Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN)
The Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN) is an exchange of information and ideas by institutions, for institutions, which is formally presented to the public as an as-if News Service. Eric Weinstein first publicly introduced the idea in his appearance with Bret Weinstein on The Rubin Report on February 5, 2018.
Transcript Excerpts
The Gated Institutional Narrative is like an exchange, a financial exchange, except it's an exchange of information and ideas.
In order to actually participate in this particular special conversation, you need to have a seat on the exchange. That is, you need to write for an important paper, like the Wall Street Journal, or you need to be a Senator or a Congressman so that you can gain access to the news media, where you need to be sitting at a news desk in any of these situations, whether you're a professor, or a reporter, or a politician. If you can gain a seat inside of the Gated Institutional Narrative, you can attempt to converse with other people within that particular conversation.
The rest of us do not have the same level, or kind, of access to this highly-rarefied discussion. It's comparable to what we would term a promotion inside of the world of professional wrestling. It's an agreed-upon structure in which people often agree to simulate dispute. Rather than actually have disputes (because somebody could get really seriously injured) the participants are in fact, working together to produce an engaging, and regular, product for mass-consumption.
The problem with this gated institutional narrative is that in general, it doesn't contain the most important ideas. And that's where the gating function comes in. The most important ideas are likely to be the ideas that are the most disruptive:
* What if the entire food pyramid, for example, was wildly off? What if fats were not the great danger we thought they were and those waving fields of wheat that are fabled in American song, in fact, give rise to carbs, which are very dangerous to us all.* So if everything were inverted—let's say we're in a world where instead of banishing volatility during the so-called great moderation, before 2008, we were actually building the Tinder for the world's largest financial forest fire.
* What if in fact, we had all sorts of things, exactly backward and completely wrong?
* What if diversity, wasn't a sign of our strength, but sometimes a sign of our weakness?
* What if, for example, immigration, far from being an issue of xenophobes versus xenophiles was actually an instance of redistribution having little to do with xenophobia or xenophilia to begin with?
These sorts of ideas, cannot be entertained inside of the gated institutional narrative.
And that's where the gating function comes in. What was originally a function intended to ensure quality control (of the narrative) became an instrument for something else.
And this is where I want to introduce the most important concept that I think we will be dealing with going forward. In 2020 on this program, the disc, what is the DISC?
-Eric Weinstein on The Portal #18
Breaking of the GIN
The GIN is defined as breaking when events overtake the official narratives by such an extent that they can’t figure out how to continue their arcs.
- 2001: 9/11
- 2008: Lehmann Brothers Financial Crash
- 2016: Donald Trump & Brexit
- 2019: Death of Jeffrey Epstein
- 2020: Coronavirus Pandemic
- Eric Weinstein on Twitter
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