The Mythotechnics of Meaning: 2 Semiotic Gravity: Why Some Stories Pull Collectives into Stable Orbits

Not all stories are created equal. Some vanish like smoke. Others linger for centuries, bending societies around them as invisibly as gravity bends light. Why? Because stories have mass. Semiotic mass.

Think of a narrative not as a string of words but as a lattice of potentialities. Its weight comes from how tightly it aligns the relational cuts of a collective: shared expectations, repeated rituals, moral orientations, perceptual habits. When these alignments are dense enough, the story acquires semiotic gravity: it holds minds, bodies, and institutions in orbit.

This is not poetic flourish. It is structural fact. Civilisations are like star systems: myths are their suns. Around them revolve law, custom, technology, and social hierarchies. Change the mythic centre, and the orbiting potentials wobble; change it radically, and the system collapses into chaos.

Consider a classic example: the story of kingship in medieval Europe. It was not merely a claim of divine right. It was a topological arrangement of potential: obedience, loyalty, ritual, narrative. The story’s weight stabilised courts, economies, even the very perception of the natural order. Remove it, and you do not merely lose a story — you unanchor an entire world of possibilities.

The same principle operates in every culture, past and present. Mythic mass explains why some narratives persist despite evidence, logic, or experience: their relational scaffolding has been repeatedly actualised across generations. They have inertia. They have centripetal force.

But here’s the twist: semiotic gravity is neither moral nor fair. It does not reward truth; it rewards alignment. A story survives not because it mirrors reality but because it orchestrates the potentials of its collective effectively.

For those who think they are free to question, innovate, or escape the gravitational pull of their cultural narratives, take heed: every attempt to shift the orbit must contend with the mass already in motion. Resistance is possible, but only if the new story can generate greater alignment, greater relational density, than the one currently dominating the system.

In other words, world-stability is not accidental. It is an ongoing negotiation between competing potentialities, enacted through myth, ritual, and repetition. Semiotic gravity is the invisible law that holds worlds together — and, if neglected, explains why they fall apart.

The moral (or anti-moral) of this reflection: if you wish to craft change, you must understand mass. Not the mass of armies, not the mass of economies, but the mass of stories. That is the true architecture of collective reality.