Excellent article Caitlin! Right on.

So, the next reasonable question to ask and answer is why would anyone ever let the narratives of others overrule their own narrative?

That just doesn't happen when a person is secure in the narrative they've developed.

But who develops their own narrative?

We live in a world where developing your own narrative is frowned upon, ridiculed, and despised – unless you can get OODLES of people to agree with and follow it. Then the same narrative that was bonkers when you were alone in it suddenly becomes worthy of some consideration, at least – as long as it’s got the numbers and doesn’t challenge prevailing narratives that everyone believes are central and crucial to their security. If your narrative does “threaten ______ security” (fill in the blank), then you’re a no-good, a rebel, an insurrectionist, a cult leader, a megalomaniac, especially if you're so secure you can stand on your narrative even when everyone around you disagrees or spurns you or even attacks you -- *not* because your narrative is wrong, because people who attack over narratives have done shitall to figure out what's right and wrong. You become the “enemy” merely because you have, in their minds, “threatened ______ security.

Insecure people attack. People who are so beaten down, beset with inferiority, and powerless that they cannot imagine creating their own narratives – let alone a narrative that diverges from prevailing, central narratives – cannot tolerate threats to their security.

Secure people have no need to attack anyone. They can defend against their attackers. But when someone tries to rape their children, they’ll fucking attack those people.

Why don't people develop their own narratives and marvel and appreciate the narratives of others? Why do people think that narratives are something to spurn and attack and eliminate people over?

Obviously, this is a psychotic degree of insecurity. But it's all we've known, so it's been "normal" ever since we were kids.

We are that abjectly insecure because, since day one of our lives, our security proved to be either baseless (neglect) or it was undermined ("parenting") or it was devastated (abuse).

After all, *everyone knows* (right?) that children are *always wrong* until the gods of their world *make them to be right*.

And no one seems to notice that doing so is none other than psycho-spiritual rape.

Soul-rape.

Well, after a lifetime of "learning” – i.e., being penetrated without consent for the insertion and embedding of cognitive and affective (far more important) information into our psyches, whether we wanted it or not, whether we thought it was true or not, and getting punished if we resisted – having been soul-raped by every "authority" in our lives, *dictated to* about true and false, right and wrong, smart and stupid, success and failure, is it any wonder we come out with Stockholm syndrome that's socially approved as "good" and "moral" and "respectable" and "nice"?

No sane, free, secure person allows others to overrule their own narrative. Such people are *not* considered normal by most others, who see them as abnormal, “wild”, “uncontrollable”, “dangerous”. Of course they’re abnormal, because the first rule of normality is "must conform".

Conform to what?

To the prevailing normality, whatever it might be. The “what” is variable, but conforming is not. Conforming is mandatory and absolute.

For authentic people, there is no "normal”. They're not interested in conforming to anyone or anything other than what *they* want and *they* decide is true. Nor are they interested in forcing others to conform to them.

We live in a world where freedom is the worst threat to security imaginable. We’re watching people by the billions beg for their freedom to be taken from them, trusting that they’ll get security in exchange.

And of course they will get it. Nothing is more guarded and secure than the capital of a capitalist. And the most valuable kind of capital is peepstock, aka “human resources”.

People who are “normal”, who bristle and object to creating their own narratives without regard to the centralized, approved ones, who expect everyone else to conform to the narratives that they selected for themselves – these are not powerful, secure people. That’s why they believe there is “strength in numbers”. That’s why they believe that they are powerless *unless* they join or create numbers.

That’s why they don’t recognize what real power is.

None of them have gone through a detox and deprogramming process to free themselves from the raped-in crap they grew up with. None of them is secure enough to develop and stand on their own independent narrative ("Uh... what's that?") when everyone around them disagrees or THREATENS THEIR RELATIONSHIP OVER THE DISAGREEMENT.

How does being *extorted* by people you’re dependent on constitute a “relationship”?