The Narratives That Guide Our Lives
By Robert Bidinotto
July 4, 2025
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(This essay is adapted from commentaries dated April 18, 2011, and March 30, 2021, posted on my nonfiction website. Copyright 2025 by Robert Bidinotto. All rights reserved. The themes presented here are elaborated considerably in the book from which this chapter is excerpted.)
How did environmentalism become so popular—and why does it remain so?
Most people of my philosophic persuasion believe that the power that moves individuals and cultures is, at root, philosophy. Specifically, they believe that this power lies in the basic philosophical premises we accept about the world and ourselves: our conceptual beliefs about the nature of existence; about how we know things; about what constitutes good and bad; about how we should live together.
This view of the power of philosophic premises is true—as far as it goes. However, those of my philosophic persuasion also make an additional assumption: that to change one’s own life, or to “change the world,” the most important and effective thing is to adopt and advocate the “right” systematic, abstract philosophy. In practice, this means: addressing thinkers and intellectuals, teaching formal philosophy to students, planting “our” kind of professors in university chairs, and otherwise focusing specifically on philosophical pursuits. The tacit assumption here is that the basic philosophic premises that govern our lives are decisively communicated and absorbed in individuals and cultures by means of formal philosophical education.
That premise—which I for years firmly believed and preached—I now believe to be mistaken.
That premise—which I for years firmly believed and preached—I now believe to be mistaken.
We do not acquaint ourselves with our core worldviews after we have reached our late teens or twenties, and probably in a college classroom. By that time, our basic premises are usually already well-established and, in many cases, set in psychological cement.
So when, how, and in what form do we actually encounter and accept our foundational beliefs about ourselves and the world around us?
How, and in what form do we actually encounter and accept our foundational beliefs about ourselves and the world around us?
We do so early in life, and in the form of emotional, value-laden stories—or what I call “Narratives.”
A narrative is simply a story. But capitalized, I use “Narrative” (or sometimes “Core Narrative”) to mean a fundamental story that, for each individual, explains the basic nature of reality and of his or her own place in the world. This Narrative, usually just implicit, also provides a vision of values, a sense of right and wrong—hence, moral guidance by which to navigate the world.
Narratives are pre-philosophical; in fact, they are acquired in their germinal forms while we are still far too young to subject them to critical analysis. They thus actually tend to influence, even determine, which abstract philosophies, ideologies, economic theories, and political policies we later find appealing. These latter “feel right” to us largely because they mesh with the Core Narrative we already absorbed during childhood.
What a Narrative is for the individual, a myth is for a culture.
What a Narrative is for the individual, a myth is for a culture. A myth is a Narrative shared broadly across a society. The myths we learn in childhood, at Mother’s knee, in church, in schools, in films and novels, represent primitive, widely accepted interpretive stories about our world: how it works, what it means, what is right or wrong, who are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. A Narrative is a personal myth; a myth is a social Narrative.
So how, exactly, do each of us arrive at our Core Narratives?
I believe that the initial source of Narratives (on the individual level) and myths (on the social level) lies in the nature of the human subconscious, and its methods of interacting with the world.
For almost all of us, the course of our lives follows a broadly similar pattern. We are all born into a helpless state of sensory bombardment and confusion. As infants interacting with the things around us, we quickly begin to sort out sensations into perceptions, acquiring the awareness of concrete things. And we come to interpret “good” and “bad” experientially, in terms of raw, primal emotions. We either like the way something makes us feel, or we don’t; we’re comfortable and calm, or we’re uncomfortable and anxious. We also begin to notice very basic causal interactions among things. We discover that certain things and actions precede and seem to cause other things to happen.
These subconscious integrations of our experiences with emotions eventually become fodder for dreams and fantasy projections. Our dreams are windows into the often-symbolic subconscious processing that automatically and creatively sorts, associates, and integrates our perceptions. The basic aim of this processing is to provide us understanding.
I suspect that this initial human stage of experiencing primal chaos, followed by a mental process of sorting, identifying, and integrating experience into coherence, is portrayed symbolically and projected mythologically in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis.
In addition to the method by which we try to understand the world is the content the world provides for us to process. Initially, this content includes the most fundamental of our early encounters with reality.
As infants and young children, we are utterly dependent upon adults to meet our basic life needs. Adult care and nurturing typically creates a comfort zone for our early lives, a period and environment where we are not yet compelled to initiate life-sustaining action. Childhood is instead a time when we are largely shielded from dangers and the need to exert productive effort—a time when we discover things mainly through joyous, impulsive, experimental play.
In mythology, this period is psychologically symbolized variously as “the Golden Age” or “the Garden of Eden”: a past, primitive state of automatic wish-fulfillment and pleasurable self-indulgence that, in memory, seems like blissful “perfection.” (Much more about these myths, and their pivotal role in the rise of environmentalism, appears in the next chapter.)
Growing up, we become increasingly aware of the larger, more complicated, more challenging world outside of our little home-bound Eden. We become curious about its mysteries, which prompts us to question and explore. As we exercise our minds and powers, acquiring growing agency, efficacy, and confidence, we discover that there are values out there to be obtained, values that promise us all sorts of rewards and satisfactions. But—unless we are “spoiled” by doting adults—we also learn that obtaining these values necessitates tradeoffs. We discover that the two basic prices we must pay in exchange for achieving values are exerting effort and taking risks. Properly taught by adults and personal experience, we thus come to understand that achieving the potential rewards of life requires us to cultivate a sense of self-responsibility.
These lessons—and whether they are accepted or rejected—become core plot elements in our most basic stories and myths: the Narratives that guide our lives.
I say Narratives, not philosophies, because Narratives—embedded with causal explanations, personal values, and the emotions that values evoke—enter our lives many years before any philosophy does.
To an intellectual, everything looks like an abstract concept.
It is said that to the hammer, everything looks like a nail. To an intellectual, everything looks like an abstract concept. And to the philosophically minded intellectual, everything looks like an abstract philosophical premise. Ironically, the most sophisticated philosophical minds typically, honestly, but naively believe that other people’s minds are shaped by and conform to the intellectuals’ own philosophical preoccupations.
But as I’ve just sketched, our actual course of psychological development, from our earliest days through our maturation into adults, reveals something different. We do not graduate from perceptions into concepts, then leap into philosophical ruminations. Long before we ever achieve the ability to tie together concepts into anything like a systematic, abstract philosophy (and many people never do), we first interpret the world through the stories we are told. Those may be Bible stories, Aesop’s fables, cartoons and picture books, tales spun by our parents, song lyrics, good-guys-vs.-bad-guys TV shows and movies.
These stories shape our foundational interpretive template for understanding the world around us—what it is, how it works, our place in it, and what we should do with our lives.
What binds together every culture or subculture are the value-laden messages conveyed by such tales. That’s because Narratives work for a culture just as they do for an individual. Looking at the glory that was Greece, for example, it is instructive to note that Homer, the society’s seminal storyteller, preceded by hundreds of years Aristotle, who represented the apex and climax of formal Greek philosophical thought. The former was the true founding father of Greek civilization, while the latter lived during its waning days. If abstract, systematic philosophy were the ultimate source and shaper of a culture—or its salvation—then the chronological sequence of their appearances should have been reversed.
In fact, for most people, the role of explicit philosophy, ideology, and theology is to intellectually ratify and reinforce an emotionally satisfying Narrative they already acquired decades earlier. Their Narrative provides them their core sense of meaning, purpose, and identity; their philosophy rationalizes it.
Please don’t misunderstand me on this point. Yes, I believe that individuals and societies are shaped by “the power of ideas.” Yes, I believe that philosophy is vitally important. But the true and full power of ideas rests not in concepts and philosophies per se, but in concepts and philosophies as embodied, enshrined, dramatized, and propagated in compelling Narratives. In other words, the narrative medium is at least as vital and potent as its (often only implicit) philosophic content.
This explains the enduring power of religion. Religions communicate largely on the Narrative level, utilizing the power of myth, parable, and storytelling. Ask yourself: how many people are attracted to a given religion because of the abstract, intellectually satisfying arguments provided by its clever theologians? By contrast, how many followers instead find themselves gripped, touched, inspired, and persuaded by the stories and parables that the religion offers?
That said, let me offer some advice to those readers who may share my own secular-individualist philosophic outlook.
Individuals and societies are shaped by “the power of ideas.”
It’s futile to complain about the stubborn grip of “mysticism” on people’s lives. Trying to argue people out of their Core Narrative is almost always impossible, because all of us need a Core Narrative. The same goes for trying to argue people out of their treasured cultural myths. They cling to their Narratives and myths even when they’re demonstrably false, and they often willingly, blindly follow their seductive plotlines right off a cliff. They cling to them regardless of bad consequences, because to question them threatens to unravel a lifetime of Narrative-driven investments in values, choices, relationships, careers, emotions, money…but primarily in personal meaning and identity. And how many people are willing to do that?
Similarly, I’ve found it’s usually pointless to argue philosophy and politics with most people, like I used to do to the extreme in decades past. Why? Because ideologies are largely rooted in and motivated by underlying Narratives and myths; and that means you’ll soon find yourselves arguing past each other. You may prove a point with unassailable facts and irrefutable logic, only to hear the other person reply, “Yes, but…” Those words typically signal you’ve reached the ultimate barrier to further rational communication: you’ve unknowingly challenged the underlying Narrative upon which the person’s philosophy and politics are implicitly grounded. And, in my experience, that is ground he’ll rarely, if ever, surrender.
Like sleepwalkers, most people tend to move through life semi-consciously, their directions set by deep-seated Narratives and myths they have never consciously identified or critically considered. Here are just a few familiar ones:
“Virtuous David versus evil Goliath.” That’s a symbolic battle the Old Testament famously dramatizes. Its contemporary fruit? Decades of disastrous US foreign policy reflexively aimed at toppling big, powerful regimes in favor of the “little guy” rebelling in the streets—even if that “little guy” is a jihadist who blows up a suicide vest in a crowd, or who slaughters hundreds of innocent kids at an Israeli music festival. Or knee-jerk, popular support for a malignant nihilist who shoots a successful businessman in the back on a sidewalk in New York. Or fawning sympathy for any vandal who trashes thriving businesses and nice homes during riots against “the racist power structure.” Countless cold-blooded criminals have evoked the sympathies of millions simply by wrapping themselves in the mantle of David fighting Goliath.
“We should take from the rich and give to the poor.” That’s what the legend of Robin Hood tells us (at least, bastardized versions of it). Its political fruit? The horrors of communism, socialism, and their many “progressive” variants. Countless vicious, envy-eaten “revolutionaries” posture as heroic, latter-day Robin Hoods.
Or an example directly relevant to this book: “Paradise is pristine nature, which human activities desecrate, upsetting the natural balance.” That’s what the Garden of Eden and Golden Age myths illustrate. Their contemporary cultural manifestations? The countless assaults on modern civilization and productive individuals by atavistic environmentalists.
The forces that direct the flow and outcomes of such ostensibly political or philosophical “causes” are seldom the declared issues or proclaimed objectives. Rather, the actual forces are the unidentified, unspoken, implicit Narratives that we carry with us. These internalized stories constitute the tacit subtext of most of the arguments, thus posing a formidable challenge to persuasion. After all, it is very difficult to persuade someone rationally if, simultaneously, you are also debating the subconscious ghosts of David, Robin Hood, and Adam.
Again—it’s almost impossible to argue people out of their Narrative, because all of us need a Narrative.
Instead, you must strive to replace their reigning Narrative with a better one—one that’s more persuasive, compelling, and inspiring. Rather than try hopelessly to deprive them of their existing Narrative—environmentalist or otherwise—the more practical option is to offer them an emotionally satisfying counter-Narrative. That’s a task for storytellers who wish to dramatize and objectify individualist values, and for those who support their work.
By doing that, they will incidentally but powerfully counter the influence of environmentalism, whose roots—as we shall now see—draw deep from the wellsprings of ancient myths.
This essay is excerpted from A REBEL IN EDEN: The War Between Individualism and Environmentalism, by Robert Bidinotto. The book presents a damning historical, practical, and moral critique of the environmentalist philosophy and movement.
About the Author: Robert Bidinotto
