The Night the Invisible Consensus Moves the World: The Power of Co-Subjectivity and Narrative Late 20th to Early 21st Centuries

The Night the Invisible Consensus Moves the World: The Power of Co-Subjectivity and Narrative Late 20th to Early 21st Centuries

The strength of human beings lies not in their intelligence itself, but in their ability to believe in the same story and share the same reality. We can use the same money, follow the same laws, and share the same vision of the future with strangers whose names and faces we do not know. This is not a physical force, but a consensual force of co-subjectivity. Humans have been able to cooperate in large groups through widely shared narratives, intersubjective realities.

This mechanism is foundational to religion, the state, and science. Religion creates communal norms and belonging, the state anchors imagined connections into institutions, and science provides common procedures for understanding the world. The nation-state is an imaginary product of people who do not know each other directly but believe they belong to the same community, and religion has also functioned as a device for reproducing social values.

Given the historical background of the time, the power of stories was quickly amplified in the postwar mass society. Television and newspapers spread common topics and values, the state and corporations presented a growth narrative, and people worked, consumed, and felt secure within that framework. During the Cold War, opposing narratives of freedom and totalitarianism divided the world, and science and technology became symbols of competition.

Later, with the Internet and globalization, the narrative became fragmented and multiple co-subjectivities ran side by side at the same time. While co-subjectivities created cohesion, they also became a force that deepened division and conflict. In particular, when anthropocentric narratives become fixed, the idea that humans are the managers and optimizers of nature is strengthened, which can easily lead to ecological destruction and social breakdown.

The challenge for co-subjectivity is not to abandon the narrative. Narratives are essential to large-scale cooperation. What matters is which narratives are chosen, where they are updated, and where they are limited. The sustainability of 21st century society depends on whether we can reconfigure our narratives to new ones that include coexistence and constraints, without making anthropocentrism absolute.