What did we actually think? That people are open to reason? Here’s a useful hint: almost no one is. Reason is an edge case. Narratives, on the other hand, are the main operating system. They are potent precisely because they flatten the world into something manageable, something comforting, something that lets you believe exactly what you already want to believe.
And believing is vastly superior to knowing. Knowing is messy. It’s chaotic, brittle, and permanently unfinished. It has to be renewed, rechecked, updated, sometimes painfully revised. Knowing demands effort, attention, and the willingness to admit you were wrong yesterday. Who in their right mind would voluntarily sign up for that?
Adopting a narrative makes all of this disappear. Instantly. The world snaps into focus. Things become simple. Clean. Binary. You don’t have to learn anything new — ever. From the crib to the grave, everything you need to know is already encoded in the narrative. Just believe it, repeat it, defend it, spread it. That’s the entire job description.
Once that’s done, you’re free. Free to go back to partying, drinking, gaming, scrolling, numbing yourself with whatever distraction suits your temperament. The world — your world — is neatly ordered again. Any chaos that remains has been safely externalized. It’s out there. Never inside your head.Who needs reality anyway? Who would willingly give up the narcotic comfort of certainty for the abrasive discipline of truth? Almost no one. And that, more than any ideology, explains the state of things.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/12/21/the-resilience-of-the-church-of-climate/