Narrative Control in a Disoriented Age 2/2
Destiny by Design — Why America Turned to Prophetic Narratives in an Age of Uncertainty
"A society without myth is a society without meaning."
— Emile Durkheim (paraphrased)
For some, the rise of DEI efforts and social change wasn’t felt as progress—it was experienced as loss (Hochschild, 2016; Cramer, 2016). If someone else moves forward, they must be falling behind. In that worldview, identity becomes zero-sum, and myth becomes armor.
Moments like this one aren’t rare anymore. The collapse of institutional trust doesn’t just leave a vacuum of authority—it leaves a vacuum of coherence.
That’s where books like The Fourth Turning (Strauss & Howe, 1997) or The Next 100 Years (Friedman, 2009) come in. They’re not forecasts. They’re designed myths. They don’t offer nuance. They offer structure. Predictable arcs. Roles to play. Certainty that sticks—even if it’s wrong.
We don’t reach for stories like these because we’re lazy. We reach for them because we’re fragmented. And tribalism—especially the epistemic kind—is easier than the mess of uncertainty.
As we explored in the previous post, this isn’t tribalism in the ancient sense of kin or survival. It’s tribalism by design: identity-based epistemology, where truth is defined by allegiance, coherence is valued over evidence, and belonging is reinforced through narrative certainty.
In this kind of world, myth is more useful than fact.
When the Grand Narrative Collapsed, We Reached for the Script
Durkheim (1912/1995) argued that societies rely on shared myths to generate meaning. When those myths erode, the result isn’t just disorientation—it’s anomie. People don’t lose data. They lose purpose.
By the late 20th century, the American civil religion—those unspoken myths, rituals, and moral frameworks we all believed and gave us moral legitimacy—was in free fall (Bellah, 1967). The Cold War’s tidy moral binary collapsed. Watergate gutted trust in government for much of the public. But it also catalyzed a strategic response among conservative operatives—those who saw institutional failure not as a reason for retreat, but as an opening. Figures like Mitch McConnell didn’t just survive the fallout; they built 30-year plans around it, designing power structures that would outlast the scandal. Globalization pulled the floor out from under the middle class. And by the 1990s, postmodernism had begun to destabilize the very notion of shared truth (Lyotard, 1984).
The result wasn’t debate—it was withdrawal and fragmentation.
Into that cultural miasma—thick with disillusionment and institutional erosion, and hollowed out by narrative collapse—stepped Strauss and Howe with their generational rhythms and inevitable crises. Friedman, too, with his strategy-as-script. These books didn’t just explain history. They repackaged it into something readable again. Something where America still mattered.
They felt like prophecy. But what they really offered was trauma structure.
As Gabor Maté has written, trauma isn’t just what happens to us—it’s what happens inside us when coherence breaks down. Often, we preserve the status quo not by healing, but by mythologizing our pain (2025). We tell ourselves, “Everything happens for a reason.” “It will make us stronger.” These stories help us cope—because to endure pain without meaning is almost unbearable. But that imposed meaning isn’t neutral. It helps us bypass grief and go straight to performing. When we perform before we heal, we create movement without transformation. The surface looks orderly, even elegant—but underneath, the wound remains. Performing, in this sense, is not generative. It’s a coping mechanism. It mimics agency while avoiding introspection.
We Needed a Story Where We Still Mattered
Christopher Lasch (1996) saw this coming. He described a new professional class—technocratic, managerial, anxious. Their confidence was brittle because it depended on the illusion of systems mastery. But by the 1990s and early 2000s, those systems were visibly unraveling.
The strategic middle class—data-driven, upwardly mobile, credentialed—faced stagnating wages (Piketty, 2014), institutional erosion (Pew, 2022), and a creeping sense that meritocracy was rigged. Their self-image was no longer being mirrored by reality. For many, the rise of DEI efforts and public support for historically marginalized groups was perceived not as overdue inclusion but as displacement. In this zero-sum mindset, if someone else advanced, someone else had to fall behind. In that emotional logic, myth wasn’t just comforting—it was protective.
Just as Watergate triggered not only disillusionment but long-range institutional maneuvering, this new phase of identity dislocation demanded narrative reinforcement. Stories that reassured readers they were still central—still destined—became lifelines. As political scientists Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson (2012) have shown, periods of cultural anxiety often catalyze long-game institutional strategies. Arlie Hochschild (2016) found that identity threat—especially when rooted in the feeling of being displaced or overlooked—can generate not just grievance, but deep narrative attachment. The myth becomes the medicine, and over time, a belief system.
So, they reached for narratives that let them stay protagonists. Around this time, we also saw the rise of the Purpose Economy—an emerging narrative that suggested capitalism could evolve, that companies could be mission-driven without losing profit, and that work itself could be reimagined as a source of meaning. There was reason to believe recovery was possible. Obama’s election brought a surge of optimism. The financial crisis, though devastating, appeared to offer a reset. Sustainability and corporate social responsibility efforts gained new language—ESG, triple bottom line. People were hungry not just for reform, but for redemption.
The 2008 election had been fraught with political undercurrents, and the years that followed exposed how shallow some of that optimism really was. In business, what looked like values-driven strategy often turned out to be short-term posturing. Sustainability wasn’t embedded; it was performative. So when political winds shifted, so did the messaging.
That doesn’t make the trend less troubling—but it does change the diagnosis.
Performance or Progress?
This essay leads us to the real question: How do we build sustainability into the business muscle, not just the marketing?
It’s not just about credibility. It’s about integrity under pressure.
This is the core leadership question behind much of what looked like progress in the late 2000s and 2010s. When Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) surged and mission statements multiplied, what we were witnessing wasn’t transformation—it was narrative positioning. Performative, not structural. Sustainability wasn’t yet a muscle. It was a fashion.
Many of the narratives that flourished during that era—both in corporate strategy and in popular books—weren’t just frameworks. They were lifeboats. As Mitzen (2006) would say, they offered ontological security: a way to feel intact even when the external world was unraveling. It’s no accident that the language we use—dashboards, metrics, alignment—offers the illusion of control. These narratives gave leaders something to say, a ready script, even when they weren’t ready to take action.
In that gap between message and muscle, performative efforts quietly became the norm. A 2021 study by KPMG found that while 82% of large companies published sustainability reports, only 38% had sustainability goals linked to executive compensation. Similarly, McKinsey’s research in 2020 showed that while 93% of CEOs saw ESG as important to company success, fewer than half had embedded it meaningfully into core business strategy. The script was widespread. The structure was weak.
Why These Books Feel So Good to Read
Books like these don’t win because they’re right. They win because they feel inevitable.
Karen Stenner (2005) showed that under threat, people seek order and closure—not openness. Jonathan Haidt (2012) added that moral reasoning is post hoc—we feel first and rationalize later.
But it was Erich Fromm who got closest to the heart of this: people don’t always flee from authority. Often, they flee to it. In his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, Fromm argued that in times of anxiety and social collapse, people abandon liberty in exchange for structure.
Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer (1951), observed that mass movements don’t just attract the disillusioned—they appeal most powerfully to those who feel unmoored, disoriented, and desperate for something to hold onto. They aren’t necessarily seeking truth. They’re looking for total belief structures—scripts that can restore a sense of identity. Hoffer noted that mass movements thrive not on facts, but on narrative clarity. It doesn’t matter whether the story is true. It matters that it’s totalizing.
Books like The Fourth Turning and The Next 100 Years offer just that. They don’t just make history feel comprehensible. They make the reader feel central to it. They transform drift into design.
That’s why they feel good. They give people something to belong to and something to be right about. Even if the facts are wrong, the form is reassuring.
Secular Scripture in the Age of Collapse
Books like The Fourth Turning and The Next 100 Years don't just offer commentary. They provide something closer to liturgy. They assign roles, outline consequences, and offer redemption without asking readers to change.
As American institutions shed legitimacy, these books became stand-ins for trust. They filled the moral vacuum not with humility, but with performance and posturing. Like Durkheim’s account of religion’s role in social cohesion, these texts stepped in to make chaos feel communal. Like Bellah’s (1967) idea of civil religion, they offered something Americans desperately wanted: a belief system that felt modern, moral, and mythic.
They didn’t ask readers to engage with complexity. They gave them a simple script that was easy to understand, something comforting, a part to play.
In that script, America was always central. Always chosen. Always on the cusp of crisis—but destined for rebirth.
Strategic Myth and the Avoidance of Accountability
These narratives don’t just comfort—they deflect. They allow discomfort to be reframed as destiny. They repackage historical failure as moral testing. Most importantly, they gave elite audiences—the technocratic, professional class—a narrative framework that preserved their sense of authority while avoiding systemic responsibility (Bellah, 1967; Haskell, 2024; Lasch, 1996).
Strauss and Howe offer generational fate as explanation, rather than naming structural forces. Friedman frames imperial projection as strategy, not excess. In both cases, the messiness of cause and effect is replaced with arc. No need for reflection when you can be reassured that it was always supposed to be this way.
In psychological terms, it’s narrative dissociation. In political terms, it’s plausible deniability.
This isn’t new, but the scale is. The stakes are higher now that we’re no longer just reading these narratives—we’re building them into our algorithms (Broussard, 2023).
The New Oracle: AI and the Illusion of Pattern
AI didn’t invent this hunger for clarity, but it turbocharged the supply. We now have tools that deliver prediction-shaped content in real time. Not just recommendations—but revelation. Forecasts without context. Summaries without accountability. A frictionless future, delivered on demand.
The similarity to The Fourth Turning and The Next 100 Years is striking. Both reduce complexity into a cycle or a strategy. Both assign meaning retroactively. And both give the reader the eerie comfort of inevitability.
AI goes further. It doesn’t just amplify these patterns—it personalizes them. If you're drawn to generational collapse, you’ll see more of it. If you click on forecasts, you’ll be fed prophecy. Myth is no longer something we choose—it’s something that finds us.
The more anxious we become, the more those myths stick—and the more we feel in control, even if we aren’t. The more comforted we feel, even if the story isn’t true.”
A Call, Not to Certainty, But to Vigilance
We don't need better predictions. We need better myths—ones that make room for complexity, courage, and contradiction.
Durkheim warned that without shared meaning, societies fracture. Lasch warned that without moral clarity, elites retreat into strategy. Maté reminds us that trauma, left unexamined, requires meaning.
What’s needed now is not a prophet, but a narrator willing to stay with the uncertainty. Someone who can hold space for ambiguity without surrendering to apathy.
Because prophecy—real or synthetic—isn’t what saves us. What saves us is refusing to surrender to stories that let us off the hook from dealing with ambiguity or excuse our inaction.
What saves us is asking the harder question:
Who is the story serving by maintaining the status quo?
And, what might it be helping me avoid?
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If this sparked a pause, share it with someone who is still trying to hold their complexity in a world that keeps asking them to flatten it. Lead With Alignment is written for data professionals, decision-makers, and quietly courageous change agents who believe governance starts with remembering.