawa brilliantly put it in Rashomon, circumstantial truth is elusive. In the movie, four eyewitnesses give contradictory accounts of the same event: the murder of a samurai and the rape of his wife. Each of the characters tells what happened according to a personal need to justify their actions and show themselves in a good light.
However, under all this apparent narrative change, one thing seems to remain unquestioned: the monetary system. Not the economic distribution – this too is open to modification – but the very basis of our financial organization: fiat currencies and the banking system. This appears to be the only thing upon which almost everyone agrees.
Out of this narrative collapse, another world will emerge. The question is whether, as Tancredi put it, everything is changing in order to stay the same.
