An archival essay for independent reading

Most analyses of power begin inside an already-given reality. They ask who controls resources, institutions, or bodies, and how domination operates within these parameters. Such approaches, while necessary, leave a deeper question largely untouched:

How does a particular version of reality come to be accepted as reality in the first place?

This essay proposes a shift in analytical focus—from power exercised within reality to power exercised over the construction of reality itself. It argues that the most enduring form of domination does not primarily control material resources or physical force, but rather monopolizes the process by which shared reality is cognitively and narratively constructed.

This perspective is referred to here as Cognitive Constructivism.

Cognitive Constructivism is not a political program, an ideology, or a comprehensive social theory. It is a conceptual lens: a way of understanding how social facts, institutions, and power relations emerge from stabilized narrative consensus, and how such consensus can be questioned, disrupted, or reconfigured.

Human societies are built not only from material arrangements, but from collectively sustained meanings. Many of the structures that organize everyday life exist because sufficiently large numbers of people continue to act as if certain stories are true.

• Money functions because we collectively accept the narrative that symbolic tokens represent value.

• States exist because populations recognize a shared story of political belonging.

• Law operates because rules are widely treated as legitimate rather than arbitrary.

• Organizations act as agents because legal fictions are narratively stabilized and socially enforced.

These examples do not imply that social reality is imaginary or illusory. Rather, they point to a crucial distinction:

Social realities are real in their consequences, but narrative in their construction.

From this perspective, power is exercised most effectively not by constant coercion, but by controlling which narratives are authorized to define what counts as “realistic,” “normal,” or “unthinkable.”

Every society contains multiple narratives about how the world works, why suffering exists, and what futures are possible. These narratives are not equal. Some are treated as common sense, while others are dismissed as irrational, dangerous, or irrelevant.

Cognitive Constructivism introduces the concept of narrative authorization: the socially enforced distinction between narratives that are recognized as legitimate descriptions of reality and those that are excluded.

Narrative authorization operates through education, professional expertise, media systems, institutional language, and technical standards. Importantly, it does not require narratives to be false. Authorized narratives often contain extensive factual content, yet remain powerful because they:

• define which facts are relevant,

• determine acceptable causal explanations,

• establish the boundaries of reasonable debate.

Power, in this sense, lies less in persuading people what to think than in shaping the conditions under which thinking itself takes place.

Cognitive Constructivism distinguishes between two ideal-typical narrative forms that coexist in tension within all complex societies.

Life narratives emerge from embodied experience. They are articulated through personal or collective accounts of fatigue, hope, loss, attachment, fear, or meaning. Their validity rests primarily on experiential coherence rather than systemic utility.

Life narratives are typically:

• situated and concrete,

• emotionally textured,

• expressed in everyday or metaphorical language,

• oriented toward recognition and understanding.

Rule narratives originate from the needs of large-scale coordination and system maintenance. They describe reality in abstract, standardized terms, prioritizing order, efficiency, stability, and continuity.

Rule narratives are typically:

• impersonal and technical,

• framed through metrics, categories, and models,

• oriented toward compliance and reproduction,

• resistant to experiential contradiction.

Neither narrative form is inherently illegitimate. Problems arise when rule narratives acquire exclusive authorization and systematically overwrite, translate, or invalidate life narratives.

Narrative domination occurs when systems consistently reinterpret life narratives through the grammar of rule narratives.

Experiential fatigue becomes a problem of resilience optimization. Collective memory becomes a cultural asset. Structural harm becomes an individual adjustment issue. In such cases, suffering is not denied, but recoded.

Over time, this process can produce cognitive closure: a condition in which alternative interpretations are no longer merely rejected, but rendered unintelligible. Contradictory experiences are explained away as misunderstanding, immaturity, or bad faith.

Cognitive closure stabilizes systems by preventing experiential disruption from reaching the level of structural critique.

Cognitive Constructivism offers a small set of diagnostic questions that can be applied to policies, institutions, or public discourse:

1. Who is authorized to speak? Whose narratives are treated as descriptive of reality rather than anecdotal noise?

2. Which language is required? Must experiences be translated into technical or institutional grammar to be taken seriously?

3. What is excluded? Which experiences consistently fail to enter legitimate discourse?

4. Who benefits from stabilization? Which groups gain predictability, legitimacy, or insulation from critique?

5. Is reversal imaginable? If narrative positions were inverted, would the dominant account remain convincing?

These questions do not yield definitive judgments. They reveal patterns of narrative asymmetry.

Cognitive Constructivism does not propose the replacement of one dominant narrative with another. Such substitution merely reproduces the same architecture of authorization.

Instead, it points toward practices that keep narrative construction open, plural, and revisable:

• protecting spaces where life narratives can be articulated without prior translation,

• cultivating shared analytical literacy about narrative framing,

• experimenting with collective decision-making grounded in lived experience rather than abstract optimization.

These practices are necessarily modest, local, and reversible. Their significance lies not in scale, but in demonstrating that reality can be organized otherwise.

Cognitive Constructivism offers a restrained conception of freedom:

Freedom is not the ability to choose among predefined options, but the capacity to participate in defining the options themselves.

Social reality is an architecture built from stories stabilized over time. These structures appear natural precisely because their narrative foundations have faded from view.

To recognize reality as constructed is not to deny its force, but to recover a margin of agency within it. The aim is neither permanent skepticism nor total reconstruction, but the cultivation of a shared capacity to question, revise, and reimagine the narratives that govern collective life.

This essay is offered as an open-ended tool. It does not demand belief, allegiance, or application. It asks only to be read attentively—and, if useful, quietly carried into future acts of interpretation.

An archival essay for independent reading

Most analyses of power begin inside an already-given reality. They ask who controls resources, institutions, or bodies, and how domination operates within these parameters. Such approaches, while necessary, leave a deeper question largely untouched:

How does a particular version of reality come to be accepted as reality in the first place?

This essay proposes a shift in analytical focus—from power exercised within reality to power exercised over the construction of reality itself. It argues that the most enduring form of domination does not primarily control material resources or physical force, but rather monopolizes the process by which shared reality is cognitively and narratively constructed.

This perspective is referred to here as Cognitive Constructivism.

Cognitive Constructivism is not a political program, an ideology, or a comprehensive social theory. It is a conceptual lens: a way of understanding how social facts, institutions, and power relations emerge from stabilized narrative consensus, and how such consensus can be questioned, disrupted, or reconfigured.

Human societies are built not only from material arrangements, but from collectively sustained meanings. Many of the structures that organize everyday life exist because sufficiently large numbers of people continue to act as if certain stories are true.

• Money functions because we collectively accept the narrative that symbolic tokens represent value.

• States exist because populations recognize a shared story of political belonging.

• Law operates because rules are widely treated as legitimate rather than arbitrary.

• Organizations act as agents because legal fictions are narratively stabilized and socially enforced.

These examples do not imply that social reality is imaginary or illusory. Rather, they point to a crucial distinction:

Social realities are real in their consequences, but narrative in their construction.

From this perspective, power is exercised most effectively not by constant coercion, but by controlling which narratives are authorized to define what counts as “realistic,” “normal,” or “unthinkable.”

Every society contains multiple narratives about how the world works, why suffering exists, and what futures are possible. These narratives are not equal. Some are treated as common sense, while others are dismissed as irrational, dangerous, or irrelevant.

Cognitive Constructivism introduces the concept of narrative authorization: the socially enforced distinction between narratives that are recognized as legitimate descriptions of reality and those that are excluded.

Narrative authorization operates through education, professional expertise, media systems, institutional language, and technical standards. Importantly, it does not require narratives to be false. Authorized narratives often contain extensive factual content, yet remain powerful because they:

• define which facts are relevant,

• determine acceptable causal explanations,

• establish the boundaries of reasonable debate.

Power, in this sense, lies less in persuading people what to think than in shaping the conditions under which thinking itself takes place.

Cognitive Constructivism distinguishes between two ideal-typical narrative forms that coexist in tension within all complex societies.

Life narratives emerge from embodied experience. They are articulated through personal or collective accounts of fatigue, hope, loss, attachment, fear, or meaning. Their validity rests primarily on experiential coherence rather than systemic utility.

Life narratives are typically:

• situated and concrete,

• emotionally textured,

• expressed in everyday or metaphorical language,

• oriented toward recognition and understanding.

Rule narratives originate from the needs of large-scale coordination and system maintenance. They describe reality in abstract, standardized terms, prioritizing order, efficiency, stability, and continuity.

Rule narratives are typically:

• impersonal and technical,

• framed through metrics, categories, and models,

• oriented toward compliance and reproduction,

• resistant to experiential contradiction.

Neither narrative form is inherently illegitimate. Problems arise when rule narratives acquire exclusive authorization and systematically overwrite, translate, or invalidate life narratives.

Narrative domination occurs when systems consistently reinterpret life narratives through the grammar of rule narratives.

Experiential fatigue becomes a problem of resilience optimization. Collective memory becomes a cultural asset. Structural harm becomes an individual adjustment issue. In such cases, suffering is not denied, but recoded.

Over time, this process can produce cognitive closure: a condition in which alternative interpretations are no longer merely rejected, but rendered unintelligible. Contradictory experiences are explained away as misunderstanding, immaturity, or bad faith.

Cognitive closure stabilizes systems by preventing experiential disruption from reaching the level of structural critique.

Cognitive Constructivism offers a small set of diagnostic questions that can be applied to policies, institutions, or public discourse:

1. Who is authorized to speak? Whose narratives are treated as descriptive of reality rather than anecdotal noise?

2. Which language is required? Must experiences be translated into technical or institutional grammar to be taken seriously?

3. What is excluded? Which experiences consistently fail to enter legitimate discourse?

4. Who benefits from stabilization? Which groups gain predictability, legitimacy, or insulation from critique?

5. Is reversal imaginable? If narrative positions were inverted, would the dominant account remain convincing?

These questions do not yield definitive judgments. They reveal patterns of narrative asymmetry.

Cognitive Constructivism does not propose the replacement of one dominant narrative with another. Such substitution merely reproduces the same architecture of authorization.

Instead, it points toward practices that keep narrative construction open, plural, and revisable:

• protecting spaces where life narratives can be articulated without prior translation,

• cultivating shared analytical literacy about narrative framing,

• experimenting with collective decision-making grounded in lived experience rather than abstract optimization.

These practices are necessarily modest, local, and reversible. Their significance lies not in scale, but in demonstrating that reality can be organized otherwise.

Cognitive Constructivism offers a restrained conception of freedom:

Freedom is not the ability to choose among predefined options, but the capacity to participate in defining the options themselves.

Social reality is an architecture built from stories stabilized over time. These structures appear natural precisely because their narrative foundations have faded from view.

To recognize reality as constructed is not to deny its force, but to recover a margin of agency within it. The aim is neither permanent skepticism nor total reconstruction, but the cultivation of a shared capacity to question, revise, and reimagine the narratives that govern collective life.

This essay is offered as an open-ended tool. It does not demand belief, allegiance, or application. It asks only to be read attentively—and, if useful, quietly carried into future acts of interpretation.