And His disciples began questioning Him as to what this parable might be. And He said, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, but to the rest it is given in parables, in order that seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.”

~ Luke 8:9–10 NASB

What is interesting about Jesus’ explanation as to why He spoke in parables is that they are given so that the remaining non-believers would not understand. I am convinced that the reason people believe in false narratives is that in our fallen nature, we enjoy being lied to. This fault hearkens back to original sin, and the story of the serpent in the garden who tempted the man and woman saying, “Your eyes will be opened. For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). From the beginning, human beings have always desired to spin their own truth. Yet there is also a yearning to return to the original story — the metanarrative that will explain everything correctly.

Human beings learn through stories. Every religion is a metanarrative, that is it is based on a story, a myth, a gospel account, a creation account, a list of genealogies with stories about each generation, and so on. Far from being a story that is not true, a myth is a story about truth. In fact, the words “myth” and “mythology” come from the Greek word mythos, meaning “word,” “tale” or “true narrative,” referring not only to the means by which the story was transmitted, but also to its being rooted in truth. Mythos was also closely related to the word myo meaning “to teach,” or “to initiate into the mysteries.” These stories are mythic in the true sense of the word. They reflect the spiritual beliefs, values and cultures of the story tellers. All myths are based on some truth.

Within the one big metanarrative of a culture, there are smaller narratives. And finally there are stories that we tell about the stories, you might call these mini-narratives. These are stories that fit the prevailing worldview.

For example within the metanarrative of Christianity, if I told you a story about a completely intact woolly mammoth discovered in Siberia that was frozen in time so perfectly that its DNA could be extracted, you might think about the Genesis Flood. Surely, this giant mammal was covered over with sediment and then quickly froze after a massive change in temperature in the postdiluvian world.

On the other hand, if you are a naturalist, you might sit in wonder and be amazed that such a giant animal froze so quickly. But the proof is in the pudding. One estimate suggests that as many as 25,000 woolly mammoth carcasses have been found in Siberia since the year 1808 — seven of them well preserved – six in Russia and one in Canada. Then you decide that that there are probably hundreds of thousands of these giant creatures buried under the tundra still undiscovered — and possibly hundreds are well preserved. Much to their great astonishment, scientists have been able to sequence DNA from one such mammoth’s flesh, which was preserved “in a glass-like state.”

The top expert on woolly mammoths in Siberia, Nikolai Vereshchagin, has spent nearly a half century of research on the mammoth fauna. He states that there are many hundreds of thousands of large mammals buried in Siberia22 and also many millions of bones.23 One estimate he made for one region of Siberia would suggest five million mammoths buried. (The extinction of the woolly mammoth: was it a quick freeze?)

Is this story better explained by the metanarrative of the catastrophism of the Genesis Flood or by the uniformitarianism of scientific naturalism?

Constructing a Biblical Worldview vs. Following a Narrative

There is an old couplet that goes like this:

This light obeyed increases light,
Light rejected bringeth night.”

That is expressing a biblical truth. It begins in John chapter 1, which speaks of Jesus Christ being the True Light that lightens every man coming into the world. Paul develops it in Romans chapter 1 when he speaks of the invisible things of God being clearly seen by the creation of the world—understood by the things that are made—so that they are without excuse.

But Jesus also spoke of another strange kind of light called “the light that is darkness.” In Matthew 6:23, He said, “If therefore the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness!”

What kind of light can also be called darkness at the same time? Well, it’s the light that guides your thinking —the reasoning you pursue to try to prove a point. All Liberals do this. They have something they call light, but it’s actually darkness because it’s a set of erroneous presuppositions they bring to their study in the first place.

They’re not even aware of it. They don’t realize they’re bringing to the Scriptures a worldview that they will impose upon — or use as the standard for judging — those Scriptures, deciding which parts they will accept and which they will reject. It’s not the evidence that does it; it’s their a priori worldview. That is the darkness that seems to generate a certain amount of light.

They categorize according to their standard: that which aligns is “true,” and that which does not is “not true.” Then, having done this, they find a bunch of other experts who do the same thing, compile it all together, and say, “You see? The consensus is such-and-such.”

But again — what is the method here? You come with your mind already made up about what you will accept and what you will not accept. So here’s the critical question:

1. Do you allow your worldview to determine what you will and will not accept as fact?

2. Or do you gather the facts first, then extrapolate from those facts what you will construct as your worldview?

Which is the cart, and which is the horse?

1. Does your worldview determine what you accept as fact?

2. Or do you begin with an epistemology — a method for determining what qualifies as fact — based on something outside your preconceptions? Then, take those facts, assemble them, and let them shape your worldview?

These are two opposite approaches.

The Neoliberal Geopolitical Metanarrative

Few people look at the evidence and try to construct a hypothesis that explains it. Instead we believe an existing big story, and all our smaller stories extend from that. This process takes place in all areas of study — including theories of geopolitics.

The Western neoliberal geopolitical metanarrative is that the good old USA is the redeemer nation. We are the city set on a hill — a shining light for all the world to see. I myself am a big defender of this idea of America as a Christian nation. However, I want America to lead by example, not by gunboat diplomacy. We ought to be imitated due to our moral excellence, faith in God, resulting prosperity, and peaceful relationships with all nations. The USA ought not be known for our policy endless hybrid wars against emerging nations, which deems our peer competitors to be part of an “axis of evil.”

Americans don’t like to think our our nation as an empire. Yes, the Europeans had empires in the past as have dictators throughout world history. But America does no conquer and colonize foreign countries. Yes, we do have over 800 military bases all over the world, even in countries who do not want us there. We also conduct a hybrid war against many countries using trade/economic war, technology war, capital war, geopolitical war, military war, and information/media war. The West has always been adept at propaganda particularly in times of military wars.

Of course, war propaganda is nothing new. In 1924, Arthur Ponsonby published a catalogue of the lengthy list of wartime propaganda lies told to the British people in order to keep them engaged in WWI. This turned out to be the economic disaster that effectively ended the British Empire’s run as the holder of the world trade reserve currency, which by that time had passed to America.

The most surprising thing I learned from this book is not that governments concocted lies, spread rumors, or doctored photos to sell to their citizens; and it’s not that the same governments so blithely admitted to it after the fact; it’s that the people so duped and led into such a staggering catastrophe didn’t care when they learned the truth. Governments continue to pull out the same old propaganda techniques every time they need to convince their citizens that involvement in the war is necessary. Atrocity stories, especially ones involving infants or children, are an old standby. In WWI it was the “handless Belgian babies” lie. In the first Gulf War it was the “babies taken from incubators and left to die” lie. Now it’s the “beheaded children” story used against nearly every terrorist organization, often using the same photograph repeatedly for each story. Then and now, atrocities do happen; unfortunately, it’s impossible to know when we’re being lied to and when we’re not. Reading this book has convinced me to take all such stories with a large measure of salt – they’re usually lies. Why do citizens in democratic countries continue to fall for them every time?

~ Reviewer Michael Miller on Good Reads, Falsehood in Wartime — Containing an assortment of lies circulated throughout the nations during the Great War

Ponsonby firmly believed that Britain’s involvement in the WWI was a conspiracy against the ordinary people of the world by political and business elites who sought to enrich themselves by war. In a follow-up 1925 pamphlet, Now is the Time, he deplored “the millions who have fallen in the war” and denounced the “great conspiracy” by the governments of Europe to plunge the world into war. Ponsonby declared that the defining issue of the day was to establish “democratic” control over diplomacy to end the “great conspiracy” to promote “war mentality” as the prelude to yet another world war. Of course, we can follow similar logic to point to the fact that the Cold War mentality that prevailed in America from the 1950s to 1991, has been reborn among most Democrats and the neoconservatives who make up most of the Republican Party.

I remember my optimism in 1991, when my cousin Keith Johnson traveled with me to Moscow. As part of my month long trip to help found a Russian language Christian newspaper, Predvestnik, we were in the Izmailovo hotel for a few days for the Christian Youth International conference, which at the time was the largest evangelical youth conference in the history of the Soviet Union. Keith has a personable demeanor and enjoyed meeting all the students. Everybody was so nice to us as American visitors. All the young people said, “God bless you” and “God loves you.” And then one time when we were alone in the elevator together, Keith looked over at me and said, “I can’t believe my whole life I’ve been told that this was the evil empire!” And then we just looked at each other and we laughed. He said, “We actually had an American president and who used to call the this the evil empire. It’s not.”

But it’s hard to reject the narrative unless you know the Russian people. Christians need to understand that the Church is expanding into all nations of the world. These brothers and sisters cannot be our enemies. They are the salt and light in their societies regardless of whether we support their government’s policies. Hopefully, this fear of the “other” as the enemy is all going to change very fast. This will be due to AI, social media, and instant translations. As people begin know each other in instantaneous communication that was never possible in past generations, there is going to be less fear and more faith, love and understanding between the nations.

However, there are people above a certain age that are never going to make the shift. They are always going to be stuck in the old narrative because they are too old to shift away from the big story. Unfortunately, the big story of American neoconservative geopolitics is still that the Russian Federation is the same “evil empire” as the Soviet Union. It is not just the government, but also the vast majority of the Russian people who support Vladimir Putin.

The Western narrative concerning the Russia Ukraine conflict is that this is a bilateral conflict between two nations. It is a war of imperial conquest in which the Russians have decided that the territory of Ukraine is rightfully Russian. It needs to be reclaimed by Russia or Ukraine needs to be politically subordinate to Russia if not part of the Russian Federation. Further due to a mechanism by which Western values always come out on top, Russia must ultimately fail in this goal.

So a mini-narrative concerning the Ukraine conflict of the might be believing that Putin is dying of cancer,; or that the Russians are running out of ammunition and missiles; or that we need to support Ukraine as long as it takes; or that the Russians thought that they were going to take Kyiv in three days; or the Russian economy is in tatters; or the ruble is rubble; Russia is just a gas station with nuclear weapons masquerading as a country, etc.

People want to believe these mini-narratives of Russia’s demise, because they believe the narrative that the Soviet Union was the evil empire. And what they don’t understand is that Ukraine and Russia are come from the same cloth. Whatever left over corruption there is from the communist system in Russia, is also in Ukraine. And it’s also present in each one of the 15 republics.

They’ve been trained to put a big equal sign between Russia and the USSR. It doesn’t occur to people that if communism was evil, then Russian suffered under it too. No, they have to be the evil empire still who are inflicting suffering on the world. So that’s how many Americans think. And it used to be mainly the conservatives, but now it’s also the liberals think this way too.

As is the case in any conflict, the other side has a narrative too. Any challenge from a pro-Russian or even a neutral point of view is immediately dismissed as propaganda. Putin is evil. The country that invades is always at fault. There is no freedom in Russia. Christians are persecuted in Russia. Putin murders political opponents and journalists. And so on. Further, this point of view is universally held. No dissent is allowed.

There is Senator Bernie Sanders, who has no problem calling himself a socialist, who took his honeymoon in Moscow during the time of the Soviet Union. He loved communism, but now he calls Putin a “murderous dictator.” And then on the right, we have people who are always for free market capitalism, Reagan Republicans who evolved into neoconservatives, such as Senator Lindsey Graham. They hate Putin too because he’s a “demoniac,” “a crazy dictator,” or even a “communist.” So the narrative dies hard.

The big fly in the ointment in this is Donald Trump. He was elected with over 50% of the vote in 2024. So when he comes along and says that it’s Zelenskyy, not Putin, who is a dictator without elections. Trump’s statements cause cognitive dissonance. And then the paradigm or the narrative begins to shift in people’s brains. And they start to put all the data together and realize that it better fits a different narrative.

When I wrote a recent article called Is Zelenskyy a dictator without elections? I got two reactions. The first was from people who were disgusted. They can’t wrap their head around any of the data that I shared. One friend said that he didn’t care how much I could prove Zelenskyy was a dictator, I still couldn’t change his mind. And another person just said, “This is Putin propaganda.”

They also say things like, “How much is the Kremlin paying you, Dmitri?” Or — “How is the weather in St. Petersburg?”

Such responses offer nothing challenging and don’t deal with the claims.

The second type of response was from most of the people who read the article, who said that they found it fascinating, and didn’t know a lot of this information before. Now things made a lot more sense for them.

That’s the reason why I say the paradigm shift is already happening.

How an escape hatch is baked into the false narrative

One of the important points to understand about all narratives is that the weavers of these tales are sometimes aware they are lying, but are so committed to the metanarrative, that the lies are seemed necessary in order to lead the people in the correct way of thinking about a conflict. Baked into every narrative is an escape hatch.

The Russian narrative concerning the Ukraine conflict is never taken seriously in the Western legacy media. From the beginning of the Ukraine war in February 2022, President Putin stated in an address that Russia did not plan to occupy all of Ukraine. Further, the four reasons given for the “Special Military Operation” was to ensure non-NATO neutral status for Ukraine; to “de-nazify” Ukraine (meaning to eliminate the anti-Russia stance of the Kyiv government, the ultra-nationalist militias, and to ensure the rights of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine); to demilitarize the forces built up during the eight year civil war; and to deal with root causes of the conflict by negotiating a new security infrastructure for Europe.

The Western response was to mock the “denazification” demand and to ignore the rest. Instead the baked in narrative was that Putin planned to conquer all of Ukraine and then to march into Eastern Europe in a bid to resurrect the Soviet Empire. When Putin failed to conquer all of Ukraine in three days, which is something the Russians never said, the narrative became that “Russia has failed.” Even until today, Donald Trump continues to spin parts of the old narrative that Putin wants to conquer all of Ukraine “He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” Trump wrote in a social media post, adding: “I’ve always said that he wants ALL of Ukraine, not just a piece of it, and maybe that’s proving to be right, but if he does, it will lead to the downfall of Russia!”

There are numerous reasons why this narrative is pure emotionalism, and not based on any fact. The two most obvious ones are that Russia has stated the opposite and there is no evidence that this could occur given the size of the military force that Russia has mobilized to conduct a limited goal of securing several Russian speaking regions. This will become obvious before long to most thinking people. However, when a settlement is reached, Western leaders will crow that Russia lost because they did not conquer all of Ukraine. This is their intended escape hatch, but many will still see through the propaganda.

When this shift in understanding the truth about the Ukraine war finally occurs — that it was never possible to defeat Russia militarily — there is going to be a lot of anger on both sides. When people understand that they’ve been lied to yet again about another war and that hundreds of thousands of people have been needlessly killed, it’s going to be a very hard pill to swallow. In Ukraine itself, there could be a collapse of the government and a civil war to determine whether the country will continue to a futile struggle against a great power or seek for a settlement. In Western Europe, there are likely to be more violent protests over failing economies, snap elections, and regime changes favoring populist political parties.

How the coming paradigm shift in narrative will affect the world economy

Astute observers of history see that the American world reserve currency empire has run a similar course as Britain did over 100 years ago in 1921. We will see that America is now in at least “Stage Five” of what Ray Dalio calls the “Six Stages of the World Reserve Currency Empire.” Bad decisions made on foreign war policy are on of the hallmarks of the last days of empire states. The political and business elite will sometimes ensure a smooth transition by transferring its world trade currency holder status to a partner nation — as Britain did with America. More often empires in decline will collapse in a web of lies believing their greatest days are just ahead and fail to understand the magnitude of the growing crisis on the horizon.

In the US, many will forget about this conflict just as we put other failed war projects behind us, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and now Ukraine. Americans will be fixated on domestic economic issues. Another quarter of negative growth by the end of June 2025 will signal a recession. As of mid-May 2025, forecasters predicted the US economy will grow at an annual rate of 1.5 percent this quarter, down from the prediction of 2.1 percent in the last survey. However, analysts believe the American economy will contract by 0.1% through the end of 2025, with a downgraded the global economic growth forecast. A collapse to under 0 percent growth for the rest of 2025 could signal the worst recession since 2007–2009.

When the average American sees the amount of debt racked up by 30 years of unending US sponsored wars — almost $8 trillion of our $37 trillion national debt — this could push us toward Ray Dalio’s Stage Six of the world currency empire decline. Then the cycle will begin again in a new world order. If violence can’t be avoided, it will eventually quell. In any case, this will signal the acceptance the multipolar world order. The last people to accept the “End of Empire” are always the political and business elites — the “haves.” This is why such shifts usually lead to violence when the “have-nots” demand a radical reset of the debt-ridden economy.

Dalio makes a persuasive case every great country that obtains a world reserve currency has six stages:

1. An empire’s birth, including new leadership;
2. Government built and refined;
3. Peace and prosperity;
4. Great excess in spending and debt, and widening of wealth and political gaps;
5. Very bad financial conditions and intense conflict; and
6. Civil war/revolution.

Dalio believes the US is in Stage Five. The divisions we are seeing among Americans, excessive debt, and widening wealth gaps could soon lead us to a need for a drastic reform of our economic policies at home and a radical realignment of America’s role in the global order.

For an extended analysis of Ray’s Dalio’s book, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, as well as an analysis of Samuel P. Huntington, Aleksandr Dugin and other writers who predicted the current shift to the Multipolar World Order, check out my book, The Fourth Political Theory in Biblical Perspective.