Westworld season 4

Please listen in the background to the show's theme song below as you read the following. It sets the tone and mood.

This season the hosts have taken over the world and are doing to humanity what originally the latter had done to them: They are programming people to do their bidding by writing out narratives that they must blindly follow. They use subliminal sound waves to control us and implant the programs.

In episode 5 Teddy said something to Christina that highlights this theme. Something to the effect of our stories are more real than what we think is real. Christina works for a media company writing story lines for game apps. But what she comes to realize is that the stories she's writing are in fact the narratives that are being implanted in humanity.

Which of course is art once again reflecting reality. We all talk about 'controlling the narrative' since that is indeed how we program ourselves to believe in something. Our stories are far more important that the 'facts,' which we will twist and turn to cohere with our narrative. That goes for everyone, including those who think they are beyond all that. Which is of course part of the manipulative metanarrative.

As in the series there are outliers who have broken free of the dominant narrative. We need to understand the nature of narrative so that we don't get too attached to our cherished ones. Granted we need them in order to make sense of the world and function, but we can hold them more lightly. And be open enough to modify or change them when we recognize valid challenges to them. The danger is, as in the series, when we just blindly follow a particular narrative's scripts as the sole and ultimate reality. 

Instead of outing the outliers like a programmed bot perhaps consider them an opportunity for awakening.