Political Narratology
How Stories Shape Power and Compliance
Arsen Avetisov

Translator Gregory Attaryan

© Arsen Avetisov, 2026

© Gregory Attaryan, translation, 2026

ISBN 978-5-0069-4613-2

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Political Narratology
How Stories Shape Power and Compliance

Acknowledgements

This book was written thanks to politicians and their ability to turn complex problems into simple stories, their skill in framing necessity as destiny, a mistake as a stage of progress, and the absence of a solution as a sign of responsibility. It was inspired by the realities of politics, rather than by mere theory.

Political actors rarely think of themselves as storytellers and don’t receive the recognition they truly deserve as being such. Yet they are the ones rewriting reality daily, lending weight to some words, casting suspicion on others, and granting a third category the right to remain unspoken. Through their pauses, their explanations, and their omissions, narratives are formed. Narratives in which decisions become permissible, constraints become necessary, power becomes perceived, and submission becomes meaningful. The main empirical material for this work has been the observation of how some stories become entrenched, others are marginalised, and a third category is declared unthinkable.

Foreword

Humans have always lived inside stories but have rarely stopped to ask who is telling them.

We like to think that politics is about numbers, programmes, economic calculations, and balances of power. In truth, politics begins much earlier – the moment someone first utters ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘it has always been this way’, ‘it must be this way’ or ‘there is no alternative’.

A society lives within narratives. Politics lives within myths. And freedom begins where we understand the difference.

This book is a logical continuation of my previous works. In Theory of Narratology, I wrote about narrative as the means by which a person connects disparate events into a meaningful reality. Stories are not reflections of the world, but the forms into which the world is packaged to become programmes for our actions and thinking. I wrote about how our identity is not a set of traits but a coherent story we tell about ourselves.

In Applied Narratology, I showed that these stories can be worked with: rewritten, refined, made conscious. That narrative is not an abstraction but a tool for living. We discussed how a person either constructs their own narrative or unwittingly lives inside someone else’s. And that applied narratology is far from theory; it is a profession for our times.

In the book The French Narrative, the focus shifted from the individual to culture, to a way of life. I showed how a society can maintain a delicate equilibrium between freedom and community, style and resistance, pleasure and responsibility, how narratives can sustain life and give it flavour and meaning.

This book takes the next step. It is about the moment when someone else’s story becomes mandatory. It is about what happens when a narrative ceases to be personal or cultural and becomes political. When a story begins to speak in the name of millions. When fear, hope, and the image of the future become instruments of power.

Political narratology is not the science of manipulation or the nature of dictatorships. It is the science of understanding why people submit, why they take to the streets, why they believe, why they hate, and why they sometimes give their lives for someone else’s words.

This book was not written to teach how to manage the masses or seize their consciousness. It was written to learn how not to lose oneself when a story becomes more persuasive than facts.

However, this book is not about intentions. It is about consequences. It presents politics as a space of interpretations: stories about the past, present, and future that we are invited to believe, stories in which people find themselves cast as characters before they have a chance to question their role in the plot.

This book does not aim to judge specific figures or expose motives. Its focus is on narratives, specifically those in which power ceases to feel like power and becomes perceived as reality. In this sense, the politics explored here serves not as a target for critique but as a source of knowledge.

If this book makes anyone uncomfortable, it means it is doing its job.

Introduction
Where Stories Become Power

Politics is a struggle for the right to explain what is happening.

Who gets to call a crisis a crisis, and who calls it a necessary stage? Who says ‘enemy’, and who says ‘threat’? Who promises a future, and who promises stability instead? Who turns fear into mobilisation and doubt into betrayal?

Facts exist in politics. Facts never live by themselves. A fact without a story is mute. A story without facts is dangerous. But it is stories that win.

A person cannot live in a bare set of data. A person needs meaning even if that meaning is destructive.

States do not collapse when they run out of resources but rather when the narrative that explains why these resources have any meaning in the first place stops working. Revolutions do not start with slogans and barricades but with the feeling that the official version of reality no longer describes lived experience. Power is held by force and laws, but first and foremost – by the right to the plot: the right to define what was, what is, and what must be.

This book on political narratology is an attempt to describe politics not as a set of institutions, procedures, and decisions, but as a space of competing stories. Stories about the past that legitimise the present. Stories about the future that justify today’s sacrifices. Stories about ‘us’ and ‘them’, about heroes and traitors, about salvation and catastrophe.

Modern political analysis often assumes that politics is a struggle of interests, resources, and rational strategies. In this logic, narratives are considered secondary: decoration, propaganda, or manipulation layered over the ‘real’ material foundation.

However, recent decades show the opposite. Facts have ceased to be self-sufficient. Data does not convince without interpretation. Rational arguments do not work unless they are embedded within a broader story that gives them meaning.

Political reality increasingly exists as a lived plot. People act because this plot fits their worldview, confirms a collective identity, and explains their anxiety and uncertainty.

This is precisely where the need for political narratology arises.

The Collective ‘We’ as Illusion and as Force

The strongest political character is not a leader or a party. It is the collective we. It never exists on its own. It is created through language, rituals, symbols, repetition. The collective ’we’ is always imagined, but it acts in very real ways.

In the name of we, people agree to things they would never agree to. In the name of ‘we’, violence, patience, silence, and sacrifices are justified. In the name of ‘we’, the ‘I’ disappears.

Political narratology begins with the recognition of a simple and unpleasant fact: the stronger the story, the less room there is for the individual.

Why This Book is More Dangerous Than the Previous Ones

The theory of narratology is relatively safe. It explains mechanisms. Applied narratology is riskier. It gives you tools.

Political narratology is dangerous by definition. Because it deals with the consciousness of the masses. And where there are masses, the temptation to control them always appears.

This book does not teach manipulative skills. But it shows how manipulation works. Knowledge is almost always ambiguous: you can use it to defend yourself, and you can abuse it.

This Book is Not About ‘Other Regimes’

The most convenient misconception is to think that political narratives exist ‘somewhere else’. In other countries. In dictatorships. In propaganda. In reality, they exist wherever there is fear of being rejected, a desire to belong, fatigue from uncertainty, and a thirst for simple answers to complex problems.

Democracy differs from authoritarianism not by the absence of narratives, but by the number of competing stories and the ability to challenge them.

When a story ceases to be a subject of discussion, it becomes an instrument of power.

The Refusal to Think as a Form of Submission

Modern people often say, ‘I am apolitical.’ It sounds like freedom. In practice, it is a form of capitulation.

Politics does not disappear when we stop thinking about it. It simply starts happening without us.

Refusing to understand is not neutrality. It is handing over the right of interpretation to others.

Why I Wrote This Book

I did not write it to expose, and certainly not to lecture. I wrote it because I see that we live in an era where stories spread faster than awareness, where emotions outpace thinking, where complexity is displaced by convenient simplicity.

The book arose from a feeling that people are increasingly living inside stories they did not choose, did not realise, and did not have time to verify. That their actions, fears, hopes, and even language are increasingly pre-prepared by someone else, for some other purpose, according to a logic that does not require consent, only participation.

Political narratology is an attempt to restore a person’s ability to see the form of a story, not just its content. This book does not offer another universal theory or instruction manual for power. It provides an optic, a way of seeing political reality as a narrative construct that is created, maintained, destroyed, and reassembled anew.

The Narratives Will Remain

Political systems crumble, leaders leave or are re-elected, borders change. But stories remain. They pass from era to era, changing words and faces but preserving their structure.

The question is not whether we can live without narratives. It is already obvious that we cannot.

The question is different: do we realise the story we are living inside, or is that story living through us?

The Aims of This Book

This book has several objectives:

1. To show that narrative is not a by-product of politics but its structural foundation.

2. To describe the architecture of resilient political narratives.

3. To understand how narratives survive crises and why they collapse.

4. To analyse the emergence of counter-narratives and their fate.

5. To consider how the digital environment is changing the production and competition of political stories.

How to Read This Book

This book does not require specialised training in any single discipline and does not offer the reader ready-made answers. It gives a way to look and to see. And if, after reading it, political events begin to be perceived not as a chaotic stream of news but as elements of competing stories, the book’s purpose will have been achieved.

Who This Book is For

This book is addressed to those working at the intersection of disciplines: political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, media researchers, cultural scholars, as well as anyone who feels that the familiar language for describing politics is no longer adequate for what is happening.

Epigraphs

The epigraphs have been carefully chosen to precisely anchor a new stage of the argument. Those marked as [paraphrased] are concise distillations of core ideas from the authors’ works rather than verbatim quotations.

Part I: The Foundations of Political Narratology

Introduction

All domination seeks to awaken and cultivate belief in its legitimacy.

Max Weber [paraphrased]

For a long time, humanity has been preoccupied with the same question: how can you unite and manage as many people as possible, make them loyal and engaged in achieving a common goal without resorting to significant resources or overt coercion?

One reason this is even possible is simple: a person rarely acts from a place of ‘pure rationality’. They act from interpretation.

In 2015, while studying how psychological and social factors influence behaviour, the World Bank commissioned the World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. Among other things, it identified a trio of factors that systematically influence people’s decisions.

Firstly, people often think automatically: the mind chooses not from scratch but from already available schemas and stories. Secondly, people think socially: identity, group norms, expectations, and the fear of exclusion are more influential than is commonly acknowledged. And thirdly, people use mental models: frameworks through which they ‘see’ the world and themselves in it. In other words, a narrative about the world becomes a kind of frame that colours the picture of every belief and opinion.

At the same time, a person rarely lives within a single, solitary narrative. Usually, they hold onto a system of interconnected stories, striving to preserve the integrity of their worldview and their own identity. This is directly linked to another important pattern extensively researched by Paul Slovic: large-scale representations of suffering often do not mobilise but paralyse. A big number can evoke not compassion but an internal shutdown – because the psyche struggles to withstand an abstract volume of pain.

The phrase attributed to Mother Teresa, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will,’ accurately captures this unsettling mechanism: it is easier for a person to respond to the fate of ‘the one’ than to the fate of ‘the many’. This is why communications that show a single figure are often more powerful than those that show statistics.

And here we arrive at politics. Politics is sustained not only by resources and institutions of power. It is sustained by emotionally effective stories that turn numbers into metaphors and chaos into a coherent worldview. A story can unite people who would otherwise remain fragmented, and it can also turn a disagreement into a war of identities. Most interestingly, the emotional impact on initiating decisions and actions becomes more important than conscious influence.

In his book Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action, Frederick Mayer describes numerous cases in which a story turned into the decisive element in collective action. If storytelling is the thread that binds groups together, then finding ways to work with this ‘technology’ becomes the first step towards uniting those in disagreement.

Today, the world is experiencing a crisis of disunity. Polarisation is growing, conflicts are intensifying, and shared frameworks of meaning are disintegrating. Millions are fleeing war, persecution, and climate threats, while other millions continue to act out old dramas of mutual blame. And as paradoxical as it may sound, without a common political narrative, the very idea of a shared goal – even the goal of civilisation’s survival – becomes difficult to imagine.

A common narrative does not guarantee harmony. But without it, a society either disintegrates or is held together only by coercion.

Chapter 1. What Is A Political Narrative

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell

Whoever controls the interpretation doesn’t need to control the facts.

Modern formula of power

Politics Does Not Begin With Decisions

We are accustomed to thinking of politics as the sphere of decisions: passing a law, implementing a reform, changing a tax, declaring war, signing a treaty. It seems that politics is the realm of actions, not words. But this is an illusion.

No political action occurs in a vacuum. It is always preceded by a story that makes this action possible, permissible, necessary, or inevitable.

Before a law can be passed, it must be explained.

Before a war can be started, it must be justified.

Before freedoms can be restricted, a threat must be named.

Before a sacrifice can be demanded, a story must be told in which that sacrifice appears meaningful.

Politics does not begin with a decision. It begins with an interpretation. And it is this interpretation that we call a political narrative.

What We Call a Narrative and What It Is Not

In everyday speech, the word ‘narrative’ is often used carelessly. It is used to describe ideology, propaganda, slogans, the official version of events, ‘what the authorities say’. But a narrative is not all of these things. And not only these.

A political narrative is not a programme of action. A programme answers the question ‘What are we going to do?’ A narrative answers the question ‘What is even happening, and who are we in all this?’

A political narrative is not an ideology. Ideology is a system of ideas. A narrative is the story that these concepts are incorporated into to give them life.

A political narrative is not a slogan. A slogan is a compressed form. A narrative is the structure of meaning in which the slogan starts to work.

You can have an ideology without a narrative, and it will remain dead.

You can have a programme without a narrative, and it will not be accepted.

You can have facts without a narrative, and they will not be heard.

A political narrative is the frame within which facts gain significance, emotions find direction, and actions receive justification.

Story as a Form of Reality

It is important to understand one thing that usually slips by. A narrative is not a decoration of reality. It is the form in which reality becomes lived.

A person cannot live in a chaos of events. They need sequences, causes, culprits, goals, and a sense of what is happening. A political narrative serves this function precisely: it connects disparate events into a coherent picture of the world, with a beginning, a threat, a hero, a path, and a promise.

This is why, in moments of crisis, the narrative becomes more important than decisions. When the world is cracking and ready to split apart, a person asks not ‘What should we do?’ first, but ‘What does all this mean?’

Why Is Politics Always Based on Stories?

Can we imagine politics without stories? In theory, yes. In practice, no. Even the most ‘technocratic’ forms of governance rely on stories: about progress, stability, security, rationality, necessity.

When the authorities say, ‘That’s how the market works’, ‘Those are the laws of economics’, or ‘The circumstances demand it’, they are telling a story in which responsibility dissolves into impersonal necessity.

When the opposition say, ‘We were deceived’, ‘They stole our future’, and ‘We are reclaiming the country’, they are also building a story with a victim, a culprit, and a promise of restoration.

Politics cannot help but narrate, because power needs justification, submission needs an explanation, and sacrifices need meaning.

Narrative as a Competition of Interpretations

It is important to immediately abandon the naive notion that there exists one true political narrative. In reality, politics is always a competition of stories.

The same event can be described as a crisis or an opportunity, a defeat or a regrouping, betrayal or necessity, repression or protection, failure or the beginning of a journey.

The facts remain the same. The narrative they are a part of is what shifts. The winner is not the side with ‘more truth’, but the one whose story is more emotionally convincing, simpler, more repeatable, who aligns with the audience’s expectations and reduces anxiety or channels it.

Why Is Narrative Stronger Than Argument?

A rational argument requires effort. A story requires engagement.

An argument appeals to logic. A narrative appeals to identity.

An argument can be refuted. A narrative must first be destroyed. And that is always a very painful process.

When a person accepts a political narrative, they are not accepting a position but a role: citizen, victim, fighter, defender, heir, saviour.

To argue with an argument is normal. To argue with the story you live inside is to risk your very identity.

This is precisely why facts so often lose out to stories. Not because people are foolish, but because the price of abandoning the story of one’s identity is too high.

Narrative as Invisible Power

The strongest form of power is the one that is not felt as power. A political narrative works exactly like this. It dictates which questions are considered reasonable, determines what can be discussed and what seems ‘ridiculous’, forms the boundaries of permissible doubt, and preemptively labels criticism as dangerous or irresponsible.

When a narrative is stable, power can hardly intervene. People themselves explain what is happening, justify limitations, reproduce the language, and punish deviations.

At this moment, politics ceases to be external. It becomes internal.

Why Is Understanding Political Narrative Necessary?

To study political narratives is not to become a cynic. It is to reclaim the ability to see the form. A person who cannot distinguish a story from reality becomes its function.

A person who sees the narrative gets a chance not to dissolve into the collective ‘we’, to maintain distance, to preserve an inner voice, and to recognise moments of manipulation.

Political narratology does not begin with exposing others, but with observing the story you yourself are in.

We will now proceed from this point on by defining the political narrative.

Chapter 2. Narrative Is Neither Programme Nor Ideology

History has no plot; it is guided by no single logic.

Isaiah Berlin [paraphrased]

The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes

When people talk about politics, they almost always confuse three distinct levels: narrative, ideology, and programme. This confusion may seem harmless, but it is precisely what makes a person vulnerable.

A programme answers the question ‘What do we do?’ An ideology answers the question ‘Why do we do it?’ A narrative answers the question ‘Who are we and what is happening to us?’ This is why political debates so often appear meaningless: people are arguing on different levels without realising it.

One person speaks the language of numbers. Another speaks the language of values. A third speaks the language of stories. And it is almost always the third who wins.

Programme: A Soulless List of Actions

A political programme is a set of promises and measures: lower taxes, increase benefits, reform the system, improve metrics, optimise processes.

It answers the question: ‘What are we going to do?’ It can be logical, well-considered, economically sound, even beneficial. But a programme, on its own, never mobilises people.

Because a programme does not answer the essential human questions: Who are we? Why is this happening to us? What does this mean for me personally? Which side am I on?

A programme is a technical document. A human being is not a technical entity.

Ideology: A System of Ideas Without a Body

Ideology is the next level. It is a set of values and principles, notions of right and wrong, and a model of a desirable society. Ideology answers the question: ‘What do we believe in?’ But here, too, there is a limit. Ideology is abstract. It requires translation into the language of life.

People are rarely prepared to die for a formula, to endure hardship for an abstraction, or to make sacrifices for a schematic. Ideology only begins to work when it is embedded within a story that has a past, a present, an enemy, a goal, and a path. Without a narrative, an ideology remains a book on a shelf. With a narrative, it becomes a destiny.

Narrative: The World We Live Inside

A narrative is neither a set of ideas nor a plan of action. A narrative is a picture of the world in which the programme seems necessary, the ideology appears natural, sacrifices are justified, and doubts are dangerous.

It answers not the question ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ but a deeper one: ‘What is actually happening, and what is my place in it?’

A narrative does not prove. It explains. It does not convince logically. It makes reality recognisable.

Why Is a Slogan Not a Narrative?

It often seems that a narrative is just a catchy slogan. This is a mistake. A slogan is a compressed fragment of a narrative, not the narrative itself. It only works because a story already exists, roles are already defined, and the context is already understood.

Without its narrative, a slogan appears hollow, irritating, and untrustworthy. The phrase ‘we will reclaim the country’ means nothing unless it has already been explained who took it, when, why, and who exactly it must be reclaimed for.

Why Do People Think They Believe in Ideas?

Most people sincerely believe they support a particular political position because of its ideas. In reality, more often than not, they are supporting a story in which they appear to be good people, their fears are explained, their anger is legitimised, and their hope is given form. The ideas come later, as justification.

A person first feels and then explains to themselves why it is rational. The narrative makes this explanation possible.

How Does a Narrative Make Ideology Seem ‘Natural’?

The most dangerous form of ideology is the one that is not called ideology. When values are presented not as a choice, but as common sense, as self-evident, as the only possible view.

This is exactly how a narrative works. It does not say: ‘Here is our ideology.’ It says: ‘This is simply how the world works.’ A narrative does not need to be fully articulated. More often, it exists as a background, as an implicit structure of meaning within which individual events become understandable and significant.

This is why a narrative is invisible, difficult to challenge, and emotionally protected.

Arguing with an ideology is a debate about values. Arguing with a narrative is a debate with the very reality a person lives in.

Why Do Programmes Change, but Narratives Do Not?

Political history is full of sharp reversals: broken promises, changes of course, contradictory and unexpected decisions. Yet a narrative can endure for decades.

This is because a programme is a tool, an ideology is a language, but a narrative is an identity.

A government can change its measures, but if it preserves the story, people continue to believe. When the narrative collapses, no programme can save it.

The Dangerous Illusion of Rational Choice

Modern people like to think of themselves as rational voters. They read figures, analyses, and comparisons. But at the decisive moment, they do not vote for a programme, or even for an ideology. They vote for a story in which it is clear to them who they are and what they stand for.

In a well-known case study set during a recessionary period, companies like those in the Fortune 500 tried to convince their employees and potential customers that they sincerely cared for their well-being, even in hard times. Contrary to traditional business practice, amid austerity elsewhere, these companies were presented as avoiding layoffs. This is considered a wise strategy; when the economy recovers, such companies are better positioned to accelerate growth and capture market share.

The only problem with this strategy was that most employees did not believe their claims. Too many people had been laid off too many times at other companies to think the same wasn’t inevitable at theirs.

Researchers Martin and Powers wanted to find out which strategy would best overcome this wave of scepticism. They compared four approaches. One group was told a simple story illustrating the company’s commitment. A second was given statistics supporting the claim. A third received both the statistics and the story. A fourth heard a formal policy statement from a senior executive.

You have likely guessed which method worked best? Most people, when presented with this research, tend to choose the third option, the story backed by data. But they would be wrong.

The simple story was the most persuasive. Though it defies the rational mind, it turns out that even numbers can get in the way of people adopting new behaviours or beliefs. The best stories are those that bypass the brain’s requirement to store facts separately from a person’s opinions.

This is not a weakness. It is human nature. The danger begins when a person refuses to acknowledge it.

Why Is It Important to Distinguish These Levels?

Distinguishing between narrative, ideology, and programme is not an academic exercise. It is a survival skill in the political space.

He who argues with a programme while remaining inside someone else’s narrative will lose. He who criticises an ideology without touching the story will not be heard. And he who accepts a narrative without realising it loses his freedom of interpretation.

Political narratology begins with a simple, yet difficult step: to see the story before you agree or object.

If a narrative is not a programme or an ideology, a new question arises: ‘Where, exactly, does the political struggle unfold?’ Not in parliament, not in laws, and not even in the media. It unfolds in the space of competing stories.

And it is to this space we now turn.

Chapter 3. Politics as a Competition of Stories

The specific political distinction… is that between friend and enemy.

Carl Schmitt

Why Is There Never Just One Story in Politics?

One of the most persistent illusions is the notion of politics as a debate of ideas. It seems as if different forces propose different programmes, and society chooses the most reasonable one. In reality, this is never the case. Ideas rarely clash in politics. Narratives do.

Each side offers not just a position, but an explanation of reality: what is happening, why now, who is to blame, who we are, what has been done to us, or what we must do to reclaim what was lost or protect what is fragile.

Therefore, the political arena is not a marketplace of arguments. Politics is a marketplace of meanings, where the victor is not the most accurate story but the most lived one.

What Does ‘Competition Of Narratives’ Mean?

The competition of narratives is a struggle for the right to name what is happening, to define the frame of meaning.

The questions sound simple, yet they determine everything else: Is this a crisis or an opportunity? A mistake or a betrayal? A threat or an invention? A defeat or a temporary sacrifice? Stability or stagnation? Reform or destruction?

A narrative is what an event becomes in people’s minds.

Why Does Not Truth Guarantee Victory?

In theory, it seems the true story should win. In practice, the story that wins is the one that better performs a psychological function.

A story wins if it is simple, repeatable, emotionally charged, reduces anxiety, or gives it direction. It wins when it offers clear roles, provides a sense of belonging, and justifies past decisions.

Truth can be complex, contradictory, and inconvenient. A story, however, must be livable.

A person chooses what they can live with.

The Field of Narrative Struggle

The political field is always populated by several competing stories, even if one appears to dominate outwardly. Typically, these are stories of different scales and levels: the official narrative of the authorities, the alternative narrative of the opposition, local stories of particular groups, traumatic narratives of the past, hidden or suppressed plots, and accompanying ironic or cynical versions of events.

These do not always exist in direct conflict and often run parallel, hardly touching. But in moments of crisis, they collide head-on.

It is during a crisis that you can see which story people have truly internalised.

How Does One Narrative Displace Another?

Stories rarely destroy each other logically. They displace one another. A story stops working when it no longer explains a person’s experience. When words no longer match lived reality, when promises find no confirmation in fact, and when repetition ceases to soothe.

At that moment, a vacuum arises. And it is instantly filled by another story, often simpler, more radical or cruder, but emotionally precise.

Political upheavals do not begin with actions but with a replacement of explanations.

Why Is the Past a Constant Battleground?

In the competition of stories, the past plays a special role. Not as a set of facts, but as a plot. The past can be told as glory or as trauma, as proof of greatness or as a series of humiliations, as a source of pride or as an unpaid debt.

Control over the past is control over possible futures. Because it is the past that answers the question: who are we, and what are we ‘owed’?

This is why history in politics is never neutral; it is always an instrument of the present.

Why Is Compromise Between Narratives Almost Impossible?

You can negotiate with ideas. You can bargain over programmes. With stories – almost never.

Because a narrative is not an opinion; it is an identity. To accept another’s story is to admit you have been living in a false one. And that is psychologically far too costly.

This is precisely why political conflicts so often appear irrational. People are not arguing about measures, but about the right to reality.

The Triumph of a Narrative as a Phase of Acceptance

When one narrative wins, it ceases to look like a story. It begins to seem like ‘simply reality’. Its language becomes natural, its assumptions self-evident, its questions the only possible ones.

At this moment, alternative stories begin to look naïve, dangerous, radical, inappropriate, and untimely.

This is how true victory works in politics. Not through compromise or universal agreement, but when disagreement becomes marginal.

Why Does the Competition of Stories Never End?

You can suppress one story, displace another, and silence a third. But you cannot destroy the competition itself. Because reality is always more complex than any telling of it.

Any dominant story accumulates tension over time. It simplifies, smoothes over, omits, and then cracks appear. In these cracks, new plots begin to sprout.

Politics is not a path to a final truth. It is the endless rewriting of explanations.

Why Understand This?

Understanding politics as a competition of stories changes your perspective, your algorithm of observation. You stop asking, ‘Who is right?’ and start asking, ‘Which story is working right now – and why?’

You see not only the words but also the roles they offer you. Not only the facts, but the plot they are inserted into.

This does not make a person cynical; it makes them attentive. Because in a world where stories, not ideas, are victorious, the most dangerous position is to believe that stories do not matter.

It is from here that we approach the next question: ‘Why do even the most accurate facts so often lose to a well-told plot?’

Chapter 4. Why Facts Lose to Narratives

Confidence is a feeling, not a sign of accuracy.

Daniel Kahneman

The Illusion of Fact-Based Politics

Modern people like to think of themselves as rational. We believe we make political decisions based on data, numbers, statistics, expertise, and evidence. It seems that if you show the ‘real facts’, the false story will collapse on its own. But this almost never, or truly never, happens.

Facts can be accurate, sources reliable, and arguments flawless. And still, they lose because facts by themselves do not live in the human mind.

A Fact Without a Story is Mute

A fact is an isolated event; a story is a connection. A fact says, ‘This happened.’ A narrative explains: ‘This happened because… and it means…’ Without a story, a fact doesn’t know what it relates to, what follows from it, who it concerns, whether it requires action, or if it is a threat or the norm.

Until a fact is embedded in a story, it remains noise. This is precisely why in politics, it’s not about refuting facts but about rewriting the stories in which those facts live.

How the Brain Chooses Between a Fact and a Story

The human brain did not evolve to analyse mathematical tables or draw geometric figures. It evolved to survive in an uncertain environment. A story provides what facts cannot: causality, sequence, predictability, emotional orientation, a sense of control, and anxiety reduction.

Facts require effort – a story saves energy. A fact forces one to think – a story allows one to feel that they already understand.

Under conditions of overload, fear, and uncertainty, a person almost always chooses coherence over accuracy.

The Emotional Architecture of Meaning

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 function they perform.

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.

Benedict Anderson

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.

When We’ Becomes a Trap

The problem is not belonging as such – a person needs community. Danger arises when ‘we’ do not allow distance, when doubt is declared a betrayal, when exit from the narrative becomes impossible.

At this moment, the collective ‘we’ ceases to be a source of power and turns into a mechanism of compliance.

Why It is Important to See the Construction of We

Understanding how the collective ‘we’ is created does not isolate a person. It restores their choice. One can belong without dissolving, participate without abandoning thought, say ‘we’ while understanding who is forming it and for what purpose.

Political narratology begins precisely here – with discerning the boundary between the story and oneself. Because the most dangerous moment is the moment you cease to understand where the narrative ends and your self begins.

Chapter 6. Who Is Included and Who Is Excluded

Exclusion is the foundation of the political order.

Giorgio Agamben

Every We’ Begins with a Boundary

A collective ‘we’ cannot be infinite. Without boundaries, it loses its form. If it includes everyone, it ceases to mean anything.

Therefore, every political narrative, in creating a ‘we’, simultaneously, if not always explicitly, answers another question: ‘Who does not belong?’

It is this question that makes politics tense, painful, and dangerous because inclusion offers protection and meaning, while exclusion brings vulnerability and silence.

Exclusion as an Invisible Operation

Exclusion is rarely declared outright. It is almost never spoken of openly. It happens through language, implication, tone, emphasis, word choice, repetition, and silence. Some are labelled ‘authentic’, others as ‘questionable’, ‘temporarily misguided’, ‘not fully’, ‘too much’, or ‘not quite’.

This is how a zone of ambiguous status is formed: people who are technically within society but not fully within the story. This zone is the most vulnerable.

Inclusion as a Privilege

Belonging to the ‘we’ is never unconditional. It comes with terms: loyalty, language, gestures, agreement with the story, acceptance of symbols, and observance of rituals. A person can be a formal citizen, yet narratively excluded. They can live within the state, but outside its ‘we’. They can speak but not be heard.

Politics rarely punishes directly. Far more often, it simply ceases to recognise.

The Categories of Others’ as a Construct

In every political narrative, a recurring set of exclusionary figures can be found. Their names change, but the structure remains: the outsider, the traitor, the parasite, the elite, the marginal, the agent, the rootless, the illegitimate. And the ‘crown of them all’: the enemy of the people.

It is crucial to understand: these categories do not describe real people. They describe functions within the story, and their purpose is to reinforce the boundary of the ‘we’.

When the narrative needs consolidation, the number of the excluded expands. When it is confident, the boundaries may temporarily widen.

External Exclusion: Them

The simplest form is external: ‘them’. Another people, another culture, another bloc, another world.

An external enemy is convenient: they are distant, abstract, and easily demonised. They can be blamed without immediate risk of internal social conflict. They are used to explain failures, delays, fears, and restrictions.

The external enemy is a way to keep the internal ‘we’ in a state of tense unity.

Internal Exclusion: The Most Dangerous

Far more dangerous is internal exclusion. This is the moment when the ‘others’ are close by.

This is where the figures of the ‘fifth column’, ‘enemies within’, ‘doubters’, ‘the overly complex’, ‘the disloyal’ emerge. Their difference is not always in actions but more often in their interpretation.

They are dangerous not for what they do, but for explaining events differently. Consequently, the struggle against them is almost always narrative, not judicial.

Language as a Tool of Exclusion

Notice: exclusion is rarely formulated through direct prohibition. It is enacted through language.

A person may not be arrested but simply no longer invited. Not silenced by law, but no longer quoted. Not declared an enemy, but labelled as ‘controversial’, ‘toxic’, or ‘problematic’.

Language sets the social temperature. And if that temperature drops, a person finds themselves in a chilling space, without the need for formal exile.

The Excluded as a Mirror of Fear

The figure of the excluded always reflects the fears of the ‘we’ itself. Insecurity about identity, anxiety about change, fear of losing control.

By excluding the other, the collective confirms itself. By punishing deviation, it soothes its own doubts.

Therefore, exclusion is rarely linked to a real threat; it is linked to the psychological vulnerability of the narrative.

Why Exclusion Seems Necessary

Every story strives for coherence. And coherence struggles with complexity.

Differences interfere with simplicity, ambivalence disrupts mobilisation, and multiplicity weakens clarity. Therefore, the narrative seeks to simplify reality, which means reducing the number of permissible positions.

Exclusion is a way to lower a society’s cognitive load.

The Silent Majority of the Excluded

The largest excluded group are those no one names. They are neither enemies nor heroes. They simply don’t fit.

People without a clear identity, without a voice, without symbolic capital. They are absent from the stories, not debated, and do not become characters.

This is no accident. A narrative needs outlines, not nuance.

Exclusion and Violence

Not all exclusion leads to physical violence, but all mass violence begins with narrative exclusion.

First, a person ceases to be considered ‘one of us’, then ‘equal’, then ‘necessary’. And only at the end – ‘human’.

This process is almost always gradual and thus imperceptible from within.

Is It Possible to Manage Without Exclusion?

Completely – no. Any identity implies a boundary.

But there is a difference between a permeable boundary and an absolute one. Between exclusion as distinction and exclusion as annihilation.

A society’s political maturity is measured by whether its narrative allows for the possibility of disagreement without exile.

What Understanding the Mechanism of Exclusion Offers

By becoming aware of how inclusion and exclusion work, a person gains a rare resource – the ability not to confuse belonging with subordination.

One can be part of the ‘we’ and still see how it is constructed. One can participate without surrendering the capacity to question. One can understand that every narrative has a shadow – and avoid becoming its victim.

Political narratology does not abolish boundaries. It makes them visible.

And a visible boundary is no longer an absolute one.

Chapter 7. Language, Symbols, and Memory

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Politics Begins with Language

No political reality exists before language. The word comes first; action follows.

Before a law is enacted, there is a formulation. Before an enemy is identified, there is a name. Before a society begins to remember, it is told what to remember. Politics does not use language as a tool; politics exists within language.

Language Does Not Describe – It Organises

We are accustomed to seeing language as a neutral vehicle for information. In politics, this is a dangerous fallacy.

Language places emphasis, creates causality, assigns responsibility, sets the emotional tone, and defines permissible formulations.

Consider: ‘reform’, ‘optimisation’, ‘reduction’, ‘cutback’, ‘deprivation’. The underlying fact may be the same; the realities constructed are different.

Political language is not a reflection of the world; it is its architecture.

Words with Lost Innocence

In politics, there are no ‘pure’ words. Each key concept carries the trace of prior use.

Words like ‘freedom’, ‘security’, ‘order’, ‘tradition’, ‘the people’, ‘the state’ seem self-evident, but are in fact containers for meaning. Their contents change, but the form remains, which is precisely what makes them so effective. A political narrative does not invent new words; it rewires the old ones.

Language as the Boundary of Permissible Thought

It is not only what can be said that matters, but also what cannot be said. Every stable political narrative creates a zone of the unthinkable: topics that seem strange, dangerous, absurd, or ‘inappropriate’. Not because they are false, but because there is no language to discuss them.

When a question cannot be framed in words, it disappears from public consciousness. This is one of the softest and most effective forms of power.

The Symbol as a Condensed Narrative

If language is the fabric of the story, the symbol is its knot. A flag, a coat of arms, a monument, a date, a gesture, a melody, a colour – these are not mere ornaments but concentrations of meaning. A symbol does not explain; it includes the narrative.

A person may not understand a manifesto, know the facts, or grasp the arguments, but a symbol works directly through emotion, the body, and habit.

A symbol is a narrative experienced without words.

Why Symbols Provoke Such Strong Reactions

A rational argument can be discussed; a symbol cannot.

Try ‘calmly debating’ a symbol, and you will see the reaction is disproportionate. This is because the challenge is perceived not as criticism but as an invasion of identity.

Symbols answer the question, ‘Who are we?’ They store not information, but belonging.

Rituals as Body Language

Political rituals are the language through which the body of society speaks. Elections, parades, moments of silence, oaths, ceremonies, anniversaries – these are not formalities. They are means of synchronisation.

A ritual habituates: it creates a sense of normality, repeatability, and stability.

Through ritual, a narrative ceases to be a thought and becomes a habit.

Memory as a Political Arena

Collective memory is the product of selection. A society cannot remember everything; it remembers what has been narrated and repeated. Everything else dissolves and disappears.

Therefore, memory is always political. It is not distorted; it is structured.

What is recalled as a feat, what as a tragedy, what as an error, and what as a necessity – this is decided not by the past, but by the present.

Forgetting as a Form of Power

Equally important is the question: ‘What is forgotten?’ Forgetting is not an empty space; it is the result of silence, the absence of rituals, the absence of language.

If an event receives no symbol, no date, no name, it ceases to exist in collective consciousness, even if it was traumatic.

In this sense, power governs not only memory but also amnesia.

Rewriting Without Rewriting

Modern politics is not inclined to crudely rewrite history; that is too conspicuous.

More often, the frame of interpretation changes: the same events begin to ‘mean’ something else.

Victory becomes a ‘complex victory’; defeat, an ‘inevitable stage’; violence, a ‘response’; and resistance, ‘chaos’.

The facts remain; the plot changes.

The Language of Crisis and the Language of Stability

Every political regime has its dominant language. In a crisis, the language of threat, urgency, mobilisation, and exceptionalism prevails; in stability, the language of order, development, normality, and gradualism.

A shift in language always anticipates a shift in politics. When the lexicon changes abruptly, it means the story into which people are being prepared has changed.

Why the Struggle for Language is a Struggle for Reality

Whoever determines how things are named determines how they are experienced. To call a protest ‘disorder’ is one thing; to call it an ‘uprising’ is another. To call it a ‘movement’ is a third.

None of these words is neutral: each immediately proposes a role, an emotion, a conclusion. Therefore, political struggle begins with terminology, not with actions.

Media as a Language Amplifier

Modern media accelerate and simplify language. Complex constructions vanish, leaving short formulas, images, clichés, and repeated phrases.

This makes narratives more viral but less stable: they capture attention rapidly but burn out faster.

In such an environment, symbols and concentrated words become even more crucial.

When Language Breaks Down

The most alarming moment is not a lie but a complete loss of trust in words themselves. When all words seem like manipulation, when any statement is perceived as having a hidden agenda, language ceases to connect people; it begins to divide them.

This state we call cynicism, and a separate chapter will be dedicated to it.

What Understanding Language, Symbols, and Memory Provides

Political narratology does not offer ‘correct words’; it teaches one to hear the structure. Understanding which words work like hooks and traps, which symbols switch emotions on, which memories are activated and which are suppressed – this is not protection from the influence of politics, but protection from dissolving into it.

As long as a person can notice the language, they remain a subject, not merely a carrier of history. From this understanding, we move on to how political narratives unfold over time.

Chapter 8. National History as Narrative

Traditions are often invented.

Eric Hobsbawm

History as a Story About Ourselves

Every society lives not merely in the present but within a story about itself. This story need not be precise; it must be comprehensible.

National history is a narrative in which a society answers several fundamental questions: ‘Where did we come from?’ ‘What have we endured?’ ‘What sets us apart?’ ‘What are we proud of?’ ‘What has traumatised us?’ ‘Where are we going?

Without this narrative, the ‘we’ cannot hold.

Why History is Always Simplified

The real past is chaotic, contradictory, and multi-layered. The collective consciousness cannot contain it. Therefore, national history is always reduced: complex processes become a few turning points, multiple causes become a single line, contradictory figures become heroes or villains.

This is not falsification but a psychological necessity. A society, like an individual, requires a coherent biography.

History as a Justification for the Present

The national narrative almost always explains why the current state of affairs is ‘the way it is’. Through history, borders, institutions, hierarchies, traumas, fears, and expectations are justified; the past becomes an argument.

The phrase ‘it has always been this way with us’ is one of the most powerful political formulas. It absolves the present of responsibility and transfers it to the realm of fate.

The Myth of Origin

At the centre of any national history lies a myth of origin. This is not necessarily a lie; it is the assembly point of the entire narrative.

The myth of origin answers the question: ‘Who were we at the moment of our birth – victims, victors, the chosen, survivors, pioneers, martyrs, liberators?’

This image scarcely changes, even if details are adjusted, because it sets the emotional tone for all subsequent history.

Great Victories and Great Traumas

The national narrative is built around two types of events: victories and traumas. Victories provide a sense of dignity, exceptionalism, and strength. Traumas provide a sense of justified suffering, suspicion, and the moral superiority of the victim.

Interestingly, societies often cling to their traumas as firmly as to their victories. Trauma more readily explains fears and mobilises loyalty.

History as a Moral Map

National history is always moralised; it clearly assigns roles: who was right, who was guilty, who betrayed, who saved, who suffered needlessly, and whose sacrifice was ‘necessary’.

This forms a moral map of the world by which society orients itself in the present. Political conflicts may appear to be disputes about the future, but at their core, they are all about the past and its meaning.

Characters of the National Narrative

History demands heroes, and real people are transformed into archetypes: the founder, the liberator, the martyr, the reformer, the tyrant, the traitor. Their human complexity vanishes; only their function remains.

The simpler the character, the more stable the narrative; the more complex, the greater the threat to the story’s integrity.

This is why the reassessment of historical figures always provokes a painful reaction: it shatters the familiar dramaturgy.

Textbooks as Scripts

A school history textbook is a script for national identity. It teaches not so much facts, events, and dates, but intonation: what to be proud of, what to sympathise with, what to consider shameful, what to mention in passing, and what to repeat constantly.

This is why debates over school curricula are always political. The issue is not the past, but what kind of citizens are being formed for the present and future.

Monuments and Dates as Narrative Anchors

A monument is often an art object. But in politics, it is a materialised fixation of an interpretation. A date is not a calendar mark; it forms the rhythm of memory.

Through monuments and dates, society continually reproduces its narrative in space and time. They sustain the story, preventing it from disappearing.

The demolition of a monument or the abolition of a date is perceived as an assault not on stone or a calendar, but on identity itself.

Competing Versions of the Past

There is no single national history. Usually, several versions of it coexist within a society: official, alternative, traumatic, marginal, regional, or familial.

As long as they can coexist, the society remains alive. When one version is declared the only permissible one, a hard politics of memory begins, and history turns into a battlefield.

Why the Past Cannot Be Left in Peace

It is often said, ‘Why dredge up the past? We must look to the future.’ This is astonishingly naïve. The past does not lie somewhere behind us; it is embedded in language, institutions, fears, and expectations.

An unprocessed past returns in the form of symptoms: aggression, suspicion, recurring conflicts.

The Manipulation of History Without Falsification

Contemporary politics rarely distorts facts crudely; it is far more effective to change the emphasis.

Amplify some episodes, reduce others to footnotes, add emotional valuation. The history remains ‘the same’, but functions differently.

History and the Image of the Future

The national narrative always looks not only backwards but also forwards. The past is used as proof that the future is either possible or dangerous. ‘We have been through this before’ is a powerful argument against change. ‘We have always risen again’ is an argument for endurance.

Without an image of the future, history loses its mobilising force and turns into a pantheon.

The Danger of a Static Narrative

The most dangerous form of national history is a static one: when the past is declared complete and interpreted once and for all, and any new reading is perceived as a threat.

At this moment, history ceases to be a dialogue and becomes dogma. And dogma, too, always demands protection.

Why It Is Important to Understand the National Narrative

Political narratology does not offer a ‘correct history’. It proposes seeing how history is constructed; understanding where fact ends and narrative begins, where memory turns into a tool, and where pride leads to blindness.

A person cannot live without history. But they can choose how consciously they participate in it. We will return to a more detailed study of national history’s influence on mass behaviour in Part Three.

Our next step now is to understand how history functions not only in the past but in time itself.

Chapter 9. Time in Political Narrative

Domination exists insofar as it is believed.

Max Weber

Political Time Does Not Coincide with the Calendar

In the common understanding, time is a linear sequence: the past has gone, the present is happening, the future has not yet arrived. In politics, this is not the case.

Political time is not chronology but a construct. It stretches, compresses, loops, accelerates, or freezes depending on which narrative is currently required.

Politics does not manage events in time; it manages the experience of time.

The Past as a Resource

In a political narrative, the past is not ‘what happened’ but ‘what it means’. The same historical events can serve as a source of pride, a justification for fear, proof of greatness, an argument against change, a warning, or a promise.

The past is always used selectively: some fragments are brought into the light, others remain in shadow, and others are simply rewritten.

What matters is not what happened but what function it serves today.

The Present as a Point of Pressure

The present is the most vulnerable part of a narrative because this is precisely where people live. And it is here that they feel fatigue, anxiety, lack, and irritation. A crucial, constant function of the political narrative is to explain the present.

If the present is difficult and heavy, it is called transitional; if it is unjust, it is called necessary. If it is anxious, it is temporary; if it is a failure, it is the result of others’ mistakes.

The present is never described as final; it is a ‘bridge’ to another story.

The Future as the Primary Object of Politics

Politics does not govern the present directly; it governs through the image of the future.

The future can be a promise, a threat, a catastrophe, a rebirth, stability, a leap, a surge, or simply ‘so it doesn’t get worse’.

Even the rejection of a future is also an image of the future: the future as a repetition of the present. People are willing to endure much if they believe it is leading them somewhere.

The Temporal Asymmetry of Narrative

Political narrative is asymmetric in time. The past is depicted as saturated with meaning, the present as tense, and the future as redemptive or threatening. This creates both direction and movement.

Without this dynamism, the narrative freezes and ceases to mobilise.

The Politics of Acceleration

One of the most dangerous techniques is the acceleration of time. When people are told that ‘there is no time’, ‘decisions must be made urgently’, ‘the window of opportunity is closing’, or ‘now or never’, then reflection is disabled. Accelerated time leaves no room for doubt. Doubt appears as sabotage because any question becomes a threat to momentum.

The Politics of Deceleration

The opposite technique is deceleration. Power speaks of complexity, the need for caution, the danger of sudden steps, historical responsibility, and the prospects of a long road. Time is stretched.

Deceleration lowers expectations, dampens momentum, and transforms the energy of protest into patience. But this only works as long as people believe that movement still exists.

Cyclical Time

Some political narratives are built as a cycle. ‘We have always been like this’, ‘History repeats itself’, ‘Nothing new’, ‘That’s how the world works’.

In cyclical time, the possibility of an alternative disappears. If everything repeats, any effort seems naïve, and such a narrative is very convenient for preserving the existing order.

Linear and Messianic Time

Other narratives, conversely, appear linear and directed. History is depicted as a path to a goal: liberation, justice, greatness, prosperity, purification.

In such messianic times, the present is merely a trial, and the future is the reward.

This makes sacrifices possible; they acquire meaning and necessary value.

The Manipulation of Expectations

Politics does not deceive directly or openly. It always actively works with expectations. Promises can be vague, deferred, reformulated, postponed to the next generation, and explained by external circumstances.

Fulfilment is not the point; sustaining expectation is. Expectation is crucial – when it disappears, the narrative collapses.

We Are on the Threshold

One of the most persistent formulas of political time is the sensation of a threshold. ‘We stand on the threshold of change’, ‘we are at the final line’, ‘we are close to a turning point’.

Threshold time mobilises without demanding immediate results, keeping society perfectly in tense anticipation. The danger is different: the threshold can last indefinitely.

Generational Time

Political narratives always address generations. Some are told, ‘You must endure for the sake of the children’; others, ‘You are reaping the fruits of your parents’ sacrifices.’

Thus, responsibility is distributed across time, and discontent is softened by a moral argument.

A generation becomes the bearer of an imposed debt.

Time as an Instrument of Exclusion

The control of time is also control over a person’s belongings. Those who ‘do not understand the historical moment’ are declared backward; those who are ‘ahead of their time’ are dangerous; those who ‘live in the past’ are obstructive. In this way, time acquires another quality – it becomes a marker of loyalty.

When the Future Disappears

The most alarming moment is the disappearance of the future from the narrative. When power no longer promises but only warns. When the opposition does not propose but only exposes. When society stops asking the question ‘Where?’

At this moment, politics becomes the management of present fear without a definable horizon of the future.

Cynicism as Temporal Fatigue

Political cynicism appears as distrust of words, but in fact, it is fatigue with time. People stop believing not because they were lied to, but because promises no longer correlate with the lived present.

When the gap becomes too great, the narrative loses its power.

Why Understanding Temporal Architecture is Important

Understanding political time allows one to see what exactly is holding them: a promise, fear, urgency, anticipation, memory, guilt, or hope.

A person cannot step out of time, but they can see which time they are being made to live in. And this understanding is the first step towards freedom of interpretation.

The next question is inevitable: ‘If politics manages time in this way, is it possible to govern without narratives at all?’

Chapter 10. Why Politics is Inevitably Narrative

Myth thinks in men.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

The Illusion of a Post-Narrative World

Contemporary people often believe that politics can be ‘technical’. That it can be managed by experts, algorithms, calculations, models, charts, neural networks, process optimisation.

It seems possible to dispense with stories and retain only management. But this is an illusion.

Even the most technocratic governance must still answer the questions: ‘Why?’ ‘For what purpose?’ ‘In whose interests?’ ‘Towards what future?’

And that is no longer technique – it is meaning.

Governance Without Meaning is Impossible

You can manage a machine without explanation; you can manage a process without emotion. But you cannot govern a society without answering the question ‘why?’

A human is not a mechanism; they cannot comply merely because an instruction is logical. They comply when they understand what is happening, accept a role, see a justification, feel a sense of belonging, and believe in a direction. All these elements reside in the realm of narrative.

Even the Rejection of Narrative is a Narrative

When a government says, ‘We have no ideology’, ‘We simply do what works’, ‘We are above politics’, it is already telling a story.

A story of rationality, neutrality, inevitability, maturity. And this, too, is a narrative – merely one masquerading as the absence of narrative.

It is also dangerous because it appears as the natural state of things, an existing given.

Politics as the Editing of Reality

Politics does not create reality from scratch – it edits it. It chooses what counts as cause, what as effect, what as background, what as centre, what as coincidence, and what as pattern. Editing is the right and the act of the storyteller.

Why ‘Pure Facts’ Do Not Work

A fact is an element; a narrative is the connection. Without connection, facts do not persuade and quickly become tiresome. Their excess without a story creates a sense of chaos.

In chaos, a person seeks someone who will offer a simple, comprehensible frame. Therefore, politics that renounces narrative always yields to politics that offers it.

Politics as Work with Identity

No society exists without answers to the questions: ‘Who are we?’ ‘Where do we come from?’ ‘What unites us?’ ‘What threatens us?’ ‘What is unacceptable to us?’. These are not philosophical questions but questions of a community’s elementary survival.

They cannot be answered with a calculated formula. The only answer is a story.

Narrative as a Form of Legitimacy

People submit not to an institution of power, but to the story that justifies it.

When the narrative collapses, the institutions remain – but cease to function. They begin to be bypassed, mimicked, sabotaged, ridiculed. And then power is forced to rely on coercion.

Violence as a Substitute for Story

When a story no longer convinces, force appears. This is a universal law of politics – violence signals the failure of narrative.

Where words have stopped working, batons, prisons, exclusions, and stigmatisation begin to work.

Violence never creates a sustainable story; it temporarily fills a void.

Why It Is Impossible to ‘Just Govern

The dream of governance without story is a dream of people without memory, without emotion, without identity. One could not call such people healthy.

Even if one tries to raise them as such, they will inevitably begin to create alternative narratives: rumours, jokes, myths, underground histories, ironic versions of the official tale.

A story always returns, in a different form or content.

Political Narrative as a Field of Conflict

Politics is inevitably narrative for another reason: narratives always compete. If one story fails to provide meaning, another appears. If one explains things in a complex way, another explains them more simply; if one is difficult to understand, another is seductively clear. The vacuum of story is never left empty.

The Attempt to Ban Stories

From time to time, power attempts to ban narratives. It bans interpretations, versions, alternative descriptions, and questions. But prohibition does not destroy a story; it drives it underground.

And underground stories are far more radical and dangerous than official ones.

Why Myths Are Stronger Than Exposés

An exposé destroys a specific story, but it does not necessarily offer a new one. A person deprived of their story does not become free – they become vulnerable.

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 how they are constructed, maintained, and destroyed.

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 Theoretical Narratology the narrative was examined as a universal form of human thought, and in the book Applied Narratology as a tool influencing the private life, choices and identity of an individual or a community of people, then in politics the narrative becomes an entire infrastructure. Not an idea, not an opinion, but a full-fledged system.

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 Applied Narratology, we saw how a narrative governs the life of an individual person, their choice of profession, their attitude towards the body, time, age, pleasure, and responsibility. In politics, the same thing happens, but on the scale of society.

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 exposé: it is the anatomy and physiology of power.

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.

Étienne de La Boétie

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.

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

Charismatic legitimacy arises where power is linked to a person. Not to an institution, not to a rule, but to a specific figure who appears exceptional.

The charismatic leader is a character in the story in whom expectations, fears, hopes, and projections are concentrated. They are attributed with special vision, destiny, a mission, and a connection to the future or the past. They may break the rules, and paradoxically, this very fact is taken as proof of their strength.

But charisma is unstable; it lives only as long as it is sustained by a story of success. Failure destroys it instantly.

That is why charismatic power either rapidly institutionalises or collapses irretrievably.

Tradition: The Power of Habit

Traditional legitimacy is the quietest and the most resilient. It requires no adulation; habit is sufficient.

People submit because ’it has always been this way’, ’it is customary’, ’this is how the world is ordered’. Here, there is no need to explain every decision; it is enough to refer to the order of things.

Tradition is a narrative in which time works for power, and the past serves as an argument.

But this form of legitimacy has its own weakness: it weathers abrupt change poorly. When the world accelerates, the traditional narrative begins to appear archaic and rapidly loses persuasiveness.

Rationality: The Power of Procedure

Rational-legal legitimacy is built on belief in rules. Not in people and not in the past, but in procedures. Here, people submit not because they love the power, but because they consider the system as a whole to be fair, or at least predictable.

Laws, elections, courts, and regulations – all these are elements of a narrative in which power appears impersonal and therefore purportedly neutral.

But rationality, too, requires belief. As soon as procedures begin to be perceived as a fiction, this form of legitimacy collapses faster than any other.

Legitimacy as a Story about Justice

All forms of legitimacy share a common element: they tell a story about justice. Justice may be understood in different ways: as the will of the leader, as fidelity to tradition, or as adherence to rules. But without a sense of justice, submission becomes fragile.

A person can endure inconvenience, restrictions, and even suffering if these are embedded in a story where justice exists.

When this story of justice disappears, nothing remains but bare coercion. And that does not work for long.

Submission as Participation

One of the most dangerous myths is the conception of submission as a passive state. In reality, submission is a form of participation. A person always participates in the reproduction of power when they repeat its language, when they explain its decisions, when they justify its mistakes, and when they condemn those who doubt. They participate even when they censor themselves internally.

Legitimate power conserves resources because people do part of its work themselves. This is precisely why legitimacy is power’s chief capital. Armies, police, and laws are necessary for its functioning, but they are secondary.

When Submission Becomes the Norm

The most stable moment of legitimacy is when the question ‘Why do we submit?’ ceases to arise. At that moment, power becomes a convenient background. It is not discussed, not problematised, not recognised as a choice.

People begin to perceive the order as natural and the alternative as dangerous, naïve, or irresponsible.

This is the peak of narrative force.

Cracks in Legitimacy

Legitimacy does not vanish suddenly. It is eroded gradually. First, a discrepancy appears between the story and experience, then doubt arises, then cynicism. And only then – open conflict.

When power continues to tell the same story, and reality fits into it less and less, submission itself begins to demand ever greater effort.

It is precisely this moment that we will examine next, in the chapter on how power loses its right to the story.

Why This Understanding Matters

Understanding legitimacy is a way not to confuse submission with necessity nor order with truth. A person who sees how belief in power arises ceases to perceive it as a natural background, even if it is a convenient one.

They may still continue to submit, but now consciously. And conscious submission is, at the very least, less dangerous than blind submission.

Because legitimacy is not something that power possesses once and for all. It is something that society each day either confirms or refuses to confirm.

And in this lies the hidden point of freedom, from which political thinking begins.

Chapter 12. When Power Loses Its Right to the Story

Power weakens when its explanations grow longer than society’s patience.

A contemporary analytical formula

The Loss of Power Does Not Begin with Revolt

It is customary to think that power collapses due to uprisings, coups, economic disasters, or external pressure. But that is already the final stage.

A real crisis of power begins earlier, at the moment its story ceases to work. When people still obey but no longer believe; when words continue to sound but no longer evoke either a response or support. When the language of power remains the same, but the internal consent of the masses disappears.

Power may retain control over institutions, the army, the economy, but if it loses its right to the story, it begins to exist in a state of deferred disintegration.

What The Right to the Story Means

The right to the story is not a formality; it is society’s agreement to accept the interpretations of power as plausible.

Power possesses this right so long as its explanations seem credible, align with everyday experience, give meaning to what is happening, promise a future, or at least explain its absence.

As soon as these conditions are violated, a rupture emerges between words and reality. And it is precisely this rupture that is the beginning of the end.

Discrepancy as the First Symptom

The loss of narrative power begins with micro-cracks. People notice that official explanations no longer match what they see and experience. That the language of power becomes either too optimistic, too abstract, or overtly defensive.

A sense of falseness appears. Not necessarily lies – specifically falseness.

It is important to understand the distinction here: people can tolerate a lie for a long time if it is embedded in a convincing story. But they cannot endure meaninglessness.

Repetition Without Conviction

One of the characteristic signs of a dying narrative is obsessive repetition. Power begins to say the same thing more frequently, louder, more insistently. The effect is the opposite. Repetition ceases to reinforce belief and begins to destroy it.

Words sound like an incantation that no longer works. The formulae remain, but their energy is lost. This is the moment when power does not yet realise the criticality of the moment, but already instinctively tries to maintain its control over interpretation.

Cynicism as a Mass Condition

The next stage is cynicism. Cynicism is not equal to protest, and in the short term it can even be convenient for power.

A cynical person does not believe, but neither do they resist. They adapt, ironise, distance themselves, live a ‘private life’, repeat the phrase ‘they’re all the same’, but it is precisely this cynicism that corrodes the narrative from within.

When a society on a mass scale stops taking words seriously, any mobilisation becomes impossible. Neither fear nor hope nor appeals can work as they once did.

The Narrative Vacuum

The most dangerous state for power is the absence of a story. When power loses its right to the story, a vacuum of meaning emerges. Events are no longer explained, linked together, or justified. Rumours, alternative versions, conspiracy theories, fragmentary explanations, and emotional outbursts appear.

Power may try to fill the vacuum with force, but force does not create meaning. It merely suppresses chaos temporarily.

From Explanation to Coercion

When the narrative ceases to work, power begins to rely on control. Regulation intensifies, the number of prohibitions grows, the language of threats and punishments expands. Explanation gives way to demand.

This is a critical moment: power still exists, but no longer as a story; rather, as pressure. It is precisely here that a qualitative fracture occurs: obedience ceases to be internal and becomes external.

Why Force Cannot Replace the Story

No regime can exist for long on fear alone. Fear is exhausting and requires constant reinforcement. It does not create loyalty – only temporary compliance.

Without a story, power is forced to constantly prove itself anew through repression, displays of force, harsh measures. This is costly, unstable, and dangerous.

A story, on the other hand, is fantastically economical, causing people to obey voluntarily. This is precisely why losing the right to the story is already a strategic defeat.

Competing Stories

As soon as the official narrative weakens, alternatives appear. They may be marginal, radical, naive and dangerous, utopian, or destructive. But they are united by one thing – they fill the void.

At this moment, power no longer controls the space of meanings: it becomes merely one party in a competition of interpretations.

This is a fundamentally new situation, even if everything outwardly appears stable.

The Illusion of Restoration

A mistake often made by power is the attempt to ‘restore the old narrative’. But stories never return in their previous form: the context of the times has changed, people’s experiences have changed, expectations have shifted.

Attempting to speak the old language in a new reality only heightens the feeling of detachment and inadequacy. The right to the story cannot be restored in a purely mechanical, procedural way. It can either be reassembled anew or lost for good.

When Society Stops Listening

The key moment of crisis is not a street protest or a revolution, but indifference. When the words of power no longer evoke anger, support, or even argument; when people simply stop reacting.

At this moment, the story is over. Only its form remains. From here, various scenarios are possible: a sudden collapse, a slow decline, a replacement of the plot, or external intervention. But they all begin with the same thing: the loss of narrative authority.

Why This is Important for Understanding Politics

Understanding how power loses its right to the narrative allows one to see a crisis before it becomes visible. Not through economic indicators, polls, or ratings. But through language, tone, repetitions, and the reaction of society.

Political narratology teaches one to listen not to what is being said, but to how it all ceases to work and loses its capacity to exist. And it is precisely this understanding that allows us to move to the next question – the image of the future as power’s main resource.

Because where the future disappears, so too does consent. It is from here that we shall continue.

Chapter 13. The Image of the Future as the Primary Resource

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Future as a Source of Obedience

In politics, victory rarely goes to those who best explain the present. It goes to those who more convincingly describe the future.

Economic indicators may be weak, institutions may be worn out, and elites may be unpopular, but if a power can maintain an image of the future, it retains its primary resource, i.e., society’s patience.

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