The Power of Narrative Intelligence. Enhancing your mind’s potential. The art of understanding, influencing and acting. Arsen Avetisov

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      The next sublevel of goals in the hierarchy are initially tribal goals, which later became national and state goals. The categories of a person’s identity are language, passport, lifestyle, and borders of residence. Combining goals at this level allows you sometimes to neglect mega goals. For example, this enables actively cutting down trees in the Amazon rainforest and justifying why signing the Kyoto Protocol is not worthwhile.

      Below the national level are corporate goals. These are the goals of companies and entire industries grouped into categories of employment and workplaces. The implementation of goals of this level becomes a dominant feature, which occasionally allows industries to dump toxic waste into the environment, neglect business norms, and ignore state nature conservation programmes.

      The goals of families, groups, clans, and gangs are even lower. Conflicts, wars and confrontations between generations may occur at this level despite corporate culture, traditions and unspoken laws.

      And finally, the level of personal goals. These are the most sensitive and most important goals for a person, goals that shape most of a person’s daily behaviour, goals that people are not ready to give up, which they are not ready to neglect, sometimes even in the most extreme circumstances.

      The challenge of managing people has always been how to subordinate the goals of the lower levels to the upper ones, whether they are family, corporate or state. The complexity of this task increases with the elevation of the goals. One of the reasons is that at lower levels, a person’s behaviour is formed on deep and stable narratives, and at higher levels the meanings of narratives often become less clear or appear unconvincing.

      It is believed that the quality of a person’s life depends on the effectiveness and satisfaction from the process of achieving goals. In pursuit of this desired quality, people are ready to unite and adjust. They are ready to change their place of residence, family, profession, place of work, and sometimes even country and nationality. People are willing to redefine their identity to attain the lowest-level goals. This, as it will be discussed in the next chapter, is a natural function of the human brain and is integral to its operation.

      Other cases of interest are rare but popular, when individuals prioritise higher-level goals over more immediate ones. And here, striving to achieve these 'elevated’ (in all senses) goals, a person encounters illusions.

      The first of these illusions arises when people think that they are pursuing their own goals. But in reality, the goal may have been subtly replaced with tasks imposed by their surroundings. Why is that? At least because for a long time it was believed that people with goals of their own are dangerous, especially if their goals do not align with those of their leaders. Wouldn’t it be better to give these individuals assignments? Substantial, ambitious, life-long assignments.

      For example, some nations have introduced a continuous task – a social credit system for evaluating citizens’ behaviour. Score is calculated based on their compliance with the society’s requirements and rules. Quite a goal, isn’t it? History shows that the desire 'to be right’ within the state or nation is gradually and necessarily transformed into an even more ambiguous one – 'to be always right’.

      Smaller-scale goals are reserved for environments such as supermarkets, vanity fairs, multi-currency accounting systems, and similar areas to materialise self-identification. To maintain a comfortable existence within these consumer spaces, people are ready to engage in strenuous work, the effectiveness of which is judged by the authorities and society in goals achieved per unit of time, ultimately leading to a dubious system of evaluating these accomplishments.

      However, what motivates a person to willingly prioritise the goals of a company, nation, or country over their own? It is the pursuit of meaning that can peacefully lead the mind to compromise with its goal to survive. This is likely the primary factor distinguishing people from the rest of the living world.

      In the long run, at every hierarchical level, individuals employ a similar strategy to subdue those beneath them, which involves selling various concepts of happiness. These concepts are replicated, appealing, and straightforward to the same extent as they are unreachable. Perhaps because they aim to blur the distinction between 'I want’ and 'I need’, rendering it negligible and obscure.

      How many unnecessary worries from 'I want’ arise due to the fact that what you really need is not always what you want! Therefore, if you imagine that you want exactly what you need, then this already acquires some commercial and political interest. The only task is to convince yourself of this construction. To show that in addition to goals, actions and plans, your 'desires’ also contain the essence of your life.

      By the way, if an individual is not persuaded by this semantic framework, then an undesirable situation for the upper levels may occur – when a person wants what he or she already possesses. And it can be regarded as happiness – to want what you have. Yet, this is a different story and a different concept.

      Some Cherished Stories from the Bible

      How many stories – so many interpretations.

      Reading the news, it is sometimes difficult to even imagine a place where such cynical and hypocritical stories can still occur. Although everyone suspects that the place is not so far from them. And there are many, many such stories.

      How many stories has humanity managed to tell itself? Do you know how many stories there are in the Old Testament? There are much more than may be seen at first glance. After all, each story can be interpreted in different ways: as a historical description of the people in search of their place in the world, as instructions for each day’s behaviour, or as a manual for managing people and processes. Each story reveals several layers of meaning, depending on the angle from which it is viewed.

      What is the meaning of the life story of Joshua, a military commander and leader, or the story of such a controversial figure as King David? How many temptations fell to the lot of King David? The king, who regularly violated the laws, at least moral laws, after all the turmoil, again and again returned to his faith and his mission. Maybe the point is that none of us knows our purpose in life until we take responsibility for events and our own lives.

      Or the story of Joseph, the son of Jacob, who later became Pharaoh’s first minister. After his brothers had nearly killed him and then sold him as a slave to the caravan drivers, he forgave them. A story of mercy? Or is it a story about how the path to success always lies through suffering, betrayal, and knowledge? Or in the ability to interpret dreams and that you need to listen to the voice of God or your inner voice? In any case, try to understand what He or it wants to tell you. How many different interpretations! It is like in medicine: how many doctors there are, so many diagnoses they make.

      We sometimes trust TV series characters more than politicians because the former present us with a more understandable semantic narrative. And, as history shows, what matters most about politicians is how close their promises are to our desires than to our values. And our desires are not always in full accordance with our model of morality. The world has become so cynical that to achieve their goals, politicians and those around them do not disdain to appeal to the different beings that live in each of us. But more to those beings who neglect their intelligence.

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