With permission from r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration), a nonprofit that reimagines how the global economy can truly support people and the planet, we’re publishing selected chapters from its Seeds Series Volume 2 as part of an ongoing series. This new volume explores a vital question: how can societies intentionally dismantle collapsing systems and replace them with regenerative ones that can endure and help life flourish?
Read more from the series here: Executive Summary | Chapter 1 | Chapters 2 – 2.1.1 | Chapter 2.1.2 | Chapter 2.1.3
“We engage Sylvia Wynter’s definition of human beings as homo narrans – the ones who narrate ourselves – to examine how people create stories about life and about who we are, and how we live within the stories we create.”
Arturo Escobar, Michal Osterweil & Kriti Sharma, Relationality, 2024
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s work on cognitive framing, popularized in his 2004 best selling book Don’t Think of an Elephant!, re-framed how we understand framing. His brilliant title succinctly illustrates the power of narrative framing: cognitively speaking, we can’t not think of an elephant, once it’s invoked, because the very invocation triggers neural pathways in the brain that fixate on – and fix – that frame.
Sylvia Wynter’s framing of humans as homo narrans reminds us that the power of story to define experience and understanding is as old as our species: we are storytellers, whose stories are not only narrative, but more literally define our lives. A change of story can transform our life.
The tension between this fixity and fluidity of framing is what imbues story with such deep power: since stories are constructs of the imagination, we can change them at any time, simply by shifting what we think; and, since our minds are “hard-wired,” new stories can shift how we think. And compelling stories can stick.
Interviewee Steve Keen illustrates the power of framing – and re-framing – through the “story” of mainstream economic theory.
“Economic theories have got to go in the garbage bin – mainstream economic theory is completely delusional. It’s a very convincing delusion, which is why it’s lasted 150 years. We can date it back to the 1870s, but the intellectual components of that have mathematical flaws and empirical flaws, which, in any genuine science, would have overturned the theory: it should have been overturned in the 1920s, certainly by the 1960s or 70s.”
“So that theory has to go, and you then need to apply a physical approach to economics, one that realizes production necessarily involves using raw materials and energy we find in the environment, and necessarily generates waste and necessarily obeys laws of thermodynamics, and that, with that framing, we would never have let ourselves get in the situation we are in now. It’s the absence of that framing that has allowed this to happen, and the most delusional people on the planet are the economists specializing in climate change.”
Gaya Herrington also picked up on the power of framing using the example of degrowth, not only as an economic and social theory/movement, but as a cognitive frame that consciously fucks with traditional marketing wisdom for specific purposes.
“People complain that degrowth is not good marketing, which is true. More and more, I am starting to become appreciative of their argument that yeah, that’s on purpose, because then it can’t be co-opted. Even terms like sustainability can be co-opted. But it’s true that degrowth can’t be co-opted.”
Scientifically, the term sustainability has robust precision, but in popular usage, it has been greenwashed to the point of meaninglessness. This development was both purposeful (evidence documents conscious manipulation and dilution of the term’s precision) and systemic: the predominant capitalist economic system and cultural modernist system are inherently unsustainable and violent (as Vanessa Andreotti has shown), so the systems themselves reinforce the undermining of terms that challenge their hegemony.
What’s so brilliant about degrowth framing as co-optation insulation is that the case against degrowth – that the framing is uncompelling and turns people off – is precisely the case for this framing, which forces those who encounter it to confront their own deeply embedded biases toward growth, which is thermodynamically impossible to sustain as infinitum (particularly when compounded) and socially unjust due to inherent concentration of wealth & power.
Gaya names another powerful aspect of narrative framing: the ability to create coherence through mutually validating and reinforcing storylines.
“So again I’m more and more favorable towards degrowth, also because I think the movement itself has grown a lot – I think the movement is, everybody saying the same thing basically, now, so I think it’s very coherent.”
In describing the practice of commitment pooling that he engages in with the Indigenous Kenyan communities where he lives, Will Ruddick explains the use of the narrative device of visioning.
“When we’re practicing this, we put it within a visionary process to community action planning framework. So, we start with asset mapping: we talk about social assets, like belonging, we talk about skills, we talk about spiritual purpose, we talk about governance and voice, we talk about the nature around us, we talk about infrastructure, and we talk about our commitments. So, commitments are one element of a whole bunch of assets that we have as a community.”
“And then we worked on vision. We say, where are we actually trying to go? What is our vision of a healthy environment? What does health look like to us individually, as families? And so we do a lot of drawing, we do a lot of processes, and then we say, okay, well, how do we get from, here we are with our assets, and, there’s our vision. How do we get there?”
“And we build these sort of structural tension charts with them, we use rubber bands. We say, what’s the tension between where we are and where we’re going? And how do we release that tension? What does it actually look like to do so? And we come up with action steps and whatnot with them, but a core part of that is, what are the tools, the instruments, and agreements we need to take these assets and reach our vision?
Ashish Kothari called for enabling people at the fringes to tell their own stories and bring them to the center. Specifically, he laid out a strategy to
“identify where those movements already exist, to document them, to talk about them, to enable those people to tell their own stories, not just people like me going and writing an article about it, but for them to voice their own stories and for that to reach audiences where policies are being made… It’s about documentation, visibilizing, networking, creating the platforms for communities of that kind to be able to meet each other.”
Sahana Chattopadhyay was the interviewee who focused most on story and narrative framing – and the most eloquently and persuasively – so we will let her speak for herself extensively. Sahana started by outlining the conscious nature of narrative development through conscious collaboration to achieve the kind of coherence that Gaya advocated through multi-voiced perspectives.
“We need many more communities of intention, communities of purpose where we are developing skills very deliberately, we are sowing and seeding new narratives very deliberately by design — we are not leaving it to, ‘it will happen if we repeat it often enough.’ It has to be, I would say, a concerted, deliberate, painstaking effort to co-create those narratives that are not only representing different voices but are also representing a confluence of voices that are microcosms, literally microcosms of the world that we wish to inhabit, inherit, and leave behind.”
Sahana extended this conscious approach to cultivating the necessary “outside-the-box” creativity, calling for advocates of regenerative economies and cultures
“becoming radical imagineers: imagination, not as flights of fancy, but very deliberate imagination, which I personally feel is a holistic skill of sensemaking and intuition, tapping into our own deep wisdom and deep listening to many, many voices and narratives outside — so listening within, listening outside — and imagining from there.”
“I even put it beyond foresight, because foresight operates using certain frameworks within the present hegemony, so it ends up tweaking and recalibrating the hegemonic narrative rather than making that leap of faith into a very different imagination, which is currently a deliberately exiled capacity, because the hegemony is scared of our imagination.”
“We have to re-invite that exiled capacity back and deliberately build it in these communities for us to manifest different alternatives, and I think it’s so possible… These communities become not only crucibles, but I would also say they become these collective imaginal cells, holding the DNA for possible futures — but they have to be very deliberately nurtured, nourished, stewarded, facilitated, and the skills and capacities have to be deliberately built and held on to.”
Picking up on the points Ashish made, Sahana directs our attention away from the mainstream to seek out the stories & narratives that have been rejected by today’s hegemonic cultures.
“So communities imagine becoming imagineers and listening to the periphery, listening to the edges, listening to the margins — the voices of Indigenous and tribal wisdoms, and beyond that, because there are so many voices and narratives that are delegitimized, invisiblized, silenced — they are not even sought out. We have to deliberately go seeking those narratives, become story seekers, pattern seekers, then weave these qualities into these communities and build those skills and capacities that will collectively enable us to embody what we want the world to be.”
“So let the hegemonic narrative go. We don’t have to fight it. The more we fight it, we give it more energy. It’s like, if you keep saying ‘No, we won’t do that,’ we are repeating what we won’t do, so let’s not fight it. It will die its own death. It’s already impaling itself on its own stupidities.”
“Certain powers would rather have us polarized, and are trying to keep us polarized. We won’t be polarized, we won’t be fragmented. We won’t be fractured. We won’t give in to propaganda. How can we do that? We can do it, and I would say, the best examples I’ve seen in recent times are the stories of the student encampments supporting Palestinian resistance to genocide spread all over the globe. I mean, they just came together. I’m sitting a world away, continents away from them, following their stories, because their stories speak about community, speak about cultural pluriversality, speak about empathy, speak about solidarity, speak about allyship or relationship. They embody what we can do in a very short space of time to create alternative narratives collectively.”
An earlier version of this piece was published here. The complete Seeds Series, Volume 2, is available here.
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