Арсен Аветисов – Political Narratology. How Stories Shape Power and Compliance (страница 5)
A political narrative is always built around emotions. Fear explains necessity, anger provides direction, pride creates identity, resentment justifies radicalism, and hope maintains loyalty.
Facts do not carry emotions in themselves. They must be ‘sanctified’ with meaning. Therefore, the same statistic can evoke anxiety or calm, rage or indifference, mobilisation or apathy.
The deciding factor is not the number, but the story into which it is embedded.
Why Refutation Almost Never Works
There is a naive belief: if you expose a lie, it will disappear. But political narratives are not destroyed by refutations because they are sustained not by their ‘truthfulness’ but by the
If a story provides a sense of belonging, justifies pain, explains failures, preserves dignity, and reduces anxiety, then a fact that destroys it is perceived not as information but as a threat.
At this moment, defence mechanisms activate: the fact is declared false, the source hostile, the critic a traitor, doubt a weakness. The story protects itself.
When Facts Start to Work
Facts begin to matter not when they are accurate, but when they coincide with experience. If a person’s experience confirms a fact, it is easily accepted. If experience contradicts it, the fact is discarded.
This is why political narratives so often appeal to ‘life experience’, ‘ordinary people’, and ‘what is visible to the naked eye’.
A story that aligns with feeling is always stronger than a story confirmed by experts.
Information vs. Identity
The biggest mistake is to think that a political dispute is about data. In reality, it is a dispute about identity.
To accept a fact is to admit: I was wrong, I was deceived, my group is not right, my choice was incorrect.
This is psychologically painful and sometimes traumatic. Therefore, a person defends not a position, but themselves. Facts that threaten identity provoke resistance regardless of their quality or correspondence to reality.
Media and the Illusion of Being Informed
Modern people receive more information than ever before. But this does not make them more resistant to narratives. Quite the opposite. The increasing information flow destroys the ability to build one’s own stories, and a person begins to borrow ready-made ones.
Media rarely supply facts in their pure form; they convey frames, intonations, accents, repetitions, emotional markers.
This creates the feeling of ‘I know everything’, even though it is merely the reproduction of someone else’s plot.
Why The Truth Will Prevail’ is a Dangerous Myth
The belief in the automatic victory of truth absolves one of responsibility for form. It allows one not to think about language, structure, or how exactly what is happening is explained.
But truth without form does not prevail. It dissolves. A story without facts is dangerous; facts without a story are helpless.
Politics exists in the tension between them. And most often, the side that better manages meaning wins, not the one that provides information more accurately.
What Understanding This Mechanism Provides
Realising why facts lose to stories does not mean abandoning facts. It means abandoning naivety. You begin to see why some data are picked up and others ignored, why exposures don’t work, and why people cling to obviously weak explanations.
And most importantly, you begin to notice which stories serve your own beliefs. Because the most dangerous narrative is the one that seems like ‘just reality’.
From this understanding, we move on to the question of how exactly the main character of political history is created: the collective ‘we’.
Chapter 5. The Collective ‘We’ as the Main Character
A nation is an imagined political community.
Why Politics Almost Never Says ‘You’
Politics almost never addresses a person directly. It rarely says ‘you’ and almost never ‘I’. Its basic form of address is ‘we’.
‘We are the people’, ‘we are the country’, ‘we are the majority’, ‘we are the heirs’, ‘we are in danger’, ‘we will win’. This is not a stylistic device nor a collective politeness, but a fundamental mechanism of political narrative.
Politics requires a character that is larger than any individual, spans generations, and can demand sacrifices without direct violence. This character becomes the collective ‘we’.
It is ‘we’ who act, err, suffer, endure, wage war, wait, justify, and forgive. It is ‘we’ who become the bearer of historical meaning.
We’ is Not Discovered – It is Constructed
The collective ‘we’ does not exist as a natural fact. It cannot be discovered, measured, or empirically recorded. It is created through language, symbols, rituals, repetition, emotional synchronisation, shared fear, and a shared promise.
Before a common narrative appears, there are simply a multitude of people with different interests, fears, views, and biographies. After its emergence, a subject appears that speaks on behalf of everyone, demands loyalty, defines the boundaries of acceptability, and punishes deviation.
This is neither a conspiracy theory nor manipulation in a narrow sense. It is a way to make society governable and predictable.
Imagined Does Not Mean Fictitious
The word ‘imagined’ is often perceived as a synonym for ‘unreal’. This is a mistake. Money is imagined, borders are imagined, laws are imagined. Yet they structure the lives of millions.
The collective ‘we’ operates on the same logic. It does not have a biological body, but it possesses psychological reality. People are willing to die in its name, endure for it, stay silent for it.
The imagined is a source of power.
The Belonging Effect as an Emotional Technology
Belonging is not proven – it is experienced. A person does not analyse ‘we’ because they are inside it.
The ‘we’ effect is formed through repeated formulas, recognisable symbols, collective rituals, images of the past, and projections of the future. At some point, a person ceases to distinguish where their own position ends and the position of the ‘collective’ begins.
This is precisely why belonging is felt physically – in a crowd, at a rally, in front of a screen, during the national anthem, at a moment of threat.
Why We’ is Stronger Than Individual Thinking
The individual ‘I’ doubts. The collective ‘we’ is certain. ‘I’ can be wrong. ‘We’ is almost always right. ‘I’ is afraid. ‘We’ provides courage.
The key is that ‘we’ removes a portion of responsibility. The decision is made not by a person, but by ‘history’, ‘the people’, ‘the era’, or ‘circumstances’. This provides psychological relief and a sense of justification.
This is where the collective ‘we’ becomes particularly attractive.
The Dissolution of Personal Doubt
When a person begins to think in terms of ‘we’, they gradually lose the habit of asking questions. Formulas like ‘we know’, ‘we understand’, and ‘we must’ displace personal doubt.
Disagreement begins to be perceived not as a position, but as a threat to integrity. Internal self-censorship arises: it is better to stay silent than to be excluded, better to agree than to be left alone.
A political narrative wins not when it convinces, but when alternative thought becomes psychologically dangerous.
We’ as a Moral Screen
The collective ‘we’ possesses a special property – it blurs personal responsibility. What a person would not dare to do in their own name, they easily justify in the name of the group.
Violence turns into defence, lies into necessity, suppression into care, silence into maturity. ‘We’ becomes a moral screen behind which individual ethics disappear.
This does not make people evil; it turns them into functions of history.
The Boundaries of ‘We’ as the Foundation of Identity
Any ‘we’ exists only if there is a boundary. If there is ‘we’, then there is ‘not us’. If there are ‘our own’, then there are ‘outsiders’. The stronger the narrative, the more sharply defined these boundaries are.
Political identity is rarely built on positive characteristics. More often – on negation: we are not them, we are not like that, we will not allow it, we will not forget.
It is precisely through the exclusion of ‘outsiders’ that the collective ‘we’ feels its own density.
Why We’ Requires Constant Reproduction
The collective ‘we’ is unstable. It must be constantly maintained – through holidays, crises, threats, mobilisation, symbolic gestures, repetition of history.
When the narrative weakens, the ‘we’ begins to disintegrate into a multitude of ‘I’s. This is the moment that power fears most – the moment of silence, in which the common explanation of events disappears.