Political Narratology. How Stories Shape Power and Compliance

In such messianic times, the present is merely a trial, and the future is the reward.

This makes sacrifices possible; they acquire meaning and necessary value.

The Manipulation of Expectations

Politics does not deceive directly or openly. It always actively works with expectations. Promises can be vague, deferred, reformulated, postponed to the next generation, and explained by external circumstances.

Fulfilment is not the point; sustaining expectation is. Expectation is crucial – when it disappears, the narrative collapses.

We Are on the Threshold

One of the most persistent formulas of political time is the sensation of a threshold. ‘We stand on the threshold of change’, ‘we are at the final line’, ‘we are close to a turning point’.

Threshold time mobilises without demanding immediate results, keeping society perfectly in tense anticipation. The danger is different: the threshold can last indefinitely.

Generational Time

Political narratives always address generations. Some are told, ‘You must endure for the sake of the children’; others, ‘You are reaping the fruits of your parents’ sacrifices.’

Thus, responsibility is distributed across time, and discontent is softened by a moral argument.

A generation becomes the bearer of an imposed debt.

Time as an Instrument of Exclusion

The control of time is also control over a person’s belongings. Those who ‘do not understand the historical moment’ are declared backward; those who are ‘ahead of their time’ are dangerous; those who ‘live in the past’ are obstructive. In this way, time acquires another quality – it becomes a marker of loyalty.

When the Future Disappears

The most alarming moment is the disappearance of the future from the narrative. When power no longer promises but only warns. When the opposition does not propose but only exposes. When society stops asking the question ‘Where?’

At this moment, politics becomes the management of present fear without a definable horizon of the future.

Cynicism as Temporal Fatigue

Political cynicism appears as distrust of words, but in fact, it is fatigue with time. People stop believing not because they were lied to, but because promises no longer correlate with the lived present.

When the gap becomes too great, the narrative loses its power.

Why Understanding Temporal Architecture is Important

Understanding political time allows one to see what exactly is holding them: a promise, fear, urgency, anticipation, memory, guilt, or hope.

A person cannot step out of time, but they can see which time they are being made to live in. And this understanding is the first step towards freedom of interpretation.

The next question is inevitable: ‘If politics manages time in this way, is it possible to govern without narratives at all?’

Chapter 10. Why Politics is Inevitably Narrative

Myth thinks in men.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

The Illusion of a Post-Narrative World

Contemporary people often believe that politics can be ‘technical’. That it can be managed by experts, algorithms, calculations, models, charts, neural networks, process optimisation.

It seems possible to dispense with stories and retain only management. But this is an illusion.

Even the most technocratic governance must still answer the questions: ‘Why?’ ‘For what purpose?’ ‘In whose interests?’ ‘Towards what future?’

And that is no longer technique – it is meaning.

Governance Without Meaning is Impossible

You can manage a machine without explanation; you can manage a process without emotion. But you cannot govern a society without answering the question ‘why?’

A human is not a mechanism; they cannot comply merely because an instruction is logical. They comply when they understand what is happening, accept a role, see a justification, feel a sense of belonging, and believe in a direction. All these elements reside in the realm of narrative.

Even the Rejection of Narrative is a Narrative

When a government says, ‘We have no ideology’, ‘We simply do what works’, ‘We are above politics’, it is already telling a story.

A story of rationality, neutrality, inevitability, maturity. And this, too, is a narrative – merely one masquerading as the absence of narrative.

It is also dangerous because it appears as the natural state of things, an existing given.

Politics as the Editing of Reality

Politics does not create reality from scratch – it edits it. It chooses what counts as cause, what as effect, what as background, what as centre, what as coincidence, and what as pattern. Editing is the right and the act of the storyteller.

Why ‘Pure Facts’ Do Not Work

A fact is an element; a narrative is the connection. Without connection, facts do not persuade and quickly become tiresome. Their excess without a story creates a sense of chaos.

In chaos, a person seeks someone who will offer a simple, comprehensible frame. Therefore, politics that renounces narrative always yields to politics that offers it.

Politics as Work with Identity

No society exists without answers to the questions: ‘Who are we?’ ‘Where do we come from?’ ‘What unites us?’ ‘What threatens us?’ ‘What is unacceptable to us?’. These are not philosophical questions but questions of a community’s elementary survival.

They cannot be answered with a calculated formula. The only answer is a story.

Narrative as a Form of Legitimacy

People submit not to an institution of power, but to the story that justifies it.

When the narrative collapses, the institutions remain – but cease to function. They begin to be bypassed, mimicked, sabotaged, ridiculed. And then power is forced to rely on coercion.

Violence as a Substitute for Story

When a story no longer convinces, force appears. This is a universal law of politics – violence signals the failure of narrative.

Where words have stopped working, batons, prisons, exclusions, and stigmatisation begin to work.

Violence never creates a sustainable story; it temporarily fills a void.

Why It Is Impossible to ‘Just Govern

The dream of governance without story is a dream of people without memory, without emotion, without identity. One could not call such people healthy.

Even if one tries to raise them as such, they will inevitably begin to create alternative narratives: rumours, jokes, myths, underground histories, ironic versions of the official tale.

A story always returns, in a different form or content.

Political Narrative as a Field of Conflict

Politics is inevitably narrative for another reason: narratives always compete. If one story fails to provide meaning, another appears. If one explains things in a complex way, another explains them more simply; if one is difficult to understand, another is seductively clear. The vacuum of story is never left empty.

The Attempt to Ban Stories

From time to time, power attempts to ban narratives. It bans interpretations, versions, alternative descriptions, and questions. But prohibition does not destroy a story; it drives it underground.

And underground stories are far more radical and dangerous than official ones.

Why Myths Are Stronger Than Exposés

An exposé destroys a specific story, but it does not necessarily offer a new one. A person deprived of their story does not become free – they become vulnerable.

Therefore, destroying a narrative without replacement almost always leads to a new, often harsher, myth.

Politics as a Struggle for Interpretation, Not Truth

Truth in politics is important but insufficient. What matters is who explains the truth, how, in what form, for whom, with what tone and emotion.

Politics is not a competition of facts; it is a competition of interpretations.

Why This Cannot Be Abolished by Reforms

You can reform institutions, change procedures, and renew elites.

But if the narrative is not renewed, everything returns to its former state. Reforms without a story are perceived as a reaction born of impotence; a story without reforms is perceived as a declared lie.

Awareness of Narrative Does Not Neutralise Its Effect

It is important to understand: awareness does not render a person completely free. Even knowing you are inside a story, you still continue to live within it. But the difference between blind participation and conscious participation is vast – awareness creates distance.

Political Maturity as the Ability to Live with Stories

A mature society is one where narratives can be discussed, contested, compared, and changed. Where the story is neither sacralised nor devalued. Where people know that any political reality is a story about the world, not the world itself.

Why This Book Begins Here

Once you understand that politics is inevitably narrative, you can no longer ask: ‘Why are they lying to us?’

The correct question is different: ‘What story are we being offered – and why?’

From this moment, the essence of the conversation changes. And from here, we will no longer speak about the fact that narratives exist but about how they are constructed, maintained, and destroyed.

This concludes the first part. Next – the mechanics of power.

Part II. The Mechanics of Power

Introduction

In the first part of this book, we discussed why politics inevitably becomes history. We talked about how facts transform into meanings, how a collective ‘we’ emerges from language, how the past and future are rewritten depending on the present. Now it is necessary to take the next step. Simply understanding the nature of the political narrative is not enough.

Any story, once it has arisen, must be held, defended, repeated, reinforced, and passed on. And it is precisely here that the mechanics of power begin to operate.

If in the book Theoretical Narratology the narrative was examined as a universal form of human thought, and in the book Applied Narratology as a tool influencing the private life, choices and identity of an individual or a community of people, then in politics the narrative becomes an entire infrastructure. Not an idea, not an opinion, but a full-fledged system.

Power as the Management of Explanations

Power is usually described through its institutions: parliament, courts, the army, police, ministries. But these forms are secondary.

Before power becomes law, it becomes an explanation. Before an order appears, its justification arises. Before submission occurs, a story emerges in which that submission appears reasonable. Power exists thanks to the ability to hold the right to interpret what is happening. What is considered a crisis, what is the norm, what is a threat, and what is an acceptable risk and a necessary sacrifice? The mechanics of power is the mechanics of meaning.

Why Stability is More Important Than Force

Political power is difficult to maintain through violence alone: violence is costly, unstable, and does not scale well. Power that does not require constant coercion is far more effective; it reproduces itself through language, is supported by rituals, and is habitually perceived as the surrounding landscape.

Such power does not look like power; it looks like reason, common sense, tradition, inevitability, responsibility. Anything but power. That is precisely why the key questions in our exposition become not ‘Who rules?’ and not ‘What decisions have been made?’ but ‘Why do people submit to this?’ ‘When do people stop believing?’ and ‘What happens when the story no longer works?’

From Private Narrative to Mass Narrative

In the book Applied Narratology, we saw how a narrative governs the life of an individual person, their choice of profession, their attitude towards the body, time, age, pleasure, and responsibility. In politics, the same thing happens, but on the scale of society.

And here one transition is especially important: what in private life looks like a habit or a personal choice, in politics becomes a norm, and then an obligation.

An individual narrative can be changed. And a political one can too, but it is much more difficult. Because behind such a narrative stand not only the words and their constructions but also entire institutions, sanctions, rituals, expectations, and collective emotions.

When Power is Strongest Where It is Invisible

The most stable forms of power operate inconspicuously. They do not require constant orders. People themselves know how to think, speak, and feel ‘correctly’. They repeat the necessary formulas, shame others for deviations, explain events only in permissible terms; they experience fear, not so much of punishment, but of exclusion.

The mechanics of power is not only the control of actions. It is the control of everything that accompanies actions: interpretations, pace, pauses, and silence.

What This Part is About

In the following chapters, we will not be talking about ‘evil regimes’ or ‘bad leaders’. We will be analysing why power is recognised as legitimate, how it loses the right to tell the story, why the image of the future is more important than the memory of the past, how promises turn into a contract, why a leader becomes a character, how rituals replace content, why the language of power becomes more complex, and why silence frightens power more than protest.

And all of this is not an exposé: it is the anatomy and physiology of power.

Why Understand the Mechanics of Power

Understanding mechanisms, anatomy, or physiology does not automatically make a person free, but it gives them a chance not to be completely blind. Those who do not see what power consists of and how it works almost inevitably begin to explain what is happening in the language of power itself.

This part of the book is an attempt to return to the reader the distance between an event and its explanation, between a decision and its justification, between reality and the story into which it is packaged. Because power begins where explanation ceases to be a subject for discussion.

And it is with the question of legitimacy that we continue.

Chapter 11. Legitimacy: Why People Submit

A tyrant has only two eyes, two hands, one body – and nothing more beyond that, save the power you give him.

Étienne de La Boétie

Submission as an Enigma

The most interesting question that politics poses is not about forms of coercion and violence, but about forms of unforced consent.

History knows countless regimes in which millions of people obeyed orders, laws, restrictions, and sacrifices without being under constant physical compulsion. Moreover, they often defended that power, justified it, reproduced its language, and punished those who doubted it.

If power were only fear, why does it endure for years, decades, sometimes centuries, even when fear subsides?

Why do people submit not only under the whip but voluntarily?

The answer to this question is legitimacy.

Legitimacy Is Not Legality

In everyday speech, legitimacy is often confused with legality. But these are different substances: legality is formal conformity to rules; legitimacy is the recognition of those rules.

One can have an entirely lawful power that is not perceived as ’one’s own’. And one can have a power that violates formal procedures yet is accepted as necessary and justified.

Legitimacy is not so much a legal category as it is a psychological and narrative state of society, in which submission appears reasonable, inevitable, and right.

That is precisely why the question ‘Why do people submit?’ cannot be resolved by reference to constitutions, courts, or procedures. All this is decided in the space of narratives.

Weber and the Three Sources of Belief

Max Weber proposed the classic typology of legitimacy: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal. It is often recited mechanically, as a textbook list, but behind it lies an important insight.

All three forms are not types of power – they are types of belief.

People submit because they believe in the person, in the order, in the procedure. Not simultaneously and not necessarily consciously, but they believe.

Charisma, tradition, and rationality are different narratives of justification for submission, different stories about why this particular power is permissible.

Charisma: The Power of Exceptionality

Charismatic legitimacy arises where power is linked to a person. Not to an institution, not to a rule, but to a specific figure who appears exceptional.

The charismatic leader is a character in the story in whom expectations, fears, hopes, and projections are concentrated. They are attributed with special vision, destiny, a mission, and a connection to the future or the past. They may break the rules, and paradoxically, this very fact is taken as proof of their strength.

But charisma is unstable; it lives only as long as it is sustained by a story of success. Failure destroys it instantly.

That is why charismatic power either rapidly institutionalises or collapses irretrievably.

Tradition: The Power of Habit

Traditional legitimacy is the quietest and the most resilient. It requires no adulation; habit is sufficient.

People submit because ’it has always been this way’, ’it is customary’, ’this is how the world is ordered’. Here, there is no need to explain every decision; it is enough to refer to the order of things.

Tradition is a narrative in which time works for power, and the past serves as an argument.

But this form of legitimacy has its own weakness: it weathers abrupt change poorly. When the world accelerates, the traditional narrative begins to appear archaic and rapidly loses persuasiveness.

Rationality: The Power of Procedure

Rational-legal legitimacy is built on belief in rules. Not in people and not in the past, but in procedures. Here, people submit not because they love the power, but because they consider the system as a whole to be fair, or at least predictable.

Laws, elections, courts, and regulations – all these are elements of a narrative in which power appears impersonal and therefore purportedly neutral.

But rationality, too, requires belief. As soon as procedures begin to be perceived as a fiction, this form of legitimacy collapses faster than any other.

Legitimacy as a Story about Justice

All forms of legitimacy share a common element: they tell a story about justice. Justice may be understood in different ways: as the will of the leader, as fidelity to tradition, or as adherence to rules. But without a sense of justice, submission becomes fragile.

A person can endure inconvenience, restrictions, and even suffering if these are embedded in a story where justice exists.

When this story of justice disappears, nothing remains but bare coercion. And that does not work for long.

Submission as Participation

One of the most dangerous myths is the conception of submission as a passive state. In reality, submission is a form of participation. A person always participates in the reproduction of power when they repeat its language, when they explain its decisions, when they justify its mistakes, and when they condemn those who doubt. They participate even when they censor themselves internally.

Legitimate power conserves resources because people do part of its work themselves. This is precisely why legitimacy is power’s chief capital. Armies, police, and laws are necessary for its functioning, but they are secondary.

When Submission Becomes the Norm

The most stable moment of legitimacy is when the question ‘Why do we submit?’ ceases to arise. At that moment, power becomes a convenient background. It is not discussed, not problematised, not recognised as a choice.

People begin to perceive the order as natural and the alternative as dangerous, naïve, or irresponsible.

This is the peak of narrative force.

Cracks in Legitimacy

Legitimacy does not vanish suddenly. It is eroded gradually. First, a discrepancy appears between the story and experience, then doubt arises, then cynicism. And only then – open conflict.

When power continues to tell the same story, and reality fits into it less and less, submission itself begins to demand ever greater effort.

It is precisely this moment that we will examine next, in the chapter on how power loses its right to the story.

Why This Understanding Matters

Understanding legitimacy is a way not to confuse submission with necessity nor order with truth. A person who sees how belief in power arises ceases to perceive it as a natural background, even if it is a convenient one.

They may still continue to submit, but now consciously. And conscious submission is, at the very least, less dangerous than blind submission.

Because legitimacy is not something that power possesses once and for all. It is something that society each day either confirms or refuses to confirm.

And in this lies the hidden point of freedom, from which political thinking begins.

Chapter 12. When Power Loses Its Right to the Story

Power weakens when its explanations grow longer than society’s patience.

A contemporary analytical formula

The Loss of Power Does Not Begin with Revolt

It is customary to think that power collapses due to uprisings, coups, economic disasters, or external pressure. But that is already the final stage.

A real crisis of power begins earlier, at the moment its story ceases to work. When people still obey but no longer believe; when words continue to sound but no longer evoke either a response or support. When the language of power remains the same, but the internal consent of the masses disappears.

Power may retain control over institutions, the army, the economy, but if it loses its right to the story, it begins to exist in a state of deferred disintegration.

What The Right to the Story Means

The right to the story is not a formality; it is society’s agreement to accept the interpretations of power as plausible.

Power possesses this right so long as its explanations seem credible, align with everyday experience, give meaning to what is happening, promise a future, or at least explain its absence.

As soon as these conditions are violated, a rupture emerges between words and reality. And it is precisely this rupture that is the beginning of the end.

Discrepancy as the First Symptom

The loss of narrative power begins with micro-cracks. People notice that official explanations no longer match what they see and experience. That the language of power becomes either too optimistic, too abstract, or overtly defensive.

A sense of falseness appears. Not necessarily lies – specifically falseness.

It is important to understand the distinction here: people can tolerate a lie for a long time if it is embedded in a convincing story. But they cannot endure meaninglessness.

Repetition Without Conviction