Quotation of the Day
14th June 2025
ZMan:
One of the unique and strange aspects of this age is how our rulers operate from narratives rather than reality. The managers, in their committees and work teams, come up with a scenario that leads to a desired result. It just needs approval by management to set it going. Once a narrative is accepted, the decision makers set it in motion and then they just assume it will work out exactly as expected.
Note that they do not monitor it, assuming that they will have to adjust as reality fails to comport with the narrative. They just assume it will go as expected. In fact, they will often act as if it played out according to the narrative, before events have reached anything resembling a conclusion. It as if once the narrative is accepted, it then displaces actual reality in the shared mindscape.
One of the best examples of this was back in the Obama years when they passed a big spending bill to fix the economy. They passed a trillion-dollar stimulus bill and sold it as something like the Civilian Conservation Corp in the FDR years. The White House prepared marketing material for the foretold “summer of recovery” that they were sure would be the result of the spending bill.
In May they had warehouses full of signs and posters to distribute to publicity stunts around the country to showcase the millions of Americans coming together to restore the country after the Bush years. By June it was clear the summer of recovery was not happening, but they went ahead with the celebrations anyway. The joke at time was that the only people stimulated by the bill were the sign makers.
The funny part about that is it took until July for the White House to realize that reality was something different from their reality. At that point, the summer of recovery stuff celebrations stopped. That is when the other thing you see with these narratives happened, which is the memory hole. After the narrative collapse phase of the story, the whole thing is then erased from their shared mindscape.