What is Narrative Warfare, and Why Do We Need to Understand It?
Part 2: A Primer on Narrative Warfare
Author’s note: This is the second article in a series about narrative warfare (you can check out Part 1 here). To begin to understand what’s happening to the politics and the storylines in the United States (and around the world), and to understand how it’s affecting our minds, we have to start with the basic building blocks of narrative warfare.
My perspective comes from decades of studying story, psychology, and more recently narrative warfare, although I would never claim to be an expert in any of these areas. This is an attempt to wrap my mind around what’s happening and to help others grapple with it at the same time.
Narrative warfare is the strategic use of stories and information to influence the perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of people, and groups. It’s a targeted effort to shape and manipulate our beliefs about a given topic, person, situation, etc.
It's a form of psychological operation where the battlefield is the territory between your ears—the mind.
Narrative warfare is particularly effective because it uses our very human need for stories. We are wired to process and remember information better when it is given to us in a narrative format. That’s why we remember stories far better and far longer than we remember statistics and facts.
As I wrote in Part 1, stories have been used throughout human history to pass down morals, cultural history, values, norms, and events. Our deep-rooted connection to storytelling is what makes stories/narratives a powerful tool for influencing our perceptions and behaviors.
The primary goal of someone using narrative warfare is to manipulate, influence, and persuade through carefully crafted messages designed to achieve specific outcomes. An effective narrative warfare strategy often takes a very long time to enact—think timelines of months and years—because the effects of their efforts are cumulative and slow. Narrative warfare is not about one storyline. It’s about many storylines strung together over a long period of time.
You might be thinking that narrative warfare sounds like propaganda, but it is different in that propaganda is a tool, while narrative warfare is a broader and more sophisticated overall strategy.
You might be also wondering how this differs from good ol’ political campaign strategy. We’ll talk more about that later, but for now, understand that campaign strategy (in the old days, at least), was more focused on persuasion than manipulation.
Ideally, campaign strategy relies on being transparent about how the candidate operates so they can build consensus and support.
On the other hand, those who use narrative warfare are covert about their operations, and those behind the narrative usually go to great lengths to hide their identities and/or the evidence that they are using narrative warfare.
Often, their primary aim is to destabilize cultures, communities, governments, or organizations by creating discord and confusion.
We’ve seen narrative warfare in the Cold War, when both the US and the USSR used the strategy to promote their ideologies through the media.
We also saw this in the 2016 US elections, when Russia interfered using social media with the intent to spread disinformation.
Why is this important right now?
Let’s zoom in on a moment you’ve probably had. You’re standing at the kitchen counter, or waiting in the car, or waiting in line at the grocery store, and you’re idly scrolling social media. Someone posted something about a candidate that almost instantly enrages you. You go from zero to 90. What do you do?
A lot of the people I’ve talked to fall somewhere between the following two camps. In the first camp, you share and spread the post far and wide, adding all kinds of emojis and opinions, making it clear how wrong wrong wrong you believe this is. You think the world is going to hell and you are mad as a hornet.
In the second camp, you shut down the phone, despair over the state of humanity, and kind of… detach. Subtly throw your hands up. Numb yourself out and, consciously or unconsciously, decide there’s nothing you can do about it.
Now, let’s say you’re the person behind the curtain. Maybe you work at a bot farm, like the one pictured above, that’s been hired to sow and spread misinformation. You’re the very first person who released that enraging post out into the world. What kinds of outcomes would you hope that little social media post would achieve?
In this case, it doesn’t really matter what storylines you post as long as they’re a little confusing and the stories diverge from the main news currently in play just enough to get people thinking, but not enough to make it obvious that it’s a fake story.
Rage, to the point that the meme gets shared again and again and again?
Yes, that is a good outcome.
Detached numbness, a feeling of despair and futility that might even lead someone to believe there’s nothing that can be done?
Yes, I’d say that’s a great outcome, too.
Keep in mind: the individual stories used aren’t the point or the endgame. We get way too focused on whether one news item or another is “fake news” or not. They almost don’t matter.
What matters is what the stories do to you: They make you feel that everything is fucked, no one knows what’s going on, and the world is falling apart.
THAT’s the overarching narrative they want you to believe.
Rage and despair are not the only two outcomes, of course. This is a bit of a false binary used to prove a point. In this scenario, the person behind the curtain wins no matter what happens. The only failure is if it doesn’t spread—but it’s just one in thousands of volleys launched, so the failure of one post means nothing because the overall effect is achieved.
Even if that post is proved false later, how often do we hear about that, with literally billions of new posts being shared every day? And even if that news makes it back to us, how likely are we to believe it—especially if the original lie fits a narrative that we deeply believe?
This is how easily we are manipulated. Because we love stories, because social media is a new kind of battleground, because we hold our beliefs so deeply and strongly, because we are literally scrolling for something to stimulate us.
And that’s why we need to start to detect when we’re being manipulated. It has happened in the past. It will happen throughout this entire election. It is already happening right now.
As always, let me know what questions, ideas, or counterpoints you have — the door is always open.
Also, please feel free to share this newsletter and Part 1, especially if you think it will help someone deal with the stress of the events of the world today.
Do you see narrative warfare, like stress, as having positive and negative use cases? What would be a practical example from history of narrative warfare being used to a positive end?