This Won't Hurt a Bit (Chapter 2 - Modern Myth-Making)
Chapter 2
Modern Myth-Making
Any dictionary can tell you what a myth is, but the definition I always remember is that given by David Griffin: “A myth is an idea that, while widely believed, is false.” This makes sense to me; if what was widely believed was true, we would call it “knowledge” or “history”.
There have always been those who were fascinated by myths and have studied them, and much has been said and written on the subject of mythology. In the last two centuries, as the field of psychology emerged and our understanding of mental processes grew, much has also been said and written about the social function of myths. Most of that commentary, however, has been devoted to ancient myths; this book is about modern myths.
In a process the roots of which can be traced to the Enlightenment period of the 17th century and which picked up considerable “steam” (pardon the pun) from the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, mankind has almost completely discarded his prior worldview and replaced it with a new one. This radical shift of perspective has happened in less than four hundred years, which is an astounding speed when compared to the sedate pace of collective psychological change evidenced by the rest of history. While the mind is infinitely flexible and designed for rapid displacement of ideas, perhaps our emotional nature is not. That we must struggle in some way to cope with the pace of ideological change is evidenced by Shopenhauer’s oft-repeated truism, “All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” With our mental and emotional rates of acceptance at odds, it is inevitable that our assimilation of the new paradigms has been less than perfect. Our instinctual natures still cling, to some degree, to the ancient ways. Consciously, we reject mythology, but in reality, we have simply replaced some of our old myths with new ones.
These modern myths were constructed hastily in comparison to the ancient myths which preceded them, but they are still formed by a gradual accretion of life experience. The tempo of life, methods of securing survival needs, goals and objects of ambition, and environmental stressors of Industrial (and, some would say, post-Industrial) societies have changed remarkably from their pre-Industrial state. Accordingly, our modern myths reflect this change; they have an altogether different flavor than that of ancient myths. Some have developed in response to social needs that didn’t even exist in earlier times.
I’ve identified nine modern myths -- that is to say, I’ve grouped the erroneous ideas that we collectively hold into nine major classifications and given those classifications names for the sake of convenience. These are:
- The Myth of Powerlessness
- The Myth of Human Nature
- The Myth of Self-Determinism
- The Myth of Normality
- The Myth of Status
- The Myth of Race
- The Myth of History
- The Myth of Luxury
- The Myth of Scarcity
[Note: this list will change slightly between now and the final draft. I may combine Status and Luxury, and I will almost certainly add one or two more myths to the list.]
I will explain each of these names in separate chapters after this one, but first I want to make some general observations about the origins, structure, functions, and effects of these myths.
Classical myths had a unifying effect on the simpler cultures of the ancient world. They were religious in nature and primarily concerned with the gods. The religious view of the world is a monarchical view, and reflected the mostly monarchical governments of the time. The homogeneity of religious and political heirarchy ensured a corresponding uniformity in the structure and function of myth. This order of the world no longer exists, and thus our mythology has become fractured and contradictory. We no longer believe in a “god” or “gods” in the traditional sense. Overall, atheism has grown while religion has declined. Even those who identify themselves as members of a traditional religion find it difficult to reconcile the ancient myths with the discoveries of modern science. Many religious adherents accomplish it by holding a much modified conception of “god” from that of their ancestors. Likewise, monarchy has fallen out of favor in the world, having been supplanted by a variety of competing ideals, such as democracy, socialism, communism, and anarchism. There is no longer a strong global consensus on how the Universe is structured, or how government ought to be structured, to serve as a single context in which myths can develop.
The sources of modern mythology cannot be adequately explained by religion and politics alone, however. There is a third major force at work in their formation, one that cannot be overlooked and without which any understanding of the current human condition is impossible: economics.
Economics, as a system, now reigns supreme as the ultimate determinant factor of human experience. This came about as a result of modern banking practices, the origins of which can be traced to Italy in the 12th century and which have changed little since the founding of the central banks of Amsterdam and England in the 17th century. Over time, through the subtle manipulation of debt, banks gradually acquired ownership of all the real property of the world. We now function within a primarily economic system, to which even governments and religions must submit.
Having elevated money to the status of a god and financial service to the status of a religion, it is no surprise that much of our thinking now revolves around economic issues. Especially in the United States, we decry social division such as the caste system of India as inimical to modern ideals of democratic equality, egalitarianism, and individual upward mobility, yet our society is very strongly divided by an equivalent system of class division known as tax brackets or income brackets. Some will say that is merely an amplification of the same ideals of class that have always existed, and they would be right; but the aspect of it that deserves our attention is the fact that the criteria of classification have migrated away from religious, political, and hereditary considerations and are now almost solely economical in nature. Of all systems, economics comes closest to having replaced the religious monarchies of the past as the foundational basis of our collective worldview, but the trend is too new for it to have spawned all of our modern myths.
It is also profoundly disturbing that economics has achieved the prominence it has. The business models and corporate philosophies that have proved economically successful are amoral -- if not immoral -- in the extreme. In business, there is only one objective: monetary profit. The single-mindedness with which the corporations of the world pursue this objective leaves no room for humane concerns or meaningful ideals. On the higher rungs of the corporate ladder, from which policies that affect entire cultures are formulated and implemented, even those who have not completely shed their conscience and would like to conduct business with integrity find themselves in such a competitive environment and pitted against such morally bankrupt competitors that any positive ideals they hold must ultimately give way to the practical demands of success. In the world of big business, as in politics, it is a rare person who can achieve any measure of success without being corrupted. Thus large corporations routinely destroy the environment and manipulate political systems to achieve their ends. Those corporations that influence political and social systems also do something else, something that is directly relevant to the theme of this book: they create, perpetuate, and reinforce the belief in modern myths that are beneficial to their bottom line.
While economics, politics, and religion are the pillars of society, there is another institution at work in our time that is less overt but just as influential, and that is science. It is such a pervasive force that even the least educated among us now regularly use scientific terms and concepts in their daily speech, such as “ego”, “anxiety”, “complex”, “bacteria”, and “calorie”. Science is so heavily relied upon that the most educated among us will pay little heed (at least consciously) to anything that does not have a direct reference to the results of a “scientific study”. How reassured we feel when the information being passed to us begins with “scientists say...”! Yet this is a false reassurance. Scientists are as susceptible to corruption as anyone, and the parameters of an experiment can be so contrived as to produce a desired result. This happens far more often than the scientific community would like to admit, and the destructive effect of false information bestowed with the credibility of “science” is incalculable.
Our modern myths are woven from the fabrics of economics, politics, science, and religion, but they are essentially social creations. They are beliefs that were once new, but that were passed around and used often enough to become universally accepted. Or are they? The process of myth-making, as just described, is a natural process; but the process itself has been corrupted.
Two key factors have made the manipulation of the myth-making process possible in recent times. One is increased speed of communication. From the printing press to television and radio to the Internet, our technical ability to disseminate information from a single source to just about everyone else has increased at an exponential rate. The second factor is the complementary disciplines of psychology and sociology. Once the process of myth-making itself became explicitly understood, those with the means to do so could, and did, commence making deliberate use of it. Entire books have been written on this subject, such as Edward Bernays’ modern classic, Propaganda, in which he stated: “If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will, without them knowing it.”
Mass-manipulation of social beliefs is an irresistible tool to those of high position who have a political agenda to push or a profit to make. In fact, the industry that we call “marketing” came into existence out of demand for this tool by businesses. I have often said that the finest minds in behavioral psychology can be found in the fields of advertising and marketing.
In politics, this manipulation creates an interesting feedback loop when applied to the democratic form of government -- which, in case you hadn’t noticed, has become overwhelmingly popular. On the one hand, because political leaders are publicly elected, it has been said that “people deserve the government they get”; on the other hand, political leaders have the means to persuade the public to elect them! Even a cursory study of the subject will reveal significant relationships between political figures, financial titans, and the owners and managers of the remaining six major media companies. The line between government and big business (which includes the media) has become so blurred that it is now commonly likened to a “revolving door.”
The increasingly closed loop of politics, economics, and public opinion amounts to a new homogeneity that the highest class, for the sake of power and profit, tries to stealthily enforce upon society, comparable in terms of mythical function to the religious monarchies of the past. This pressure, added to an already indigestible rate of change, is wreaking havoc on society, by which I mean it is wreaking havoc on us, the members of society.
One of the features of a lie is that it will inevitably be exposed. Truth is simply a statement of what is, and such a statement requires no effort to sustain. But a lie, or false statement, needs constant effort to postpone its exposure, to preserve its existence. In a society as complex as ours has become, with our attention divided and scattered and insistently pulled in different directions, a lie can exist alongside the truths that expose it for a dismally long time. This situation produces social conditions that are ironic, oxymoronic, and paradoxical. These contradictory but simultaneous conditions are the footprints of modern myths; they alert us to the presence of falsehoods at work in our midst.
Look at the world around you now, in the year 2017 A.D.; contradictory conditions abound. Despite amazing technological progress, the majority of the world still lives in poverty and misery. Our understanding of the human body has advanced to the point that we are mapping the human genome and learning how to merge microchips with our impossibly delicate nervous sytems, yet diseases such as cancer and autism have gone uncured, and new disease classifications are continually added to the diagnostic manuals. The epidemic of mental illness grows in proportion to the quantity of psychiatric medications we consume. We’ve created “social media” that encourages anti-social behavior. We presume ourselves to be more “humane” than the “primitive savages” who lived before us, but war in the 20th century has been more constant and more destructive than at any other time in recorded history. Despite the ease with which we can harvest unlimited, clean energy from our environment, we persist in the inefficient and pollutive methods of fossil fuels and nuclear power. The United States, which a few decades ago was universally regarded as the most the most powerful, the most prosperous, and the most protective of individual rights of all nations, is now universally regarded as the #1 threat to world peace. Its economy is in ruins and its established government ignores its own laws to trample the rights not only of its own citizens, but those of the world.
Underscoring it all are the continual revelations of the “whistleblowers”. The inevitable exposure of decades of lies is, fact by fact, allowing us to construct a truer picture of recent history. We are beginning to understand why we suffer.
But it does us no good to blame our problems on the manipulations of politicians, tycoons, and media moguls. Yes, they sell us a steady stream of lies -- but we don’t have to buy them. We can’t blame society, because we are society. Any one of us may become the next successful CEO or the next elected official. In those positions of power and influence, the same modern myths that underlie our thinking now will encourage us to become the next generation perpetuating them. Even if we remain humble “nobodies” in society, we will reinforce the myths in the minds of our peers with every word we speak and every action we take that is tainted by them. The only way out of this trap is for each of us, individually, to recognize and reject them.
To that end, let us proceed to the exposition of the myths themselves.