Арсен Аветисов – Political Narratology. How Stories Shape Power and Compliance (страница 10)
And underground stories are far more radical and dangerous than official ones.
Why Myths Are Stronger Than
An
Therefore, destroying a narrative without replacement almost always leads to a new, often harsher, myth.
Politics as a Struggle for Interpretation, Not Truth
Truth in politics is important but insufficient. What matters is who explains the truth, how, in what form, for whom, with what tone and emotion.
Politics is not a competition of facts; it is a competition of interpretations.
Why This Cannot Be Abolished by Reforms
You can reform institutions, change procedures, and renew elites.
But if the narrative is not renewed, everything returns to its former state. Reforms without a story are perceived as a reaction born of impotence; a story without reforms is perceived as a declared lie.
Awareness of Narrative Does Not Neutralise Its Effect
It is important to understand: awareness does not render a person completely free. Even knowing you are inside a story, you still continue to live within it. But the difference between blind participation and conscious participation is vast – awareness creates distance.
Political Maturity as the Ability to Live with Stories
A mature society is one where narratives can be discussed, contested, compared, and changed. Where the story is neither sacralised nor devalued. Where people know that any political reality is a story about the world, not the world itself.
Why This Book Begins Here
Once you understand that politics is inevitably narrative, you can no longer ask: ‘Why are they lying to us?’
The correct question is different: ‘What story are we being offered – and why?’
From this moment, the essence of the conversation changes. And from here, we will no longer speak about the fact that narratives exist but about
This concludes the first part. Next – the mechanics of power.
Part II. The Mechanics of Power
Introduction
In the first part of this book, we discussed why politics inevitably becomes history. We talked about how facts transform into meanings, how a collective ‘we’ emerges from language, how the past and future are rewritten depending on the present. Now it is necessary to take the next step. Simply understanding the nature of the political narrative is not enough.
Any story, once it has arisen, must be held, defended, repeated, reinforced, and passed on. And it is precisely here that the mechanics of power begin to operate.
If in the book
Power as the Management of Explanations
Power is usually described through its institutions: parliament, courts, the army, police, ministries. But these forms are secondary.
Before power becomes law, it becomes an explanation. Before an order appears, its justification arises. Before submission occurs, a story emerges in which that submission appears reasonable. Power exists thanks to the ability to hold the right to interpret what is happening. What is considered a crisis, what is the norm, what is a threat, and what is an acceptable risk and a necessary sacrifice? The mechanics of power is the mechanics of meaning.
Why Stability is More Important Than Force
Political power is difficult to maintain through violence alone: violence is costly, unstable, and does not scale well. Power that does not require constant coercion is far more effective; it reproduces itself through language, is supported by rituals, and is habitually perceived as the surrounding landscape.
Such power does not look like power; it looks like reason, common sense, tradition, inevitability, responsibility. Anything but power. That is precisely why the key questions in our exposition become not ‘Who rules?’ and not ‘What decisions have been made?’ but ‘Why do people submit to this?’ ‘When do people stop believing?’ and ‘What happens when the story no longer works?’
From Private Narrative to Mass Narrative
In the book
And here one transition is especially important: what in private life looks like a habit or a personal choice, in politics becomes a norm, and then an obligation.
An individual narrative can be changed. And a political one can too, but it is much more difficult. Because behind such a narrative stand not only the words and their constructions but also entire institutions, sanctions, rituals, expectations, and collective emotions.
When Power is Strongest Where It is Invisible
The most stable forms of power operate inconspicuously. They do not require constant orders. People themselves know how to think, speak, and feel ‘correctly’. They repeat the necessary formulas, shame others for deviations, explain events only in permissible terms; they experience fear, not so much of punishment, but of exclusion.
The mechanics of power is not only the control of actions. It is the control of everything that accompanies actions: interpretations, pace, pauses, and silence.
What This Part is About
In the following chapters, we will not be talking about ‘evil regimes’ or ‘bad leaders’. We will be analysing why power is recognised as legitimate, how it loses the right to tell the story, why the image of the future is more important than the memory of the past, how promises turn into a contract, why a leader becomes a character, how rituals replace content, why the language of power becomes more complex, and why silence frightens power more than protest.
And all of this is not an
Why Understand the Mechanics of Power
Understanding mechanisms, anatomy, or physiology does not automatically make a person free, but it gives them a chance not to be completely blind. Those who do not see what power consists of and how it works almost inevitably begin to explain what is happening in the language of power itself.
This part of the book is an attempt to return to the reader the distance between an event and its explanation, between a decision and its justification, between reality and the story into which it is packaged. Because power begins where explanation ceases to be a subject for discussion.
And it is with the question of legitimacy that we continue.
Chapter 11. Legitimacy: Why People Submit
A tyrant has only two eyes, two hands, one body – and nothing more beyond that, save the power you give him.
Submission as an Enigma
The most interesting question that politics poses is not about forms of coercion and violence, but about forms of unforced consent.
History knows countless regimes in which millions of people obeyed orders, laws, restrictions, and sacrifices without being under constant physical compulsion. Moreover, they often defended that power, justified it, reproduced its language, and punished those who doubted it.
If power were only fear, why does it endure for years, decades, sometimes centuries, even when fear subsides?
Why do people submit not only under the whip but voluntarily?
The answer to this question is
Legitimacy Is Not Legality
In everyday speech, legitimacy is often confused with legality. But these are different substances: legality is formal conformity to rules; legitimacy is the recognition of those rules.
One can have an entirely lawful power that is not perceived as ’one’s own’. And one can have a power that violates formal procedures yet is accepted as necessary and justified.
Legitimacy is not so much a legal category as it is a psychological and narrative state of society, in which submission appears reasonable, inevitable, and right.
That is precisely why the question ‘Why do people submit?’ cannot be resolved by reference to constitutions, courts, or procedures. All this is decided in the space of narratives.
Weber and the Three Sources of Belief
Max Weber proposed the classic typology of legitimacy: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. It is often recited mechanically, as a textbook list, but behind it lies an important insight.
All three forms are not types of power – they are types of belief.
People submit because they believe in the person, in the order, in the procedure. Not simultaneously and not necessarily consciously, but they believe.
Charisma, tradition, and rationality are different narratives of justification for submission, different stories about why this particular power is permissible.
Charisma: The Power of Exceptionality