Narratives are the means by which control is exercised. The powers that be have recognized long ago that when you put shackles on someone, the nature of your relationship becomes clear. The person so enslaved has an obvious enemy to fight and resist and overcome. An obvious story of oppression implicit in their circumstance. But when a person adopts a narrative of their own free will, there is no external enemy. The enemy is within, and the poor soul who has been indoctrinated considers that enemy a friend, and indeed a part of themselves that they will defend. Now if you remove the shackles from this person you have become the enemy. And their immediate impulse will be to get rid of you, and restore the shackles to return to what feels like a familiar and safe environment.
Moreover, when a culture and society forms around the narrative, the social dynamics will shape themselves to protect and preserve the narrative. A person who seeks to leave the narrative, to establish some other way of life, will quickly discover that all of their friends are terrified for them. The world beyond the narrative is chaos, confusion, danger, and ultimately death. Slavery may be uncomfortable but at least we know where our food comes from, and what we need to get it. Escape slavery, and it is just you and the wild.
This is in essence, the story of Exodus. In Exodus, when the Israelites are escaping Egypt, they find themselves in the open desert, and all of the behaviors and attitudes that created survival for them within Egyptian culture are now totally useless in this environment. It’s sink or swim, and there are going to be a lot of failures, a lot of discomfort, fear, blame, and yes, deaths occurring while the tribe recreates competence for itself in this new environment.
And the impulse through all of this is going to be to return to Egypt. Return to the recipe you know for food, shelter and safety.
Certainly, if you ask anyone back home what you should do, it will be obvious to them. You should do the things that they never stopped doing. And you are a stupid fool to have gone into the desert to begin with. Everyone knows the desert is death.
But for those of us who have had the impulse to leave the safety of the known civilization, and to ask “What else is there? There must be another way…”, the impulse to do so is coming from our personal experience. From witnessing the way we are treated, the way that others are treated. From a knowing within, that we are more than this. We’re capable of creating a world not governed by fear, but by love, and by an aspiration to serve the highest calling - to build the Earth as a temple and a garden to the God who lives within all things.
It is that aspiration, that vision for more humanity, more compassion, more gentleness and kindness, that brings a person to leave safety and comfort and strike out into the dangers of the unknown.
links to the Feral Human Society theme song, Rusty Cage—the Soundgarden original and the Johnny Cash cover; both sonorous perfection 
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