Election contests are usually assessed on the basis of the foundational elements of politics such as policies, ideologies, historical legacy, and organizational strength. While these do provide the structural groundwork of political competition, they alone do not determine electoral outcomes. In contemporary democratic contests, the reality is that temporarily constructed political narratives play a decisive role—often overriding policies, ideologies, and history. It is these temporary narratives that shape how voters understand, interpret, and emotionally experience policies and political forces.
Temporary political narratives are cognitive–emotional structures that transform complex social realities into comprehensible story forms. The majority of the public does not engage with politics through policy documents, theoretical texts, or historical analyses; instead, they relate to politics through simple yet meaningful stories that answer questions such as: “Who is responsible for what is happening now?”, “What is at stake?”, and “What will the future look like?” Hence, narratives are not merely communication tools; they are material political forces that shape public consciousness.
Policies do not become politically active on their own; they acquire meaning only within a narrative that connects them to everyday life. Whether it is a welfare scheme, infrastructure development, or economic reform, it gains political significance only when it becomes part of stories about dignity, injustice, social security, or national reconstruction. Similarly, ideologies cannot inspire people without a narrative language that links them to emotions, social identities, and moral consciousness. Even a progressive historical legacy can become electorally irrelevant if it is not narratively connected to present conditions. People do not vote for history itself; they vote for what that history means today.
The power of political narratives lies in their ability to engage reason and emotion simultaneously. While policies appeal to rational evaluation, narratives activate emotions such as fear, hope, pride, anger, and desire. Voters’ political behavior is shaped less by cost–benefit calculations and more by whether a political force conveys that it “understands” their lives. Parties may possess strong policies, but if they cannot explain why those policies matter now, they lose narrative coherence—and with it, electoral credibility.
Another crucial aspect of narrative power is timeliness. Narratives must align with the key social contradictions of a particular historical moment. A narrative that was effective in one electoral phase can become irrelevant as social conditions change. Political forces that rely excessively on past achievements or static ideological language often fail to recognize such narrative phase shifts. Conversely, even policy-weak actors can achieve success if they present stories that directly engage emerging anxieties, identity conflicts, and hopes. Elections, therefore, are less a judgment of objective performance and more a struggle over how reality itself is interpreted.
Narratives also define political legitimacy. Who constitutes “the people,” who are the “elites,” who is the protector, and who is the threat—all these are shaped through narrative construction. Narratives can transform failures into sacrifices, weaknesses into virtues, and contradictions into necessities. At the same time, they can delegitimize even policy-competent opponents. This is why emotionally coherent narratives, even when factually incorrect, often overpower campaigns that are factually honest but narratively weak.
In today’s media environment—dominated by social media, visual communication, and rapid information flows—the power of narratives has intensified further. With shrinking attention spans, meaning is transmitted through images, slogans, and micro-stories. As a result, emotionally strong, morally polarized, and easily shareable narratives gain precedence. Political success depends not on controlling all facts, but on maintaining narrative coherence across platforms.
In conclusion, while policies, ideologies, and historical records are essential components of political credibility, they are insufficient on their own to determine election results. What binds them together and mobilizes people as a living structure of meaning is the political narrative. Elections are ultimately not contests over “who has the best plan,” but over who can define the most compelling narratives capable of influencing people. In rapidly changing social phases marked by high uncertainty, those who can create honest, timely, and life-connected temporary narratives are the ones who achieve electoral success.
It is in this context that the defeat faced by the CPI(M) in this election can be understood. The CPI(M) assumed that its record of governance achievements, development initiatives, and welfare activities would automatically translate into votes. However, it failed to recognize the narratives constructed by its opponents around emotionally charged issues such as Sabarimala, or to build stronger counter-narratives in response.
In political activity, narratives cannot be reduced to decorative rhetoric appended to policies or ideological programs. They function as active material forces within society, shaping how people perceive reality, organizing collective emotions, directing attention, and mobilizing or demobilizing social energies. A successful political narrative does not merely describe the world; it actively participates in producing it by stabilizing certain power relations while destabilizing others. From the perspective of Quantum Dialectics, a political narrative is best understood as a coherent configuration of meaning—a structured synthesis that temporarily resolves multiple, often contradictory, social experiences into a communicable and emotionally intelligible form. It is neither an imaginative fiction detached from reality nor crude propaganda imposed from above, but a condensed expression of lived social contradictions translated into language, symbols, and shared orientation.
Quantum Dialectics conceptualizes narratives as fields of coherence operating within a broader socio-political quantum field composed of material conditions, institutional structures, cultural memories, and collective emotions. When a narrative accurately resonates with lived material contradictions—such as economic insecurity, social injustice, cultural anxiety, or aspirations for dignity—it produces coherence across diverse social layers. This coherence generates trust, identification, and mass adhesion, enabling collective action to take shape. Conversely, when narratives lag behind rapidly changing realities or misrepresent lived experience, they lose their binding power. In such situations, decoherence sets in: meanings fragment, trust erodes, cynicism spreads, and political organizations find themselves increasingly disconnected from the very masses they seek to represent, often culminating in strategic paralysis or electoral defeat.
Therefore, the creation of effective and timely political narratives must be understood as both a science and an art. It is a science insofar as it requires rigorous analysis of objective social dynamics—class structures, institutional contradictions, historical timing, and shifts in collective consciousness. At the same time, it is an art that demands intuitive sensitivity to mood, ethical judgment in framing truth without distortion, mastery of symbols rooted in cultural memory, and precise timing in articulation. Only when scientific clarity and artistic intelligence converge can political narratives achieve sustained coherence, mobilize transformative energies, and guide society toward higher dialectical synthesis.
In classical political theory, narratives are often conceived as top-down ideological instruments, consciously crafted by elites and transmitted to passive masses as tools of persuasion or control. Such a linear and mechanistic understanding fails to capture how narratives actually arise, circulate, and acquire power in real social life. Quantum Dialectics decisively rejects this model. It understands political narratives as dialectical emergences—products of the continuous interaction between objective material conditions and subjective interpretation. Narratives do not descend from above fully formed; they crystallize from below and across society, shaped by economic realities, institutional practices, cultural memories, emotional climates, and the interpretive labor of social actors. Political leadership does not “invent” narratives ex nihilo; it selects, structures, and amplifies meanings already latent within social contradictions.
Within this framework, a political narrative exhibits distinct quantum-dialectical properties that explain both its power and fragility. One such property is superposition: a single narrative can carry multiple meanings simultaneously, enabling different social groups to recognize their own experiences and aspirations within the same symbolic structure. This multiplicity is not a weakness but a strength, allowing broad coalitions to form without immediate ideological uniformity. However, superposition requires careful balance; excessive ambiguity can drift into incoherence if not anchored by shared material reference points.
Another essential property is coherence—the internal alignment between stated values, empirical facts, emotional tone, and projected future direction. Coherence allows a narrative to stabilize meaning across time, generating trust and predictability. When words, actions, and outcomes reinforce each other, narratives become durable and self-reproducing. Yet this coherence is inherently fragile because narratives are highly sensitive to decoherence. When lived experience persistently contradicts narrative claims—when promises fail to materialize or moral postures clash with practice—the narrative can collapse rapidly, losing its capacity to bind social energy and legitimacy.
Finally, narratives are phase-dependent. A narrative that is progressive and mobilizing in one historical moment may become obstructive or reactionary in another if it fails to adapt to changing contradiction structures. What once unified can later stagnate; what once inspired can later alienate. In quantum dialectical terms, narratives function like waveforms of meaning within the socio-political field. For them to remain effective, they must be continuously tuned to the contradiction density of the moment—the intensity, configuration, and direction of social tensions. Only narratives capable of evolving in phase with reality can sustain political coherence and transformative momentum over time.
The scientific foundation of political narrative formation begins with rigorous material analysis. From a quantum dialectical standpoint, no amount of rhetorical skill or symbolic brilliance can indefinitely compensate for a misreading of objective reality. Narratives draw their strength not from repetition or emotional appeal alone, but from their capacity to accurately register and reorganize the real contradictions operating within society. When narratives are detached from material conditions, they may achieve short-term coherence, but they inevitably collapse under the pressure of lived experience. Scientific narrative construction therefore requires disciplined attention to the concrete structures and dynamics shaping social life.
At the core of this analysis lies the mapping of contradiction structures. Every society is traversed by multiple, intersecting contradictions that generate tension and movement. Class contradictions—most fundamentally between labour and capital—shape economic life, distribution of wealth, and conditions of work. Identity contradictions emerge between community and individual, tradition and autonomy, belonging and exclusion. Governance contradictions arise in the relationship between the state and citizens, particularly around authority, accountability, and participation. Cultural contradictions, such as those between tradition and modernity, continuity and change, further complicate the social field. A scientifically grounded narrative does not ignore these contradictions or treat them in isolation; it recognizes their interaction and seeks to articulate a higher synthesis capable of holding them together meaningfully.
Equally important is the assessment of contradiction intensity. Not all historical moments carry the same degree of social tension. Periods of acute crisis—marked by economic distress, political instability, or moral outrage—generate high-intensity contradictions that demand sharp, decisive, and clearly articulated narratives. In contrast, relatively stable periods with lower contradiction intensity favor integrative narratives that emphasize continuity, reform, and balance. A mismatch between narrative tone and contradiction intensity—soft language in moments of crisis or aggressive rhetoric in times of relative stability—produces dissonance and weakens political credibility.
Narratives must also be situated within their temporal location. Quantum Dialectics insists that time is not neutral; it is structured by phases of crisis, transition, consolidation, and decline. A narrative appropriate for a crisis phase—mobilizing, confrontational, and future-oriented—may become disruptive during consolidation, when stability and institutionalization are required. Conversely, narratives of routine governance and gradualism can appear evasive or complicit during periods of systemic breakdown. Scientific narrative formation therefore demands a clear reading of where society stands within its historical trajectory.
Finally, attention to spatial differentiation is essential. National-level coherence does not imply social uniformity across regions, communities, or social groups. Contradictions manifest differently in different locations, producing varied lived realities. Effective narratives must therefore operate at multiple scales: macro-narratives that provide overall direction and meaning, and micro-narratives that translate this vision into locally resonant forms. When local experiences are ignored or overridden by centralized messaging, narratives lose resonance and credibility.
In this sense, scientific narrative creation closely resembles field mapping in physics. It involves identifying where social energy accumulates, where tensions intensify, where fractures are emerging, and where the conditions for synthesis already exist. Only by understanding the topology of the socio-political field can narratives be crafted that do not merely describe reality, but actively reorganize it toward higher coherence and transformative possibility.
Timeliness in political activity cannot be reduced to mere chronological punctuality or rapid response. From a quantum dialectical perspective, timeliness is better understood as dialectical synchrony—the alignment of a narrative with the internal tempo and phase of social contradictions. Political time is not linear or uniform; it is structured by uneven accelerations, sudden ruptures, and periods of apparent stagnation. A narrative may be empirically accurate and logically sound, yet fail politically if it does not correspond to the lived temporality of the masses. Truth, when articulated out of phase with social experience, loses its mobilizing power.
This is why a narrative that is factually correct can become politically obsolete, while an incomplete or partial narrative may succeed if it resonates with the immediate realities people are experiencing. What matters is not exhaustive explanation, but temporal resonance. People respond most strongly to narratives that speak to their present anxieties, hopes, and frustrations as they are unfolding, not as they existed in the past or might exist in an abstract future. Quantum Dialectics therefore emphasizes that political meaning is generated in the present tense of lived contradiction.
To clarify this, Quantum Dialectics introduces the concept of narrative phase alignment. Narratives that are introduced too early—before material conditions have matured or contradictions have intensified—tend to collapse prematurely. They appear unrealistic, alarmist, or disconnected from everyday experience. Conversely, narratives that arrive too late often appear evasive, defensive, or dishonest, as if they are attempting to explain away a reality that people have already interpreted for themselves. In contrast, synchronous narratives, articulated at the moment when contradictions reach critical density, can catalyze qualitative shifts in public consciousness. Such narratives do not merely describe change; they trigger phase transitions in how society understands itself and its possibilities.
Political failure, therefore, frequently occurs not because a narrative is false or immoral, but because it arrives after the contradiction has already reconfigured itself into a new form of common sense. At that point, even accurate explanations sound like excuses, and even progressive ideas appear irrelevant. This highlights why narrative timing is a continuous process rather than a one-time intervention. It requires constant feedback between ground-level social signals emerging from everyday life, the emotional temperature of the masses as reflected in moods such as anger, fatigue, hope, or fear, and emerging symbolic ruptures—events, images, or moments that suddenly crystallize deeper contradictions. Only through such continuous attunement can political narratives remain temporally synchronized with reality and retain their transformative potential.
While scientific analysis clarifies what must be said in a political narrative—by identifying material conditions, contradictions, and historical phases—the artistic dimension determines how those truths are communicated so that they become socially effective. Without this artistic mediation, even the most accurate analysis remains inert, failing to touch consciousness or mobilize collective energy. Art transforms analytical clarity into lived meaning, allowing narratives to move from abstract correctness to emotional and moral resonance.
At the heart of this artistic dimension lies symbolic condensation. Political realities are complex, layered, and often cognitively overwhelming. Effective narratives condense this complexity into symbols that are immediately graspable and emotionally legible. A symbol does not simplify by distortion; it simplifies by concentration. It allows people to feel a structural contradiction before they fully understand it analytically. Through such condensation, narratives achieve density without obscurity, depth without technicality, and accessibility without trivialization.
Closely related is metaphoric intelligence—the capacity to draw upon culturally embedded images, stories, and linguistic patterns that bridge rational understanding and emotional response. Metaphors anchor abstract political ideas in familiar experiential worlds: work, family, dignity, injustice, struggle, or care. When metaphors resonate with collective memory and cultural sensibility, they enable narratives to travel across social layers, uniting diverse groups through shared symbolic reference points rather than rigid ideological uniformity.
Equally crucial is affective calibration. Political narratives inevitably mobilize emotions, but their effectiveness depends on balance. Excessive anger can harden into hysteria; excessive fear can paralyze; unchecked optimism can slide into denial; excessive caution can breed apathy. The art of narrative lies in calibrating emotional energies so that they mobilize without destabilizing, energize without exhausting, and inspire without deceiving. A well-calibrated narrative sustains dignity even in struggle, allowing people to act without losing ethical and psychological grounding.
Underlying all these elements is ethical tone. Quantum Dialectics emphasizes that narratives derive long-term durability not merely from emotional appeal or strategic brilliance, but from their perceived moral grounding. Narratives that manipulate, scapegoat, or distort reality may achieve short-term coherence, but they inevitably produce long-term decoherence—eroding trust, fragmenting organizations, and hollowing out collective purpose. Ethical dissonance accumulates silently, eventually undermining even the most sophisticated narrative structures.
From a quantum dialectical perspective, art in politics is therefore not manipulation or spectacle. It is resonance engineering—the disciplined practice of aligning meaning with human dignity, ethical integrity, and collective aspiration. When artistic intelligence operates in harmony with scientific analysis, political narratives acquire the capacity to endure, adapt, and guide society toward higher forms of coherence and transformative possibility.
Narrative failure, from a quantum dialectical perspective, is best understood as a process of decoherence rather than a sudden communicative breakdown. A narrative collapses when internal inconsistencies or external contradictions accumulate beyond its capacity to maintain coherence. As long as a narrative can integrate tensions, explain disruptions, and adapt to new conditions, it remains functional. When it cannot, meaning begins to fragment, and the narrative loses its organizing power over collective perception and action.
One of the most common sources of narrative decoherence is the denial of lived experience. When people’s everyday realities—economic hardship, social exclusion, institutional arbitrariness, or moral injury—are minimized, dismissed, or reframed in ways that contradict direct experience, trust erodes rapidly. Closely related is over-centralized messaging that remains detached from local realities. Uniform narratives imposed across diverse social terrains often fail to register region-specific contradictions, producing alienation rather than unity. What appears as coherence at the center becomes incoherence at the periphery.
Another critical factor is repetition without renewal. Narratives are not static slogans; they require continuous re-articulation in response to changing conditions. When political language stagnates, repeating familiar formulations without incorporating new experiences or acknowledging emerging contradictions, it gradually loses vitality. People may still recognize the words, but no longer invest belief or energy in them. Equally destructive is moral dissonance between words and actions. When proclaimed values are contradicted by organizational behavior or governance practice, narratives suffer ethical fracture. This dissonance generates cynicism, which is among the most corrosive forces in political life.
In quantum dialectical terms, these failures result in meaning decoherence. The narrative no longer functions as a binding field of coherence; it cannot organize emotions, align expectations, or mobilize collective will. At this stage, even objectively sound policies or technically competent governance fail to generate support, because the interpretive framework through which people understand and evaluate action has already collapsed.
Successful political organizations recognize that narratives must be continuously re-potentized. This does not mean cosmetic rebranding or tactical spin, but genuine renewal through dialogue with lived experience, willingness to acknowledge error, and capacity for synthesis. By correcting misalignments, integrating new contradictions, and ethically recalibrating meaning, narratives can regain coherence and once again function as living instruments of collective orientation and transformation.
Modern politics unfolds within a crowded and turbulent narrative landscape, where multiple narratives coexist simultaneously, overlap in meaning, and actively interfere with one another. Rather than a single dominant story shaping public consciousness, political space today is marked by narrative superposition—competing explanations, emotional frames, and moral claims circulating at the same time. These narratives do not merely compete for attention; they attempt to collapse one another by discrediting, absorbing, or emotionally overwhelming rival interpretations. This condition makes political struggle increasingly a struggle over meaning itself.
Quantum Dialectics reframes this phenomenon not as mere ideological competition, but as narrative field interaction. Each narrative operates as a field of coherence with its own emotional charge, symbolic structure, and explanatory logic. Reactionary narratives typically derive their coherence from fear, insecurity, and perceived loss. By offering simple explanations and clear enemies, they produce tight, emotionally charged coherence that is resistant to nuance. Progressive narratives, by contrast, often suffer from excessive abstraction. In their effort to remain analytically rigorous or morally inclusive, they may fail to translate structural truths into emotionally legible forms, weakening their capacity to mobilize mass resonance. Populist narratives occupy an intermediate space: they frequently achieve rapid coherence by directly naming grievances and appealing to immediate emotions, but they tend to decay quickly due to internal inconsistency, moral volatility, or inability to sustain structural explanation.
Within this contested field, success in narrative struggle cannot be achieved through volume or repetition alone. Quantum Dialectics emphasizes that durable narrative effectiveness depends on higher coherence, not louder messaging. Coherence integrates facts, emotions, values, and future direction into a stable whole. It also requires ethical clarity, not crude simplification or scapegoating, because ethical dissonance undermines long-term trust. Finally, effective narratives must be grounded in structural truth—addressing root contradictions rather than relying on episodic events, sensational incidents, or reactive commentary that quickly loses relevance.
The objective of political narrative work, therefore, is not the elimination or domination of all rival narratives, an impossible and ultimately counterproductive goal. Instead, the aim is narrative stabilization through synthesis—the creation of a higher-order narrative capable of absorbing legitimate concerns, neutralizing reactionary distortions, and reorganizing meaning around shared material realities and collective aspirations. Such stabilization does not silence contradiction; it integrates it, transforming narrative warfare into a pathway toward deeper social coherence and political transformation.
From a quantum dialectical perspective, political narratives must never be treated as final products or self-contained achievements. They are praxis-generating structures—dynamic frameworks that translate interpretation into action and consciousness into collective movement. A narrative that merely explains reality, however accurately, remains incomplete unless it also reorganizes social energy toward purposeful intervention. Interpretation and transformation are not separate stages; they are dialectically intertwined moments of the same political process.
A quantum-dialectically sound narrative begins with accurate interpretation of reality. It names contradictions as they are lived, not as they are wished away or abstractly theorized. This interpretive accuracy establishes trust and provides cognitive orientation. But accuracy alone is insufficient. The narrative must also mobilize collective agency by enabling people to recognize themselves as active subjects within the social process rather than passive victims or spectators. It must answer not only what is happening, but who can act and how collective action becomes meaningful.
Beyond mobilization, a transformative narrative must open concrete pathways for institutional and social change. It should point toward reforms, struggles, experiments, or organizational forms through which contradictions can be practically resolved or elevated to a higher synthesis. When narratives fail to connect meaning with action, they gradually decay into empty rhetoric—repeated, recognized, but no longer believed. Conversely, action without narrative coherence becomes fragmented and directionless, reduced to isolated reactions lacking continuity, memory, or strategic horizon.
Quantum Dialectics therefore insists on the unity of narrative and practice as the highest form of political coherence. In this unity, narratives continuously inform action, while action feeds back into narrative renewal through experience, correction, and synthesis. Such reciprocity transforms narratives into living instruments of collective self-awareness and praxis into a conscious force of social transformation.
The creation of appropriate and timely political narratives cannot be reduced to a marketing technique, a media tactic, or the charisma of individual leaders. From the standpoint of Quantum Dialectics, it constitutes a distinct political discipline—one that integrates rigorous material analysis, ethical responsibility, and symbolic creativity into a unified practice. Narratives emerge neither from manipulation nor from spontaneity alone, but from a conscious engagement with the real contradictions shaping society and the moral horizons toward which transformation is directed.
Quantum Dialectics clarifies several foundational principles of this narrative science. First, narratives function as material forces of coherence. They are not merely representations of reality but active organizers of perception, emotion, and collective will. Second, timeliness is understood as phase alignment—the synchronization of narrative articulation with the evolving configuration and intensity of social contradictions. Third, art refines science into resonance: analytical truth becomes politically effective only when translated into symbols, metaphors, and emotional structures that people can recognize as their own lived experience. Finally, ethics stabilizes coherence over time, ensuring that narratives do not achieve short-term success at the cost of long-term trust, legitimacy, and organizational integrity.
Political movements, therefore, do not succeed simply by possessing the correct ideology or the most detailed policy programs. They succeed by producing narratives that arrive at the right historical moment, speak honestly to the lived realities of the masses, and open pathways toward higher forms of social synthesis. Such narratives do not deny contradiction; they organize it, channeling conflict into transformative possibility rather than fragmentation or despair.
In an era marked by rapid social phase shifts, information saturation, and intensified narrative warfare, the future belongs to political formations capable of mastering this quantum dialectical science and art of narrative. Not as propaganda or spectacle, but as a conscious, humane, and transformative practice of collective meaning-making—one that enables societies to understand themselves, act coherently, and move toward more just and integrated forms of collective life.
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