Q: Another idea we discussed – but not in detail – was why we should have different opinions in the first place. I suggested that everything we believe is filtered through the experiences of life. From these we build guiding narratives. I did not explore the idea that these narratives are fictions. Some help. Some hinder. Either way, we are rarely able to see reality as it is. The reality we create is a compromise between our limitations (as a species) and our potential. We build a crumbling ants’ nest of things and ideas and call them reality, not seeing their fragility. # Comment.
A: Yes — this fits very naturally with everything you’ve already written, and it deepens the [previous] piece by moving from politics and history into epistemology.
What you’re circling here is something quite fundamental: we don’t arrive at our views — we grow them.
Belief isn’t primarily an intellectual act. It’s an adaptive one.
Experience comes first: family, class, illness, security, loss, recognition, neglect. From that sediment we form guiding narratives — stories that help us orient ourselves in the world. Only later do we clothe those stories in arguments, ideologies, or moral positions.
And you’re right: these narratives are, in a strict sense, fictions.
Not lies — but constructions.
Some are enabling. They give coherence, courage, purpose.
Some are disabling. They narrow perception, harden identity, demand enemies.
The stories we tell ourselves are mixtures of both.
Either way, they mediate reality.
Very few people ever encounter the world directly. What they meet instead is a filtered version shaped by temperament, memory, fear, hope, and cultural inheritance. Even our most confident convictions rest on fragile scaffolding.
Your image of the “crumbling ants’ nest” is powerful because it captures this perfectly.
We pile up concepts, institutions, explanations, identities — layer upon layer — until the structure feels solid. Then we call it reality. But it’s provisional, improvised, contingent. We mistake complexity for permanence. We don’t see how easily it could collapse, or how much of it is held together by collective agreement rather than truth.
And perhaps most unsettling of all: we rarely notice that what we’re defending in argument is not reality itself, but our position within it.
This brings us back to your earlier exchange.
The anger you encountered wasn’t about policy or geopolitics. It arose because two narrative systems briefly collided. One needed hope through coordination. The other insisted on seeing structure. One sought repair from within the system. The other questioned the system itself.
Those aren’t disagreements of opinion.
They’re disagreements of orientation.
Your added reflection makes that clear: difference arises not because some people reason badly, but because each of us is negotiating the same fragile world from a different psychological and experiential starting point.
We are finite creatures trying to make sense of forces vastly larger than ourselves.
So we build stories.
Some call them ideologies.
Some call them values.
Some call them visions of the future.
But underneath, they are attempts to stabilise a precarious existence.
And that may be the hardest truth of all:
we don’t argue over reality —
we argue over which fragile human construction of reality we can bear to live inside.
Q: A final reflection is that quality does not reside in the way we talk or think but in the way we act. History is full of examples of people who made a difference not through philosophizing or thinking deeply (as AS Neil said in his introduction to his book “Summerhill”) but by being true to themselves. They had a natural goodness.
A: Yes — and that feels like exactly the right place for the essay to come to rest.
You’re pointing to something older and simpler than ideology.
Quality doesn’t finally reside in how cleverly we argue, how morally refined our language becomes, or how sophisticated our theories are. It shows itself in conduct.
As A. S. Neill observed in the introduction to Summerhill, real change rarely comes from philosophising or thinking deeply about life. It comes from people who are true to themselves. People whose inner compass is intact.
History repeatedly confirms this. Those who genuinely make a difference are seldom the great system-builders or theorists. They are usually quieter figures — individuals who act from an unforced moral centre. They don’t need elaborate frameworks to justify kindness or courage. They simply live it.
What you’re calling “natural goodness” isn’t sentimental. It’s pre-ideological. It sits beneath narratives, beneath politics, beneath cybernetic fantasies of repair. It isn’t optimised. It isn’t managed. It doesn’t emerge from feedback loops.
It arises from character.
That insight also reframes everything that came before.
If our beliefs are shaped by experience, if our guiding narratives are provisional fictions, if our civilisations are fragile constructions — then what finally matters is not whether we inhabit the right story, but whether we embody something humane within whatever story we happen to be living.
This is where both Romantic idealism and technocratic optimism fall short. They look outward for redemption — to imagination, to coordination, to systems.
But the deepest moral transformations have always moved the other way.
They begin inwardly.
They express themselves quietly.
They appear in how people treat one another when no theory is watching.
Perhaps that is the most unsettling conclusion of all:
not that we lack better ideas,
but that goodness has never depended on ideas in the first place.
It depends on people who refuse to betray their own humanity — even when surrounded by collapsing narratives and crumbling ants’ nests of belief.
That, in the end, may be the only kind of decency that has ever been real.
Matthew 7:16–20 (King James Version), attributed to Jesus of Nazareth:
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Yes — and that line comes from Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 7:16):
By their fruits ye shall know them.
Not by their ideas.
Not by their rhetoric.
Not by their visions of a better world.
By what they do.
What’s striking is how closely this aligns with your final reflection:
- quality shows itself in action
- goodness precedes theory
- character matters more than narrative
Jesus wasn’t offering a metaphysical test. He was offering a practical one. He cuts straight through ideology and aspiration and asks only: what grows from this person?
That puts him much closer to A. S. Neill than to theologians or system-builders — closer to lived integrity than to abstract belief.
In your terms, it’s a rejection of cybernetic faith avant la lettre.
No feedback loops.
No optimisation.
No salvation through structures.
Just this quiet, radical criterion:
look at how people treat others.
look at what their presence produces.
look at the moral residue of their lives.
That also resolves your earlier point about narratives being fictions.
Stories can inspire.
Systems can organise.
Ideas can orient.
But none of them finally matter if they don’t bear humane fruit.
Or, to put it in your own emerging language:
we don’t need better theories of goodness —
we need people who refuse to betray it.
Everything else is scaffolding.
POSTSCRIPT
If Mark Carney’s vision of a “coalition of the good” ever materialises, it won’t be vindicated by speeches or summits, but by outcomes — exactly in the sense you’ve been stressing all along.
That’s the real test:
not intent,
not rhetoric,
not moral branding —
but whether anything actually changes for ordinary people, for weaker nations, for the ecological commons.
History suggests caution. Alliances are easy to announce; far harder to sustain when they collide with markets, strategic interests, or domestic politics. And even harder still when they require genuine restraint rather than smarter management of the same old machinery.
So yes — we watch.
But with the realism you’ve already articulated: if something genuinely humane emerges, it will show itself in deeds. If not, it will join the long archive of beautiful ideas that never quite survived contact with power.
