Unpredictable patterns #93: Mechanisms of meaning
The beauty of evil plans, meaning before truth, the meaning of life, how to build a meaningful enemy and why meaning is a key component in predicting our societies
Dear reader,
Thanks for the comments on the last issue on surprises. I thought it especially interesting to see how many felt that the frequency of surprises have gone up overall and that we are now living in a society that is more surprising than in a long time. This is sort of a corollary of the idea that we live in an increasingly uncertain world - but it is also something more: uncertainty can be unsurprising, even boring, but the kind of uncertainty we live in is one with surprises. That does feel like a worrying thought.
This week’s note is about how meaning is increasingly becoming an important component in any future scenarios for our societies, and what that means. It also contains a return to the theme of enemies and the purpose of enemies (and how they can be constructed). If the part of enemies interests you I recommend reading the earlier note as well - especially the part about Plutarch’s take on enemies.
Enjoy!
The meaning of dark designs
There is a beauty in vast dark plans that is hard to deny. We enjoy them. There is something about the evil machinations of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings - the sense of a pattern being woven that will catch us all - that contains a terrible allure. The idea of a long series of events, carefully crafted, deep and wide, is not just frightening - it also creates a deeper sense of meaning in our lives.
Yet, we often associate such plans exactly with evil - in one of the key scenes in Star Wars, the emperor quietly says that “everything that has transpired as done so according to my design” and in that statement he articulates one of our deepest fears - to be caught in someone else’s grand plan. We find it in depictions of evil everywhere: Nick Cave captures it well in his song about the sinister man with the red right hand:
You’re one microscopic cog/ In his catastrophic plan/ Designed and directed by/ His red right hand.
Our fear of, and attraction to, this idea is complex, and part of the attraction is almost certainly that if we are part of a grand plan that we cannot comprehend or change, then we are absolved from responsibility for our actions to some degree. We are (helplessly) caught in a web of events that is much larger than ourselves, and we merely play a part in a play that we did not write. That is almost liberating in some sense, and at the same time it is deeply incapacitating - our free will is obliterated under the complexity of the Plan - but the curious thing is that it creates meaning for us. We suddenly are part of a larger story that provides a narrative structure to the random events that we seem to be caught in.
The beauty and evil of the Plan reflects a deeper need in us for not just a story, but for the meaning that the story reveals. We want there to be - we say - some kind of meaning to our lives, a larger story than our own. This need is sometimes denounced as a religious impulse, but I suspect that it is the other way around: the religious impulse was born from this need of meaning - it precedes religion and persists after religion as well.
The question of the meaning of life is one of the so-called eternal questions, and often dismissed as impossible to answer. There are some questions that simply make no sense, we say, or that are too big for us to address them in the right way. It is a question that is lost in a multitude of different interpretations and images.
Take a simple example: do we find or create the meaning of life? Is it uncovered, like when you remove a cloth covering a painting or is it constructed like a puzzle? Is it filling a bucket with finds from a walk at the beach or is it performing a musical piece well with others? The wealth of possible metaphors makes the question not only daunting, but also very hard to discuss with others: if we do not think in the same metaphors we will automatically misunderstand each-other. Some may even feel that the search for meaning in itself is not what should define us, but the search for happiness or pleasure. But, then, what is more pleasurable than the sense of being a part of something meaningful that is larger than ourselves?
So, we end up dismissing the question as hopeless or too large for us to grapple with. We ridicule it and laugh at the notion that there could even be such a thing as the meaning of life. We side with the existentialists in dismissing life as absurd, inherently without meaning, and that our challenge is to live life anyway, in defiance of our innate need for meaning. We must think ourselves, as Camus thought Sisyphus, as happy because we have not decided to end our lives. The act of living is a conscious decision that affirms our belief in life itself as worthwhile, meaningful, and beyond that we can never find firm ground to stand on.
Or, we side with Nietzsche and declare that the meaning that was provided for us by God now needs to be woven by a new version of ourselves, a new superhuman able to anchor and revalue all values and to create her own meaning. It sounds grand, but is largely the path that we have chosen - we have made the idea of meaning individual, suggesting that everyone needs to make their own meaning when it comes to living - or reject the idea of there being a meaning to life at all.
Yet, the need is there. The allure of the Plan. The sense of the Greater Story.
We see it in our weakness for conspiracy theories. These narratives are essentially mental viruses that infuse all of our observations with meaning - they make not just our own lives meaningful, but they also create layers of meaning within everything that we see. And the larger Plan uncovered is always evil, we are always just microscopic cogs in it, but we can fight back.
Conspiracy theories use our own narrative intelligence against us, just like any other virus will use our own biology against us, and hijacks our need for comprehensive narratives that allow for a maximum of predictive accuracy when understanding the world.
We predict the world not statement by statement, but in narratives: we predict the next chapter in a book, not the next number in a series, and that is an enormous strength that has evolved in us over millennia (we sometimes mistake this for bias). It allows us to navigate in a world that is highly complex and often contains significant elements of randomness.
But that same strength can be coopted by the conspiracy theory - when it suggests interpretative patterns that explain everything in a much too compact way. We start predicting the next chapter of the book not based on the book, but based on something beyond the book - some sinister intention behind all books that seems to have a deeper explanatory value and also predicts all books.
A conspiracy theory is a virus that creates a cognitive economy for us, and allows us to explain all with a minimum of effort. It tilts the balance evolution has chosen for maximum explanatory power on a minimum of cognitive work across the line of survivability - and it does so by appealing to an instinct that is more basic than the instinct for meaning: the need for belonging.
The illusion of the individual sometimes obscures that we are, primarily, elements of something larger. Not in the collectivist sense that the group is more important than the individual, but in a much simpler sense: individuals are aspects of a larger community. What you believe to be true and what you think you want is shared by a network of others that make you into you - and the same holds for them. That does not make you less important than the group, but the you we speak of is much more complex - strewn in the eyes of the Others - and constantly constructed over and over again.
Before we seek meaning, then, we seek to belong. Meaning, in many ways, is a mechanism that allows us to belong as we grow up and become more and more independent. Language evolved to create group cohesion based on shared meaning, and not to uncover any more objective truths about the world.
Language evolved, then, to seek belonging through meaning over truth.
When we realise this we realise that the key political challenge is not to speak truth, but to create meaning that underpins belonging. That is - we should be less worried about misinformation than about mismeaning - the reason we believe conspiracy theories or discard science is not that we have evaluated our options rationally, but rather that we found less meaning in science than we did in conspiracy theory.
This is on purpose. Science has shed meaning for truth as an ideological choice. Questions of meaning have been banished from the field of science as unscientific, and even dismissed as uninteresting - in what amounts to a weirdly unscientific attitude given what we know about evolution and humankind and the way we understand the world.
We can rephrase that: what is, or should be, the objective of science? If we believe that it is to understand the world, we need to unpack what it means to understand anything - and then to adjust our thinking about science to fit into that larger understanding. And we understanding things in an evolutionary way - through meaning to truth. By jettisoning meaning, science sets itself up for first a grand victory: the production of an objective knowledge that describes the universe, and then for an equally disastrous defeat as no-one sees any meaning in that knowledge.
We buy the ideological purity of science at the cost of its meaning for us as a civilisation. And the weird thing is that even very successful scientists clearly seek truth through meaning - the idea of mathematics being the language God used to write the universe, the sense of something greater, the carefully hidden and often disparaged existential beliefs of great scientists suggest that they have sought truth through a carefully calibrated meaning. If attempts have been made to “respect” meaning over truth they have been constructed around the idea that we are dealing with two distinct domains and that the one cannot say anything about the other - and this is even worse: pretending that we can compartmentalise human experience in this way ignores the way we have become who we are through evolution’s careful work.
The nihilism of science suddenly looks deeply unscientific - and the elimination of meaning looks abstract at best, anti-humanistic at worst.
Grand narratives and the creation of enemies
We need the grand narratives, and they are slowly making their way back to us - but they are being coopted by authoritarian powers and populists. The grand narrative of the revenge for historic injustices is dominating in authoritarian polities, creating a sense of meaning for the younger generations that are turning them even more conservative and nationalistic. The West, at the same time, is stuck in thinking that these same younger generations will want freedom and so gradually dismantle the authoritarian states - but offer no grand narrative in return.
Freedom is not a narrative, anymore.
Most welfare states have deflated from projects into systems, and the political narratives have become more and more nostalgic. The past is a place where the system worked better, and we need to return to that past to put things right. We need to make the world better /again/. Increasingly, meaning is confused with identity and this drives an acute focus on differences between ourselves and others - again focused on past injustices. Some of these injustices are monstrous, and rightly condemned, but they offer no way to organise the future, no grand inclusive narrative that can create a shared meaning across identities.
Identity does create a very strong sense of belonging, however, and offers some meaning based on who you are, but remain silent on the longer future we need to build.
Meaning created on the basis of identity is particularly powerful because it allows us to create enemies. Evolution has left us with many gifts, but it has also left us with a few curses. One of the key curses is that we find meaning in opposition to an enemy.
This is why we find both beauty and horror in the large fictional plans unfolding in movies and art. The meaning of the Fellowship of the Ring is constructed around Sauron’s dark plans. The Rebellion exists in opposition to the Empire.
Meaning thrives between good and evil.
A grand narrative, then, requires the careful construction of a great enemy. The opposition to that enemy is deeply meaningful and creates a deeper commitment to our own group.
The design of an enemy is not simple. It is easy to end up with too many enemies - everyone is against you - and that will merely create a sense of paranoia rather than constructive social meaning. It is also easy to create an enemy that cannot be beaten and end up with a vague conflict that carries no meaning at all.
Once the enemy has been constructed, there is a need to reveal their plans. Their plans do not need to be detailed, but they need to be articulated in some way.
For the Cold War, George F Kennan’s memo on why it was important to contain the Soviet Union (written in 1946) did exactly that. It had five distinct sections: the first outlined the post-war Soviet outlook, the second part the background of that outlook, the third the projection of that outlook in practical policy on an official level and the fourth on an unofficial level, and the fifth part what all this meant for US policy.
Kennan’s memo is staggeringly effective at creating an enemy by, in other words, speaking to what the world looks like to the enemy (worldview), who the enemy really is (character), what they say they will do about it and what they are doing behind the scenes (actions visible and invisible) - and then what it means to us (the need for us to act).
Whoever is constructing an enemy should read Kennan’s long telegram carefully - and it is sobering to realise how much of the enemy he constructed is still there in Russia’s own narrative. The idea of “encirclement” of the Soviet Union still lives on in Putin’s speeches and rhetoric.
Now, when we say create or construct an enemy that is not to say that the Soviet Union was not opposed to the US. They were, absolutely. What Kennan did was to translate that general conflict into a narrative conflict, allowing it to carry deeper meaning and inspire action. We may know that someone is not aligned with us, but it is not until we have put their actions into a story that we can engage with that tension.
An enemy, then, is a conflict in its narrative shape - and an enemy’s plan is the story that unfolds if we do nothing and articulating both is key to creating meaning for us in opposition to that enemy and their plans.
There is no doubt that our need for enemies to create meaning is deeply problematic. It would be fantastic if we could create enemies out of abstract risks as well as out of human conflicts, but we seem unable to do so. Our attitude to climate change and increasing social inequality suggest that we have not found good ways to make an enemy out of an abstract risk.
Sure, we can declare war on drugs or poverty, and speak of an extinction rebellion, and for some this inspires meaningful action - but the vast majority of our societies are less engaged in these issues than in a story with a clear-cut enemy. The shift in opinion when there is an enemy on the stage is radical, but abstract risk at best creates a vague anxiety.
One reason for this is probably that abstract risks lack agency, and so even when it comes to climate change, the need for enemies tends to end up with companies and their executives being the enemy. (Size plays a role here: large companies, organisations, governments or even entire nationalities are easier to reshape into enemies, since their actions have potentially large repercussions. The suspicion of the what is large and complex, is a recognition of what a formidable enemy such powerful organisations would make and how hard it is to understand the deeper agency that is driving them. Fear of big companies is exacerbated by a lack of clearly perceived motive).
This need for agency in our enemy is probably also a part of our evolutionary curse — natural phenomena could only be enemies if we associated them with malicious spirits.
The devil is, then, our most successful enemy made out of abstract risks - but the abstract risks inherent in our own character. In many ways the devil is the enemy within ourselves - the voice that tempts us is our own.
And that helps us fight - since an enemy with well-laid plans is a source of deep meaning on which we can start crafting our own narrative.
So what?
It is easy to dismiss the question of meaning in analysing social trends and political events, but in doing so we are missing out on some of the key evolutionary components in our behaviour and that makes our diagnosis of the world weaker.
We need to belong and create meaning together to do so. The way we create that meaning matters deeply to what happens in society. By studying mechanisms of meaning in our societies we can understand them far more in detail than we do today.
The key components in such an analysis are the groups, the narratives and the enemies at hand. If we want to predict the future of our society we can use these three building blocks to understand plausible scenarios. Even just thinking through what it means for these groups to be smaller - pulverised - and for the enemies to be many, versus what it means to have larger groups with shared narratives and fewer enemies, is instructive.
On the basis of this we can outline a few hypotheses:
First, we should expect to see attempts from the parties in geopolitical competition to carefully craft enemies out of that conflict. The side with the clearest articulation of the enemy as enemy is likely to have a narrative advantage and create more meaning for its citizens. Creating an enemy out of geopolitical conflict may be a key factor in winning that conflict.
Second, we should expect meaning to be a key factor in younger generations choices as the world becomes more complex, and the offerings of meaning to shift and change over the coming years as new narratives order the world to create meaning. We may even see an emergence of a new generation of religious believers.1
Third, while extreme conspiracy theories may not be growing, the conspiratorial way of thinking, that seems maximum explanatory value for minimum cognitive effort, is likely to become more common in the public mind, reinforced by the speed and pace of information consumption. There is simply less time for understanding, so we will seek a better “deal” for our cognitive efforts.2
Fourth, our efforts to sponsor rationality and objectivity are largely tone deaf to the fact that meaning comes before truth, and that we need our truths to be meaningful. This in turn means that we may well see less trust in science, or where we see high levels of trust in science, in fact see less trust in scientific results - as the trust in the institution and its work is decoupled. Trust in science is likely to be different across different groups, depending on the meaning they ascribe to the scientific project.3
All in all, meaning is a key factor to understanding society and we ignore it in our work as public policy professionals or futurists at our peril. Predictions about society should be deeply narrative, and as such maybe even (to provoke) rely more on meaning than truth, more on enemies than facts. And that is because of how we have evolved - a deeply scientific insight into who we are.
As always thanks for reading,
Nicklas
This should not be exaggerated - but there are now signs that indicate that religious practices may be more common with the young than the old even as institutional faith declines. See eg. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58681075
Pure conspiracy theories are not exploding, at all. See eg. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270429
The results vary here — and some increases were seen in the Covid pandemic - but the trend for political polarisation in the US, at least, seems clear. https://www.pewresearch.org/topic/science/trust-in-science/