The “narrative trap” described in Incerto 5 has many consequences, not only in public perception of events and how history is written, but in the thinking of present-day politicians and foreign policy experts. A fundamental truth is that none of us see the world as it really is. Not only is it much more complicated in reality than we can apprehend, but how we see the world (and the narratives we build to describe it) is heavily filtered and shaped by our culture and upbringing and life experiences.
David Goldman in his 2011 book It Is Not The End Of The World, Its Just The End Of You: The Extinction of Nations makes the point that U.S. foreign policy experts, most of them secular in outlook, appear to have little understanding of the force that religion plays elsewhere in the world, or in shaping people’s actions. They see the world largely in economic and geopolitical terms, and assume that surely everyone else does the same. As our largely-unsuccessful Middle Eastern endeavors demonstrate, that is not so.
And political scientist John Mearsheimer in his 2018 book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities makes the point that nationalism, or tribalism in tribal societies like Afghanistan, is a much more potent force than idealistic American dreams about liberal democracy. Again, the example is the Middle East.
The point being that the narrative trap is not only to believe the simplified narratives we construct to abstract the real complexity of the world, but also to appreciate that we embed in those narratives our own personal and cultural assumptions, so that not only the narratives that make up our histories, but even our everyday understandings of the world presented to us by the media are heavily contaminated by cultural assumptions and biases.
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