Micro-Metanarratives Move Mountains
We must train ourselves in rhetorical wizardry, and fast. The clock is ticking. Civilization is burning. And the arsonists are lighting fires with words.
This is one of those articles you might want to sit down with and absorb. It’s important, if not also urgent. Skeptics might say pshaw and think I’m floating away in philosophical meanderings or useless abstractions. Still, if all you have right now is a bathroom break, this might be worth setting aside for now.
Once you find time to return, I take the time to break down certain concepts that, far from hollow, should animate a new way of speaking. These concepts, imperfect as they are, reflect powerful human currents shaping the world. To become a countervailing force, we need figuratively and literally to find our voice.
In some respects, this means learning to speak a new language—one that marks the next stage of psycho-social development and attracts more and more people into its orbit.
Big Words and Spellbooks
If metanarrative is a fifty-cent word, micro-metanarrative is worth at least a dollar. It’s verbose. It’s unwieldy. But unlike Grand Narrative, which is simpler and cleaner, micro-metanarrative is more precise.
A metanarrative is a cultural narrative schema that orders and explains culture and experiences, often in ways that shape a group’s moral outlook.
A micronarrative is a form of storytelling that briefly or minimally conveys a narrative, making it easier to remember and repeat.
A micro-metanarrative combines metanarrative and micronarrative in a way that increases its memetic velocity.
I might be wrong. But it seems to me the spellbook from which certain people practice dark arcana is a special kind of lexicon. In that spellbook lies the power to turn children into zombies, burn down civilization, and construct powerful meme monsters. In other competing spellbooks, people have built empires or seen heliocentric universes free of epicycles.
Let's take an important detour before we attempt our own linguistic wizardry.
Color-Coded Communities
Recall the series I published on Spiral Dynamics, which—approximately—combines psychosocial stage theories with cultural-memetic epochs. For your convenience, consider the following refresher, which starts at the most basic (BEIGE) and evolves with the world’s increasing complexity. Following the wizardry metaphor, each stage has its own order.
(BEIGE) Order of the Naked: Survival, Sensation, and Self-Concept
(GREEN) Order of the Leaf: Environment, Consensus, and Equality
(YELLOW) Order of the Nautilus: Integration, Emergence, and Complexity
(TURQUOISE) Order of the Lotus: Holism, Paradox, and Ineffability
For now, you can imagine these stages as patterns of moral-cultural community built around value clusters. In order:
1. Existence and Survival, 2. Family and Tribe, 3. Kingdom and Conquest, 4. Faith and Tradition, 5. Science and Commerce, 6. Equality and Environment, 7. Integration and Emergence, and 8. Holism and Non-duality.
Sometimes, groups blur in transitional stages, too, so the spiraling up can be more graduated. Thus, you can imagine red-blue, blue-orange, and orange-green transitional stages.
You might still be confused by 1-8 above, particularly if you’re new to Underthrow. What should help crystallize these stages will be to reveal some associated micro-metanarratives. But first, let’s isolate the political landscape in the West, especially in the Anglosphere, where about 95 percent of people fall into four primary stages:
Now let’s translate these into micro-metanarratives:
Red—The strong shall reign with will unbroken; Take a head as bloody token.
Blue—Under God’s most watchful face, blessed those who know their place.
Orange—Innovation sheds the old, and great success shall crown the bold.
Green—Wherever oppressors and oppressed, injustice can never be redressed.
Of course, no one utters these micro-metanarratives—not even in their mental chatter. They’re more like subconscious schemata.
But micro-metanarratives are enormously powerful lenses that impose a normative layer atop the physical world. Nearly every person has some such programming in her subconscious, which shapes her perspective enormously.
Now, let’s think about groupings of the contemporary West in terms of their psychosocial affiliation groups by way of examples.
Red—Sports teams and street gangs who seek victory and domination
Blue—Traditionalists and conservatives who seek godly hierarchy and order
Orange—Entrepreneurs and scientists who seek prosperity and/or knowledge
Green—Social justice progressives and eco-activists who seek equal outcomes
I would argue Spiral Dynamics is just a helpful heuristic to help us grok patterns, but it has much more explanatory power than tropes such as Left and Right. Once we add the corresponding micro-metanarratives, we’ll do much better thinking about how we might evolve from this particular historical and psychosocial mess.
But first, we must understand why so many stay mired in the First Tier.
Mired in the Green Swamp
In our discussion of Spiral Dynamics in 1-8 above, we pointed out that after Green, there is a “momentous leap” to Yellow, according to the theory’s originator, Clare Graves.
(YELLOW) Order of the Nautilus: Integration, Emergence, and Complexity
(TURQUOISE) Order of the Lotus: Holism, Paradox, and Ineffability
Before making this momentous leap lies a cognitive or spiritual gulf for many. Some people will never be able to span it—either because they are of middling intelligence or because they have been ideologically captured. Most experience enormous social pressures to arrest their own psycho-social development, which means too many are stuck in Green.
With his characteristic incisiveness, the philosopher Ken Wilber called the more pernicious aspects of the Green-level consciousness “Mean Green.” This affliction, it appears, started among the Baby Boomers. A noxious blend of overweening arrogance and relativistic individualism, unhealthy Green traps people in a swamp. While Greens claim to value community, unhealthy Green consciousness carries an almost solipsistic self-absorption. It requires scorn for those beneath it yet holds a hubris that renders inconceivable the notion of any superior intellect or higher stage of consciousness.
Charles Pincourt and N.S. Lyons disagree about this;
Pincourt recently wrote:
Unlike the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany,
woke[Mean Green] currently has two “definite goals:” Identitarianism and radical Environmentalism. Identitarianism seeks to retributively redistribute resources from so-called oppressor to so-called oppressed identities. Environmentalism, meanwhile, seeks to eliminate the so-called environmental impact that humans have on the natural world irrespective of the impact on humans themselves.
Mean Green is thus a thoroughgoing collectivist doctrine, according to Pincourt. But N.S. Lyons—like Wilber, Beck, and Graves—questions Green collectivism and calls them hyper-individualist:
Trans ideology asserts that an inner psychological “self” is not only a but the only legitimate and authoritative judge of truth and reality. The authority of the self is then asserted as superior over all external claims, whether social or biological. Even the material reality of the body itself is seen only as a form of unjust oppression, an artificial limit imposed on the full sovereignty and “freedom” of the self and its desires that must be overcome through “liberation.” Moreover, the “true identity” of the self (whether conceived of as fixed or fluid) is taken to be so unimpeachable that it can justifiably be imposed externally, in the form of demands for total acceptance and affirmation from others, whose own sovereignty is necessarily seen as subservient to the true self (me). Indeed trans ideology’s central demand is that, for the sake of justice, the world must conform to the will, rather than the will to the world.
They’re both right.
Mean Green issues from the rhetoric of relativism, which jettisons concerns about contradiction in favor of exitus acta probat. As Frantz Fanon famously wrote to rile the wretched of the earth:
As you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs, there is no other solution but to use every means available to reestablish your weight as a human being.
Any means necessary gets tied up in the bow of intersectionality.
Everything is about revolutionary expedience, which, like any Marxist variant, is both collectivist and selfish. Those poor, poor brown people, so long the victims of White Occupiers, will come around to tolerate us once they read Judith Butler and learn that we were on their side all along. Queers for Hamas can’t fathom the notion that they’d lose their heads or be tossed from a building in some Califate of the future. Once those diabolical Jews are purged, the Queers will come to visit, bedizened in pink or leather-and-ball gag to darken the walls of the holy sites.
For a self-styled academic Green, any invitation to explore nuances of the non-dual deserves only ridicule. Wilber says Greens, therefore, live in “flatland,” a terrain of contempt for anything but their down-is-up egalitarian relativism. Such prompts them to dismiss any other first-tier opinion and blinds them to what lies beyond (the Second Tier). Mean Greens cling to their sense of separateness and their illusion of superiority. They refuse to allow anyone to check their egos and guard their micro-metanarratives with petulance. All of this makes them poseurs of concern for the collective on the outside and selfish, at times sociopathically so, on the inside.
Paradox resolved. But in this paradox, they are converting people to Mean Green faster than the Ottomans converted Christian boys into janissaries. Green memes are being picked up in kids’ classrooms and on TikTok—spreading like a Winter cold.
Perhaps now you can see why developing and testing newer, healthier memes is not just important but urgent. I hope we can use micro-metanarratives to help a generation utterly inculcated with Green memes find their way to the Second Tier.
“Yellow” Journalism and Linguistic Wizardry
Here is an excerpt from my expanded description of Yellow:
Apart from the need to integrate diverse values, one of the primary insights of this Stage is the ability to parse two different types of systems: those which we design and those that emerge. The latter, emergent systems, are the hallmark of this Stage. Members of this Order focus on protocol design instead of system design, for the former gives rise to systems that are beyond our ability to design.
Evolution and emergence work together to form complex systems governed more by rules and less by men. Indeed, complex systems exhibit stunning degrees of order, despite our urge to control. And this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the development of life on Earth. Here, one discovers the sweet spot between flexibility and function, which means we must learn to guard against the urge to design and plan everything. This urge can manifest itself as unhealthy technocracy, that is, authoritarian versions of so-called ‘systems thinking.’
Like any other stage, Yellow has healthy and unhealthy aspects. So, in crafting a Yellow micro-metanarrative, we’ll do well to tap into the former.
Here are three possibilities that focus on emergent complexity.
Yellow—Beyond the grip of rigid plans, a galaxy forms across the land.
Yellow—When harmony guides our personal tales, life's complexity prevails.
Yellow—Seek understanding, not control, if peaceful emergence is the goal.
But there is another key feature of Yellow, which more prosaically goes like this:
The first thing you see clearly, that you could not before, is the value of integrating insights from the prior Stages. Not only does each stage have value in the context of specific historical life conditions, but each has value in the niches of modern life. We must relate to others in different Orders and appreciate the subtler circumstances that require us to see and be in those modalities from time to time.
Here are three more that focus on integration—that is, to transcend and include prior stages:
Yellow—Behold, our stages are a prism, and each age holds a trove of wisdom.
Yellow—Regard each stage within its niche; every age has us to teach.
Yellow—We integrate beyond our borders to navigate life's complex orders.
As you can see, I’m but an acolyte of linguistic wizardry—a new spellcaster with a broken wand. It’s one thing to write a compelling article. It’s quite another to craft a micro-metanarrative that can move mountains.
Maybe you are just such a wizard.
Still, the fact of cognitive stratification will stymie memetic penetration. In other words, most people just ain’t bright enough to send and receive Yellow memes, a fact that sends Green pillar saints into a tizzy, even as it benefits their Order.
The Narratology of Exit
Let me close this section by teeing up the narratology of exodus. For there is a sense in which—following Hirschman—the dynamic of exit, voice, and loyalty is a deeply human algorithm. Indeed, subversive innovation embodies Yellow consciousness and protocol design for the Age of Exit.
Or should I say another Age of Exit?
Arguably, the genesis story of Western Civilization is the Exodus story (though my friend Alexander Bard argues persuasively that the Zoroastrians play an equally important role.) Exodus is a mytho-poetic culmination of the resilience and creativity of nomads. Perhaps the story needs to be retold but seen through a new lens and embodied by a new generation.
Yellow—As waters part in ancient lore, freer souls find promised shores.
Yellow—In the space beyond the known, we emerge to find our sovereign home.
Yellow—As ancients fled through stormy seas, so also can your mind be free.
Maybe it’s just as simple as “F*ck Pharaoh. We’re out.”
What if maybe, just maybe, we managed to craft a micro-metanarrative for the next great psychosocial exodus? What, then, is next to do?
Love your stuff, but this is very complex (I dont understand it) and not obviously actionable. Can you simplify?