Once upon a time, we were rich in stories that united us, and helped us to understand the world and ourselves. We called them myths. Some were rooted in religions. Others told of heroes and quests. But all, in their different ways, had deep truths to teach us—about wisdom and ignorance, good and evil, grief, guilt, and redemption. Today, we’ve largely forgotten these old myths. We’ve decided that things are either literally, scientifically true, or not true at all. “Myth” has become a synonym for “wrong,” as in “urban myth.” In the thesaurus, you’ll find it filed together with bunk, crock, fabrication, fiction, and hogwash. What does this have to do with politics, economics and how to shape the future of our societies? The answer is ‘everything.’ Writing just before the First World War—at the end of another long period of globalisation, innovation, and connectedness—Carl Jung saw all too clearly the risks of “the man who thinks he can live without myth.” Such a person, he wrote, “…is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or the ancestral life within him or yet with contemporary society”. What Jung understood was that without shared myths to bind societies together, the risks of fragmentation, polarisation, culture wars and actual violence increase dramatically—exactly as we see all around us today. In such conditions—in the “myth gap” we now inhabit—it’s all too easy for dark ‘anti-myths’ to fill the void.
Why progressives should worry about the myth gap | openDemocracy
