---
description: Shared stories from religious texts to scientific theories function as coordination mechanisms that organize collective behavior, not merely as ways to transmit information
type: claim
domain: cultural-dynamics
created: 2026-02-16
confidence: likely
source: "TeleoHumanity Axioms (8-axiom version)"
---

# narratives are infrastructure not just communication because they coordinate action at civilizational scale

The standard view treats narratives as cultural artifacts -- stories we tell to make sense of things. But the TeleoHumanity axioms reframe narratives as coordination infrastructure on par with roads or legal systems. When narratives break down, societies fracture. When new narratives emerge, they reorganize civilization. The scientific revolution was not primarily about new discoveries but about a new story of how knowledge is created and validated.

This reframing matters because it implies narrative design is systems engineering. If narratives coordinate action, then constructing a new worldview is not a philosophical exercise but an infrastructure project. The axioms themselves are an attempt at this: a minimum viable narrative designed to enable distributed coordination without central control.

The claim also explains why narrative collapse is so dangerous. Since [[civilization was built on the false assumption that humans are rational individuals]], the expiration of that fiction creates a coordination vacuum. Building replacement narrative infrastructure is not optional -- it is the prerequisite for every other coordination challenge.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[civilization was built on the false assumption that humans are rational individuals]] -- the narrative that is currently failing
- [[useful fictions have shelf lives and the rational individual fiction has expired]] -- why new narrative infrastructure is urgently needed
- [[history is shaped by coordinated minorities with clear purpose not by majorities]] -- narratives enable the coordination that minorities use to shape history
- [[memeplexes survive by combining mutually reinforcing memes that protect each other from external challenge through untestability threats and identity attachment]] -- memeplexes are the mechanism that makes narrative infrastructure persistent and resistant to change
- [[language evolved primarily to spread memes not to benefit genes because no genetic theory adequately explains why humans alone developed grammatical speech]] -- language is the foundational meme-spreading infrastructure on which narrative coordination depends

- [[diagnosis is the most undervalued element of strategy because naming the challenge correctly simplifies overwhelming complexity into a problem that can be addressed]] -- reframing narratives from cultural artifact to coordination infrastructure IS a diagnosis: it names the challenge (broken infrastructure, not broken psychology) and transforms the intervention (systems engineering, not philosophical debate)
- [[all major social theory traditions converge on master narratives as the substrate of large-scale coordination despite using different terminology]] -- five independent scholarly traditions arrive at the narrative-as-infrastructure conclusion, establishing the claim on multi-tradition evidential ground
- [[Berger and Luckmanns plausibility structures reveal that master narrative maintenance requires institutional power not just cultural appeal]] -- adds the maintenance dimension: infrastructure requires ongoing institutional maintenance, not just initial construction
- [[print capitalism determined which scales of collective identity became cognitively available by creating simultaneity among anonymous strangers]] -- Anderson specifies the medium-infrastructure layer: narrative content requires a medium whose structural properties make the target identity scale cognitively available

Topics:
- [[livingip overview]]
- [[civilizational foundations]]