At one time; that the world was round, that life evolves, that the universe is expanding, that all people are equal but narratives and opinions not, and all that goes with that were fringe narratives -- in that they radically altered how we understood ourselves and our place in the universe.
They challenged and changed the narratives of the day, which we experience both individually and culturally as discomfort, anger and even rage. When we've invested much of our life in a narrative, no matter how disliked, we naturally resist discovering that it was based on flawed assumptions or irrational logic.
Fringe narratives and their architects are easy to dismiss, resist, demean and even condemn, but it's always the fringe that opens up new lines of inquiry and discovery.
It's easy today to get hold of well articulated fringe narratives, and although we need to deepen our learning, it’s just as healthy to broaden it.
So how exactly do we go about dealing with the fringe narrative, how do we discern the transformational from the clinically insane, because here the herd mentality doesn't help?
Is it coherent and well articulated -- it doesn't need to make sense as judged against the narrative of the day, but does it make sense on its own. Has the architect spent at least a decade in deep inquiry? Can it deliver predictable outcomes, and this is the key.
A narrative may be almost completely indigestible, but can it predict or be used to obtain predetermined outcomes. This is the holy grail of narratives.
A love of learning includes a love for those perspectives and narratives, which leave us feeling vulnerable and more than a little uncomfortable.
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