Saturday, August 5, 2017

How the GOP (accidentally) became a doomsday cult: Introduction to the Narrativist Framework.

Greetings gentle reader, my name is Prester Jane and I would like to welcome you to a very fascinating and ongoing discussion about the present political situation in the United States. To explain why this discussion is so interesting I will have to provide some background both on myself (the primary author of the Narrativist Framework) as well as explain the context and conditions under which this discussion evolved.

Over the years I have learned that with a history like mine the only viable approach to explaining it is to be frank and direct. So without further preamble I was raised in a cult that had its own k-12 school, and I either attended this school or was homeschooled under the supervision of this cult until I turned 14. At which point I went out and got a Social Security Number of my own volition (SSN's were a precursor to "the mark of the beast") and enrolled myself in a public school.

In my high-school years and for approximately a decade afterwards I become involved in a series of small cults. Also during this period I slowly developed schizophrenia. The net result of these two factors was that I eventually hit my personal rock bottom and checked myself in to receive professional mental health help. I shortly thereafter received a formal diagnosis (schizoaffective disorder) as well as extensive medication support and therapy.

In the course of my recovery and deprogramming (which as you can imagine involved rather a great deal of therapy) I began to develop my own personal framework for understanding the mindset and behavior of the extremists groups I had spent so much time living in and amongst. In 2015 I began publishing pieces of this framework on a paywalled discussion forum.

The community that I chose to publish on permitted an unusual experiment in collaboration. I approached the community very openly about my schizophrenia as well as my lack of formal education. I was also very open about explaining that the source of these ideas was an artifact of how my mental illness altered the way I think. Under these conditions the community was able to engage with my ideas as a sort of collective experiment in directing the freewheeling nature of a schizophrenics thought process and was very honest but fair in its reactions/disagreements/critiques, and as a result a (rarely seen on the internet these days) spirit of collaboration became the underlying groundrule for the discussion.

In short I approached the conversation well aware that I was both a schizophrenic (as well as lacking in a formal education) and that I would need to be on guard at all times for how my illness can impact my thinking, and the community approached my material by investing enough of their own time/energy to be able to discuss my ideas in my own (often very schizophrenic) terms. In general the discussion proceeded by my introducining a new concept (often with its own associated vocabulary) along with a some supporting examples culled from media and my best attempt at a rough explanation of what it meant and how this concept fit in with others. There would then follow a great deal of back and forth discussion as the thoughtful reactions of many other participants allowed me to hone both my own understanding of the concept as well as how to better explain it to others. Then there would follow a discussion about the refinements themselves and so and so forth.

One of the fruits of over two years of this unusual experiment is what this paper is primarily about: The Narrativist Framework. Before I delve deeply into that discussion just yet though I must further beg the gentle readers patience by first providing a discussion on exactly what I feel this framework describes- and what it does not. (The import of making these distinctions early will become obvious over time as the reader delves into the body of this work.)

The Narrativist Framework is a description of a particular set of behaviors and the social environment that individuals exhibiting these behaviors tend to recreate whenever they reach a sufficient threshold of influence in society. These behaviors (and their underlying causes) are ultimately apolitical in nature: They are explicitly and emphatically not inherently right or left wing in nature. Any individual or organization can potentially exhibit these behaviors regardless of their political leanings.

The Narrativist Framework is also primarily a description of the structure of the beliefs that Narrativists/Narrativist organizations embrace. The nitty-gritty specifics of the beliefs any group discussed here are not nearly as important as how those specifics all conform to an identical structure, a story-like format that I have named the Grand Narrative.

Finally the Narrativist Framework is (and I must emphasize this here) not an attempt to pathologize the right wing, it is an attempt to describe a particular set of behaviors exhibited by individuals whom within the present American zeitgeist tend very frequently to be right wing oriented- this is a result of historic forces with the Republican Party itself (notably the backroom dealings of Barry Goldwater) as well as the logical consequence of utilizing the particular public relations strategy ("dog-whistling") that the GOP has embraced for several decades now. I want to state very clearly that in my view the present insanity we see playing out in the Trump administration could just as easily had a D next to its name if the Democratic Party*** had made the same sorts of decisions.

***In fairness to the Democratic Party, despite this Millenials' personal criticisms of the DNC (and they are varied, nuanced, detailed, and acid edged) the Democrats as a whole have not engaged in the sorts of political strategies that court Narrativism, and as a result left-leaning Narrativists in the US are a rare and mostly toothless breed, although pockets of them do exist. (TERF's, Tankies, "Tumblrina's" various tiny Marxist cults, etc.)

And last of all I would like to take a moment to thank the numerous community members of SA that have made significant contributions to this work, and in particular I would like to thank poster Fuschia Tude for taking the time to condense a great deal of material into the present format, as well as taking the time to clean up many of the particular artifacts that my illness had on my earlier writing.




Authors Note: The structure of the ideas and their meaning is mine, but much credit is owed to the SomethingAwful.com Debate and Discussion community for making numerous contributions to the descriptions contained as well as the naming conventions used herein. Further this present work represents a first attempt at uniting the entire framework into a single cohesive whole. As a result I have struck the supporting arguments (which are considerably larger than the definitions themselves) presented for each of these terms, as some of these terms have individually resulted in 10's of thousands of words worth of debate in and of themselves. The following Glossary therefore represents the easiest path to learning the basics of the Narrativist Framework without diving into the (incredibly interesting but nonetheless lengthy and tedious) underlying discussions that spawned many of these terms.





Continue on to "Narrativism/Narrativist".

Full Glossary of Terms.

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