When Old Stories Die
The Need For Reconstructive Epistemology
To appreciate the need for reconstructive epistemology, we can ask what happens when a culture’s foundational narratives become maladaptive. When institutions calcify against change, their legitimizing stories erode, leaving a society unmoored. Without a more expansive and compassionate story to take its place, the resulting abyss breeds monsters - darker narratives that feed on alienation, fear, and resentment. Weaponized nostalgia for a lost world has bred some of the darkest chapters in human history, from the Ku Klux Klan to Hitler’s Germany to contemporary Christian Nationalism.
What’s crucial to understand here is that these constructed narratives aren’t just stories - they’re the invisible scaffolding that holds civilization together, transforming millions of strangers into a functional society through shared forms of meaning and identity. To understand why we need such narratives at all, let’s trace their emergence in human social evolution. These binding narratives became essential once populations grew beyond what hunter-gatherer bonds could sustain. Just as bees are adapted for a hive and wolves for a pack, human sociality evolved within a tribe - where everyone knows everyone else through face-to-face interactions and extended kinship. While living among a sea of strangers is something we’ve come to take for-granted, a ‘tribe’ of millions would have been an unthinkable contradiction for our ancestors. The evolutionary fingerprint of our tribal origins persists in modern humans - we can only maintain meaningful face-to-face relationships with about 150 individuals, a limit known as Dunbar's number.
To bridge this gap, we developed social-technologies that would allow interactions with strangers to become a routine part of life. Chief among these was the creation of constructed social identities - shared stories that sustain social trust without requiring face-to-face bonds or kinship ties. These narratives aren't merely cultural artifacts - they're the foundation that makes modern society possible. Human rights, democracy, money, and science are constructed narratives that built the modern world. If people stopped believing in them they would cease to exist, yet calling them ‘imaginary’ is to miss how they shape our material reality.
Despite their appearance of stability within a human life, these constructed narratives inevitably break down - through internal contradictions, mounting external pressures, or both. We'll call this process Construct Collapse. While civilizations can and do collapse entirely, our focus here is on societies that endure a narrative breakdown. In these cases, the void will be filled, one way or another.
Construct Collapse itself isn’t positive or negative - its impact depends entirely on what replaces the fallen narrative. Very few people today would openly argue that the collapse of narratives that supported slavery was a bad thing. On the flip side, totalitarian ideologies which exploit Construct Collapse during states of crisis demonstrate its inherent dangers - as Nazism’s rise from the trauma of World War 1 and the austerity of the Great Depression make painfully clear. It’s a lesson we may have to live through again, as today’s democracies find themselves under the assault of authoritarianism from within and without.
Between these extremes of clear benefit and catastrophic harm, Construct Collapse typically creates more ambiguous outcomes - addressing existing problems while introducing unforeseen consequences. Consider Friedrich Nietzsche's famous declaration that 'God is dead, and we have killed him.' He was describing the displacement of organized religion as the foundation of meaning in Western life. Writing amidst the rapid changes of 19th century Europe, he foresaw how traditional cultural narratives would become increasingly untenable, swept aside by the forces of modernity - science, industrialization, and secular values.
His warning was that existential needs for meaning and purpose aren’t so easily excised. And that in lieu of suitable replacements, cynicism, despair, and empty consumerism would rush to fill the void. While his proposed solution - moving 'beyond good and evil' to pursue individual will regardless of ethical consequences - was deeply toxic, Nietzsche correctly diagnosed the looming crisis.
In our own era, we find ourselves amid what cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has termed the 'Meaning Crisis.' Its symptoms are evident in the widespread adoption of conspiracy theories, political extremism, and bullshit in public discourse. The cumulative effect has been nothing short of disastrous for the civil society that sustains democracy. Social media platforms, whose business models push user engagement through divisive, inflammatory content, have only accelerated this decline. While these may seem like recent problems, they're an intensification of profit-driven media's long history of exploiting social fragmentation for private gain.
Amongst this rising polarization, we’re facing an unprecedented mental health crisis in the West - millions are feeling alienated, lonely, and displaced. In the United States, 'deaths of despair' - through suicide and substance abuse - have driven a decline in life expectancy. An unfolding ecological crisis, poised to reshape human civilization over the upcoming century, is deepening this collective trauma. A global resurgence in fascism has been ruthlessly exploiting this trauma, promising to make our societies ‘great’ again while worsening the very crises it feeds upon. This cumulative upheaval weighs heaviest on young people, where profound anxiety and despair about the world they’ll be inheriting is commonplace (here in the United States, a shared meme among Millenials and Gen Z is that our retirement plan is to die from climate change before old age). Gen Alpha, our youngest generation, has never known a world before today’s hyper-polarized dysfunction. Amid skyrocketing inequality, basic milestones of adult life - buying a home, starting a family, saving for retirement - have become impossible dreams for most.
Yet economic and political dysfunction flows downstream from culture. While these material factors are very real, we’re also facing something deeper: an epistemological crisis in the West, with different segments of society no longer inhabiting the same Reality. Beyond different interpretations over basic facts that we can more or less agree upon, reaching a foundational consensus for productive disagreements has become nearly impossible. The rise of artificial intelligence is poised to deepen these epistemic rifts even further. These developments poison our ability to cultivate shared understanding. As this crisis deepens, our social dysfunction will only worsen - making epistemological literacy more important now than ever before.
Of course, no epistemology - Enactivism included - can be a silver bullet for this crisis. What perspectives like this can offer is greater self awareness around our sensemaking narratives. Enactivism is reconstructive because it acknowledges that constructed narratives play an essential role in meeting our individual and collective needs, while recognizing that some constructions serve us better than others. And the path forward lies in constructing narratives that are flexible, compassionate, and inclusive.
In sum: reconstructive epistemology isn’t about returning to the ‘good old days’ of a romanticized past. The framework we’re proposing offers no quick-fixes for complex problems. Nor is it meant to be a dogmatic, one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, Enactivism is meant to exist in dialogue with other epistemological perspectives - not because all views are equally valid, but because the perspective if offers is true but partial.