My narrative is everything

It is also impervious to reason.

Several months ago, in October 2023, the conflict erupted between Israel and Gaza when Hamas entered Israeli territory, killing over 1300 people and kidnapping others as hostages. Some of the hostages were young children.

In a number of major cities around the world posters emerged of the missing children. These were positioned in prominent places by those sympathetic to the Israeli families involved.

The distinctive posters were designed in the style of missing children’s adverts common in many countries. They consisted of an image of the kidnapped child and basic details like their name and age.

Soon demonstrations were staged in many cities in Western countries, most pro-Palestine. Videos quickly emerged online of attendees at the demonstrations removing the posters of the missing children. Some were mild confrontations, with the video uploaders questioning their actions.

Some seemed outraged at the existence of posters in London.

When challenged many were angry. Not at being caught but at the existence of the posters.

At first glance this seems bizarre. The posters were inoffensive. Often just a handful pasted on a wall. In many cases people went out of their way to find and then remove them.

What explains this behaviour? Why would anyone deface or remove posters highlighting the plight of kidnapped children?

Narratives made visible

The posters were part of an emerging narrative. Hamas had kidnapped Israeli citizens and this shockingly included children and babies.

This created a clash with another narrative many people held in their heads. An oppressor-victim model, where Israel was the wealthy, successful oppressor of the poorer, less advanced Palestinian area of Gaza.

Images of innocent children are a challenge to this narrative. Palestinians are oppressed; that means Israeli’s are the oppressors. Pictures of missing infants bursts the bubble. Are the kids oppressing the Palestinians too?

Oppressor-victim narratives only really work when zoomed out, when detail is avoided. They rarely bear much scrutiny.

The kidnapped children introduce reality and nuance, as well as humanity. Regardless of who did what to whom, images of young children are jarring in a war context. They don’t fit well into simplified models of the world, a neat dichotomy between good and evil.

Reality can be uncomfortable. Narratives are fantasy, a thing in our heads to make sense of the world. They work best as a reference tool, to check against real-world events, but are not themselves detailed or accurate representations of the world.

Narratives can help create a framework to understand the world but are more robust if we are exposed to many narratives. We are then forced to construct our own framework that makes sense, an active process that attempts to accommodate real-world information to deepen our mental models of how everything works.

If we just download a narrative verbatim from an external source a weaker framework is created, someone else’s view of life. This then must be protected from reality. It must be defended and this can lead to irrational behaviour.

One such example is people thousands of miles from a war zone being angry when reminded some of the victims of the war do not fit neatly into aggressive oppressor versus innocent victim categories.

Lots of narratives and mental models are floating around

It has become apparent since the Covid era people are downloading narratives uncritically. Ukraine was quickly adopted as the Current Thing by many. Ukrainian flags appeared on social media profiles within days of its adoption by the media.

As the Israel-Gaza conflict erupted people quickly took sides even before anyone really knew details. Some attended pro-Palestinian rallies long before Israel mounted any response despite dead and kidnapped Israelis dominating the news.

It is worth reminding ourselves these are wars, not sporting tournaments or games. Yet they may as well be given the speed some adopt team colours or casually cheer on one side or the other.

None of this is normal. These beliefs do not emerge naturally. They lack nuance or depth. They are fictions created using public relations techniques. Most are little more than slogans. And they are everywhere.

Downloaded models, narratives and the opinions they generate are brittle. They cannot withstand scrutiny or even mild challenges.

When brittle mental models meet reality they disintegrate. A more mature approach is to reevaluate our model, then change it taking into account new information thereby adapting our mental frameworks to better reflect reality.

If this happens we see effective defence of positions. Opposing views strengthen our understanding of issues even when they don’t convince.

If avoided an incorrect model can become strengthened. Do it often enough it becomes hardened and ossified, becoming more resistant to reality because it has to so it can survive.

Do this often enough and you have a distorted perception of events that increasingly becomes your world as you entrench yourself further to defend it.

Examples abound. Children being surgically mutilated is acceptable. Government controlling our movement or diet is necessary to save the planet. Special quotas that discriminate against successful groups are required for fairness.

All this is patently false. But the focus is on maintaining a psychological landscape out of touch with reality. This is a form of mental enfeeblement. And it is increasingly visible in society.

A lack of critical thinking is fatal for society

There are a growing number of videos online of people challenging activists in a polite manner, asking basic questions about their views on the subjects they are protesting. It is striking how many are unable to articulate their position when questioned.

It is disturbing to watch adults go to the trouble of making signs and travelling to a specific location or event, shout loudly about some issue, then completely fail to explain the main tenets of their own protest when asked to do so. We witnessed something similar with the poster removers, many of whom seemed unable to explain their actions when politely challenged.

Many blame propaganda for this, and it no doubt plays a part. But the culprit is lack of critical thinking. The episodes caught on camera are just illustrations of the phenomenon.

It is doubtful these are particularly bad people. The reaction is to protect the framework, the comfortable narrative. Although some do look embarrassed when caught, perhaps aware they may be transgressing some social line. This group are likely just conformists harvesting social approval.

We also blame elites and leading institutions for these developments. Their tentacles are everywhere and they control all the narratives. This is of course present in some cases.

But a surprising amount of the drive is a reaction to discomfort when something doesn’t fit. This happens when poorly understood narrative frameworks that infer social approval are challenged by real life. The reaction is emotional and swift.

All this because of an inability or unwillingness to attempt critical analysis. It is then amplified when someone identifies with a cause based on these mental frameworks. Then the overreactions are driven by a sense of being attacked or wounded. The mental model is threatened and so are they.

This is likely what we are witnessing in these videos. Someone’s precious cause doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

With the Israeli children it is noteworthy the posters contain no Israeli flags or Jewish symbols. They look like missing children posters. Such is the hypersensitivity we are dealing with.

Are we surprised? We are aware of many things like this, although most are less visible. The poster destroyers are just a rare glimpse into what we often dismiss as snowflakery.

In a way the angry activists are the poster children of today. All emotion and no real thinking. Completely manipulated into acting in controlled ways which for them originates inside their own heads, oblivious to anything being implanted.

True non-playing characters acting out their programmed role, all in the drive to attain social capital from their peers. An extreme form of external locus of control in that it represents a total abrogation of critical thinking or any thinking whatsoever. Welcome to today.

Should we be worried? Probably not. The majority are not really like this. Most live in reality and are indifferent to the Current Thing. They hate politics and the conveyer belt of Important Issues we are told really matter.

Some have argued the missing Israeli children’s posters are themselves a manipulation. A way to avoid the realities of a complex situation that has raged for decades, reducing multiple acts of Israeli aggression down to emotive photographs of young children to elicit sympathy and avoid judgment.

They have a point, and this article is not an attempt to take one side or another in the events unfolding in Gaza and Israel. All reasonable people have sympathy for anyone caught up in conflict, especially women and children.

Others point out many Gazan children seem to be dying as we would expect in a conflict unfolding in a modest area packed with millions of people in high-rise blocks. No one is pasting posters of Palestinian kids up in New York.

But we cannot ignore the absurdity of the angry poster removers either. There is no attempt to debate or understand even when politely questioned. There is no nuance, just blind anger.

There is no accommodation for the hitherto accepted norm of keeping women and children out of conflicts altogether. The posters triggered something that circumvented this consideration.

Kidnap as a deliberate strategy, particularly women and children, should be easy to condemn no matter who is doing it. Yet this has become difficult for some.

The issue is not Israeli supporters versus Palestinian supporters, it is the power of mental frameworks and narratives to colour judgment and control behaviour, even to the point of overriding taboos most of us possess.

Maturity is the ability to resist rash judgments and focus on facts. Or to at least put the brakes on when confronted with emotive material. It is the ability to suspend emotional reactions long enough to distinguish right from wrong.

Our instinct is to ridicule the poster defilers, and it is hard to not get angry at times. But these lost boys and girls are the product of a damaged society.

We spend little time reinforcing reality, the only known cure to fictional mental models of the world. And the biased mainstream media does even less to inform anyone. Most news coverage automatically presented the Israeli view so it is difficult for many to be informed. Past actions by both Israeli and Palestinian forces are glossed over.

The Israel-Gaza situation is not new. Its current and past events are complex. Hostility on both sides is baked in. It requires careful study and some knowledge of history to make any sense of it.

Call it free speech if you will, but those who confronted the poster destroyers had limited success in discussing the issue even when calmly asking questions.

This is the defining feature of our era. Uncontrolled emotion rules, it trumps common sense and even decency. No one wins with this mentality. It defiles us all.

The missing Israeli children, deliberately kidnapped, and their dismissal by some is the true reflection of the age we live in.

All this because some have a simplified model of the world they uncritically accepted, primitive enough to superimpose onto any number of future Current Things with ease.

The next Current Thing might position you as the oppressor, in which case it is reasonable to assume they won’t care if your children are abused either.

And that is the real concern here with downloaded models and frameworks that circumvent established methods of analysis. They run the risk of circumventing moral considerations too.

Perhaps this is the real reflection of the age we live in, where morality is just an add-on to whatever fad is in vogue. And for some just an inconvenient hurdle to overcome in the search for social approval, popularity and the comfort of belonging to an in-group. If so, this is amorality in action which does not bode well for our future.