Do We Need a New Myth, or No Myth?

Do We Need a New Myth, or No Myth?

This is the true, biggest challenge I’m facing as a writer and thinker. Myth: Do we need a new one, or do we need to dispense with them altogether?

I used to direct theater. I left the theater because I got increasingly dissatisfied with its reliance on stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Aristotle's narrative arc with its rising tension, crisis, and catharsis wasn't just predictable, but dangerously limiting. Things look bad, but as long as you accept the hero's solution, everything gets solved and you can go back to sleep. Crisis, climax, and sleep - the much-too-male approach to everything from sex to religion, capitalism to communism.

I left theater for the net, which seemed to offer a more open-ended, connected form of sense-making. So I wrote about that, and the possibilities this opened for everything from economics to society. In my books, I usually tried crashing a set of myths - but then usually offer some alternative at the end. So in my religion book I smashed the myth of apocalypse and salvation, but offered an alternative path toward consensus, progressive collaboration. In another, I exposed the fallacy of hand-me-down truths, but then offered an alternative of collective reality creation. In a graphic novel, I undermined the authority of the storyteller (me) and then have a character hand a pencil to the reader as if through the page. In a book on Judaism, I smashed the idolatry that infected Judaism, but promote a new, provisional mythology of communal sense making. In my books on economics, I crash the cynically devised mythologies of capitalism and corporatism, but offer a new one of circular economics and sharing. In my Team Human podcast, I regularly crash the myth of the survival of the fittest individual, but offer a new evolutionary history of interspecies cooperation.

Better myths, like cultural operating systems, should yield better results. But if they are all myths, are they all ultimatelydestructive? 

Even science falls into the trap. We get an idea - say, that agriculture was a wrong turn - and then “see” evidence that hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours than we did after the invention of agriculture. I have even quoted this ‘fact’ from neuorscientist/sociologist Robert Sapolsky, and others, before realizing it’s based not on science but a story. 

People and institutions come to me to help develop a new myth for 21st Century, for digital times. But mythology feels more like the product of a television media environment - imagery and hallucination. The digital media environment is about fact. Memory. It all takes place on memory. That’s why we’re fighting less over who believes what, than what really happened. Where did humans come from? Are things getting better or worse? And the myths are no longer adequate. The stories are not up to the task.  

I think Team Human’s job may be to find ways to work together without an overriding mythological construct. We should do something in a new way because it’s just better, on an experiential, practical, or scientific level. Growing food in a certain way - not because it’s connected to Mother Gaia, but because it keeps the soil alive. Not a metaphor. Reality.

If we are destined to think and communicate in myths - if that’s our nature - then we can at least accept that we all use stories to understand the world. Understanding another person means listening to their story - and sharing one’s own - but accepting that both are just stories. Myths are ways of connecting the dots between the moments of human experience. They create a sense of continuity and purpose, even though there may be none. Or myths may help each of us trace a path of cause-and-effect through a maze of reality that is so interconnected it would just overwhelm us to comprehend it in its entirety. We each make our own myth to explain the journey we happened to take. But it's more of a convenience than a reality. And we can look back on our lives, and come up with a new myth to explain it. The myth is not for someone else, it's for ourselves.

Of course we can still listen to one another’s perceptions and sense-making - and then gain some empathy for why they’re thinking and acting the way they do - without necessary believing any of it. And, maybe more importantly, without trying to get them to exchange their mythology for ours. Understanding other people's myths, unconditionally and without being threatened by them, has helped keep me sane during this particularly tumultuous cultural moment.  

So what’s Team Human’s job: to come up w a new myth? Or break them all?  Whatever we decide, it should be a conscious choice. 

This essay started as a monologue on TeamHuman.fm. Please come listen!


Amanda R. Carlson

Innovating in the field of social exploration, utilizing immersive experiences that elicit creative responses, unexpected encounters, and new discoveries, offering adventures into our shared humanity.

5 年

As far as myths are epic adventures laden with hard earned wisdom and the inability to hide, myths are the juiciest stuff around. ?The question may better be, are we living our myths or living a lie?

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Rupert Newton

bioeconomy, green growth to post-growth, biodiversity | research, analysis, ideas, writer.

6 年

Throw out myth in the sense of "hero's story" or fairy tales? Yes. But myth as Levi-Strauss defined it? It's a way of thinking about reality, a method to imagining new futures, e.g. 'solidarity economics'. Or, for a more grounded example, we need metaphor to broadly communicate the biological facts about soil, because it's been framed as 'dirt'. Soil for plants is like stomachs for animals, in essence soil is a plant's external digestive system. Scientific fact as relatable metaphor...or trying to explain photosynthesis, mycelium, osmosis etc... I mean, re: metaphors, I'm sure you don't mean we do away with our primary form of linguistic persuasion, but to start from facts, while throwing out the hackneyed Joseph Campbell/Star Wars meme and our current 'leading public intellectual' boffing on about witches in the NYT,

D. W. NICOLL Ph.D. (德里克·尼科尔)

Intellectual explorer/social scientist

6 年

A new myth - new myth - well there are a few pretty old and monotonous one's kicking about - anybody that anybody ranting on a bout A.I.? again and again in an infinite maddening recursive loop - much worse than the mythic hero story of Joseph Campbell - ethics, the impact, big data, IoT oh yeah and even more A.I. - 'we need to lay down moral and ethical codes cos of it'.... yada yada... Thanks a lot for something different Douglas

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Michael Rinke

Mind juggling, learning superintendent, Training, Mentoring and Coaching

6 年

Myth is useful to impress people: it has nothing to do with my original personality but with the idea of it! And this of course alienates me from myself! Often it is used to get a spontaneous force to resolve problems. But on the long term view to have strenghts I would advise to use less Myths and more of my inside origin ressources… If your german is good heres a related article...https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/wandel-change-transformation-agilit?t-michael-rinke/

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Jason Shankel

Director of Development, Clinivise

6 年

Myth serves identity. It's the way we understand ourselves.? We're going into an era where identity is becoming distributed, persistent (even beyond death) and multi-faceted (public/private, casual/intimate, personal/professional.) We will need new myths...or updates of old ones...to relate to these new human experiences. We see it now in television shows and movies. Westworld, Humans, Altered Carbon and other stories are digging deep on the idea that identity can be copied, modified, authored, merged and forked just like source code. The notion (however reductive and simplistic) that humans and human-like beings can be defined purely in terms of mechanical processes on information is second nature to us now.? Used to be we'd think of "downloading your brain" into a computer as a fantasy, science fiction premise. And it still is. But now casual viewers will not only comprehend that premise, but will engage with the question of whether a downloaded copy of yourself is "really" you, especially if the original persists. The new myths will reconcile questions like that.

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