Clarion

Beyond Chicken Little Narratives – Luke Schulz

Jan 22, 2025 |

Screenshot 2025-01-22 at 1.44.56 PMI remember growing up with the narrative of Chicken Little, and it seems to me to be the mainstream narrative adopted by both left and right. The sky is falling because of climate change! The sky is falling because authoritarians are in power! The sky is falling because other people are rich! The sky is falling because those people think differently! The sky is falling because these are the end times! If you truly believe that "the sky is falling", you will be fed plenty of fodder to confirm your biases. And if those spinning narratives can catch you in their web, they will continue to feed on your anxious attention.
 
How you see politics, and everything else, depends on narratives. What is the story you see playing out in the world? Where did that narrative come from? Many of us are intellectually lazy, or ignorant, and so we allow narratives to be fed to us through established channels and corporate media ON BOTH SIDES. But we need to realize that these stories are curated to produce the most angst and thus demand the most attention. It is a business model and a political ploy, designed to capture you and arrest your faculties of investigation. The left is not a mass of evil Communists and the right is not a mob of psychotic Nazis. Have some nuance!
Here's a narrative for you: DEMOCRACY IS WORKING.
 
Across the West, after decades of influence, the left has done a piss poor job representing its proclaimed values and constituents, and a lot of people don't buy the narrative anymore. They didn't become enamoured with the far-right or dictators, they just want something different, because the status quo, the prevailing narrative, seems to have failed them. The only alternative to "same-old" at the moment is the populist right, and until the left re-examines itself and figures out how to better represent and legislate on the values and concerns of its constituents, the populist right will be popular.
 
In democracies, parties must calculate the desires of the population, and deliver on them. If you stray too far from that, the people vote you out. This is how democracy works, and until the left gets new accountants, they leave the populist path to victory open for the right to capitalize on. And they will, until inevitably, the roles reverse. Come back to the public with a better platform and everything will be a-ok.
 
Democracy is simply working as it does. Our problems are not caused by liberal or conservative voters. Our solutions lie ever in new offerings going forward. We will pull through this era. No war has been lost, the sky is not falling, and giving in to panic or anxiety only makes you vulnerable to the false narratives of predators wearing all stripes, who will use their influence to get you to point the finger at your neighbour instead of them.
 
Peace and Love!

Radical Empathy – Felicia Murrell

May 20, 2021 |

Any anti-racist work, any theology that does not allow for a person’s full humanity – the whole of their lived experience from triumph to tragedy is only skimming the surface and will never go deep enough to yield transformation.

Canada’s Shadow Army – Wayne Northey

May 19, 2021 |

Wayne Northey responds to Adnan Kahn's article, "Why Canada’s special forces ‘shadow army’ is still fighting ISIS" (Macleans, May 11, 2021).  Wayne: In short, Canada’s Special Operations Regiment (CSOR) is a bunch of trained hitmen. There is no...