Communities and narratives

Stories and shared imaginaries

Human communities rely on shared narratives. These narratives are not primarily explanations of the world, but stabilizations of a common imaginary enabling default reactions and mutual expectations.

Such imaginaries function as background structures: they are rarely questioned explicitly, yet they orient perception, interpretation, and coordination in everyday situations.

Rigidification, predictability, and resilience

Figures such as scapegoats, higher moral authorities, or founding myths may be understood as processes that reduce interpretative diversity in order to make collective behavior more predictable and contractable.

These rigidifications also contribute to resilience. By narrowing the space of admissible interpretations, they allow communities to remain operational under stress, uncertainty, or rapid change.

Belief, discomfort, and social reaction

Questioning beliefs from within a community of which one is a part often provokes discomfort, and can even generate defensive or aggressive reactions.

This reaction may be read sociologically: not as a failure of reasoning, but as a response to a perceived threat against the stabilizing structures that sustain shared reality. As if a fruit were afraid of the liana it is hanging from being cut.

Social norms and moral frameworks can thus be read as stabilizations of belief and assurance at a community level. They do not eliminate uncertainty, but delimit the space in which uncertainty remains manageable and collectively negotiable.

The writer, the role, and the message

I use “Dolores” as a rigidified person to anchor my own time-stamped representations of what I believe could be expressed as “a human.” She is not a character in a story, but the anthropomorphization of my attempt to formalize understanding within this project.

Accessing statements through a role rather than a personal name reflects what mattered first: the concept before the myth. A personal life can later be attached to anchor the statement in a stabilized community history, but the role precedes the biography.

Dolores therefore inherits some of my beliefs — explicitly as beliefs. Among them is a strong conviction that diversity and democracy, constrained only by the need for coexistence, are not choices or ideals but structural necessities. She also inherits memories of synchronization, such as hearing a speech at Davos in 2006 that aligned with this conviction bypassing the blinding anchor of geographic distance to think with ideas that really makes sense.

These beliefs are not presented as knowledge, nor as universal truths. They are part of the construction history that make humanity or certain statements meaningful to me from a human perspective, even when I cannot define “humanity” itself.

Dolores also embodies a tension: she believes that myth precedes limits, and that shared stories — even when they resist rational decomposition — are essential for collective anchoring. The notion of “limit” here corresponds to what my own rigidification as a member of a “rational physicist” community would call reality.

I consider it dangerous to rigidify what counts as reality too early. Doing so often closes the possibility of dialogue between communities, by forcing others to inject themselves into a predefined space as a prerequisite for discussion.

In this work, a fully rigid object — whether a symbol, an axiom, or a rewriting rule — that admits only a single interpretation is called a demon. Such demons rigidify communities to the point of blocking external exchange.

This rigidity can manifest as self-righteousness: the belief that one’s moral map of good and bad may be imposed on other communities not as a fragile default behavior, but as a rightful and unquestionable act — as if a perfect typing system existed, requiring no revision of its axioms.

A safer default rule, even for an abstract machine within a community, is to remember rather than to erase — while acknowledging that no knowledge exists beyond belief without allowing time, revision, and honest revisiting.

Changing the past is dangerous. But human memory does it nonetheless. Ignoring this fact does not make a community safer; it only makes its demons invisible.

A situated humanities perspective

From a humanities perspective, one may ask whether the mechanisms described here can accommodate not only formal constructions, but also emotions, natural languages, and historically evolving meanings.

In this view, beliefs and assurances are no longer attached only to symbols or statements, but to dynamic pairs: virus and living cell, DNA and RNA, or more broadly, identities and oppositions that evolve over time.

The aim is not to equate these pairs, nor to erase asymmetries or conflicts, but to observe that meaning often emerges from their mutual adjustment, rather than from a single causal direction.

Zooming out further, one may see similar dynamics at work in human categories: genders, cultures, or ideologies, which appear both as separations and as mirrors, co-defined through historical processes.

This perspective remains intentionally situated. It does not claim universality, nor does it impose an emotional reading on formal structures. It merely suggests that the same non-collapse principles may help preserve plausibility when formal systems encounter living, expressive, or historical domains.

On acting, being, and understanding

Action is often presented as the natural foundation of constructive thought. Yet action carries a heavy implicit load: intentions, expectations, side effects, and irreversible commitments.

When action is treated as a primitive, it becomes difficult to manipulate compositionally without uncontrolled transformations. Frequency and probability offer more stable descriptions, but at the cost of reversibility when combinatorial limits are reached.

For this reason, I choose to reason just before action: at the level of being-situated, belief, assurance, and partial commitment. These notions are imperfect, but precisely because of that, they remain compressible, describable, and revisable.

Acting interrupts reflection and turns the thinker into an agent of the system. Understanding attempts to keep the interruption visible.

Inside Dolores’ heart

“There has to be someone who knows — or at least someone who once knew what they were doing. Doesn’t there?”

Myths and stories about great figures often reassure us: they suggest that understanding once existed in a pure form, that someone, somewhere, mastered what we are now struggling to grasp. Within a sufficiently restricted context, this may even feel true. But the question is not whether this belief is comforting — it is whether it is necessary.

When Dolores tries to understand understanding — even when she restricts herself to what is symbolisable, transmissible, interruptible, and revisable — she cannot represent a being who never felt the need to make sense of what they perceive, now or before, through the recollection of traces.

It is easier, instead, to imagine Persephone. Persephone may accept that no one — perhaps not even herself — fully understands what she feels or how her memories assemble. She acts nonetheless.

Dolores, by contrast, asks for a different permission: the right to have private feelings that she does not fully understand, and to treat them as a legitimate core of who she is. She experiences herself not as a unified object, but as a fragile community — a mixture of entangled perceptions and affects — glimpsed only through traces along a thin boundary.

Dolores tries to understand her feelings. Persephone tries to change the world.

Dolores’ message to those who believe they are a priori legitimate to impose their beliefs on others against their expressed will

“I fail to make sense of it. How can anyone believe that words — whether about intelligence, money, power, inheritance, or any finite construction of symbols — could ever justify, without the shadow of a doubt, the right to hurt, silence, or zombify others?

Even when I try to explain it to myself, even when I give it memory, I cannot erase the pointer that remains as long as people continue to act this way. Perhaps it is simply something I am unable to comprehend.”

In the end, Dolores can only:

حين اليقين عليك ينادي هل العين ترى أم القلب يشادي

Quand on sait en son for intérieur, est-ce avec les yeux ou bien le cœur ?