The Monolith and the Swarm

The Function of Shared Stories

It’s tempting to describe this dependence on story as a cognitive bug, some regrettable bias tacked onto what should be a clean, rational engagement with the world. But this misses what the dependence actually does. Shared narratives aren’t ornamental. They’re functional. They’re what let millions of strangers coordinate without endless haggling. Without shared stories, society becomes one endless committee meeting about whose turn it is to take out the trash.

Think of narrative here less as belief and more as infrastructure. The shared story operates like invisible scaffolding. It holds things in place. It binds communities and cultures. On such scaffolding, cooperation feels natural rather than forced, and obligation feels meaningful rather than arbitrary.

The content of the story matters less than its scope. Societies have organized themselves around very different narratives: divine right, revolutionary destiny, national purpose, civic duty. What matters isn’t if these stories are true in any strong sense, but that they’re mutually recognized. Everyone knows the story. And everyone knows that everyone knows it.

When that condition holds, institutions feel legitimate, laws feel imbued with moral force. Social constraints register not simply as limits, but as duties – things one ought to do, even when no one is watching. Authority works not because it threatens punishment, but because it feels justified.

But when the shared story fractures, the scaffolding weakens. Institutions persist, but something essential drains out of them. The formal structure remains, but the informal buy-in erodes. Authority becomes procedural rather than persuasive. What remains is a structure without conviction, a system that still functions, but increasingly by friction rather than consent.

The Modern Fracture

Modernity keeps trying to solve this problem by inventing new shared narratives. Nationalism. Communism. Fascism. Moral panics. Techno-utopian visions. Modernity has been... experimentally enthusiastic. Almost any narrative that feels meaningful, moral, and participatory can, at least for a time, bind people together, especially where older narratives have already eroded.

But we haven’t dismantled and rebuilt at the same pace. The forces that weakened the old stories scaled more efficiently than the forces required to generate new, widely shared ones. Secularization, pluralism, mass communication, and later digital networks all excel at weakening shared stories. They’re great at dissolving consensus. But they’re much less effective at generating new narratives that are broadly shared and deeply held.

So, inherited narratives thinned faster than new ones could be made credible. The institutions that once drew legitimacy from them lost their footing. Rituals persisted, but felt increasingly hollow. What emerged was not coherence, but a vacuum: a gap between the continued need for shared narrative and the diminished capacity to supply it at scale.

Filling the Vacuum

This vacuum sheds light on things like conspiracy thinking, which we often describe as an epistemic failure. If the problem were primarily about false belief, then better information, more careful reasoning, and improved fact-checking should fix it. They clearly do not. In fact, they often seem to make things worse.

That failure suggests a different diagnosis. Conspiracy thinking isn’t just about belief. It’s about a hunger for highly social narratives. They offer meaning, shared identity, moral clarity, and a sense of belonging. These are social satisfactions that epistemic tools, like facts, evidence, and logic, are not equipped to provide, and so they fail to compete on those terms.

The point isn't to excuse conspiracy thinking, but to explain its grip. Seeing it as a response to a hunger for social narratives, the next step is to ask what kind of environment rewards it.

The Shift in the Public Square

Narrative fragmentation isn’t a cultural accident. It is reinforced by the structure of the modern public square. In earlier periods, narrative production was not necessarily centralized, but constrained – often emerging from communities but filtered through institutions that were widely accepted as authoritative. Churches, schools, tribal elders, trade guilds, and mass media acted as bottlenecks. They limited which stories could gain legitimacy at scale.

That bottleneck has disappeared. In its place is an environment governed by attention. Stories now spread not because they are widely endorsed, but because they’re engaging – emotionally charged, identity-affirming, or provocative. Coherence is not rewarded. Salience is. The algorithm is not, as it happens, a ministry of legitimacy.

What we experience as fragmentation follows from this shift. Legitimacy has been replaced by salience as the organizing principle of the public square. We have traded the stifling stability of the monolith for the proliferating freedom of the swarm. And the swarm, for all its kinetic energy, cannot sustain a shared story. The experience isn’t one of ignorance so much as noise: an excess of meaning without a center, an abundance of stories without a shared point of reference.

The Bind We're In

So modern societies are in a bind. We value pluralism and recoil from imposed authority. We distrust grand narratives, even as we depend on shared ones to make collective life possible. We reject coercion, but rely on legitimacy to keep cooperation from collapsing under its own weight.

If shared narrative really is the scaffolding of social cooperation, then the question isn’t whether fragmentation has costs. It is whether a society can sustain legitimacy without a story it is willing to hold in common.