Against Mythology, Reality Contends in Vain

artwork by Simeon Netchev (CC BY-NC-ND) from World History Encyclopedia

The title of this essay is plagiarized from Aurélien’s latest, which plunges into the treacherous subject of myth. Myth, sadly, for reasons Aurélien takes pains to explain, often trumps the truth, facts and reality when it comes to the mental models by which we attempt to make sense of the world.

(My title is actually his subtitle, itself a clever rewording of the German playwright Friedrich Schiller’s famous 1801 lament “against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain”.)

The reasons myths are so powerful, of course, is that they are simple, pat, and easily understood, and hence fit neatly into our similarly simplistic worldviews. We are frequently reminded (and I have often asserted myself) that myths aren’t necessarily false — that a myth is simply a story that is believed by enough people to serve and persist as a kind of cultural shorthand. Though I would claim, now, that all stories are fictions, so myths are as well.

Aurélien’s explanation of the meaning, purpose and power of myths is as follows:

Myths traditionally ordered events into some kind of a coherent relationship, established cause and effect, and reduced somewhat the otherwise frightening randomness of the world. Modern myths work in fundamentally the same way, and serve fundamentally the same purpose. Myths are … all-embracing and (theoretically) coherent ideological constructs that serve to give meaning to our existence and to what happens in our lives. Myths have to be all-embracing if they are to be coherent: there are no loose ends allowed, and anything that doesn’t fit has to be either suppressed, or modified. Likewise, myths draw their strength from the need for them in the first place… The validity of the myth is taken for granted, and events are fitted into it, with more or less difficulty, as they occur.

Our conditioned belief systems and worldviews naturally prefer myths above all other types of explanation and rationalization: They are compact and uniform and have no rough edges and missing pieces, so they fit beautifully into a simplistic worldview.

Aurélien visits several of the most prevalent myth archetypes of our time (and ancient times):

• The Providential Leader — who arrives to save us at exactly the needed moment
• The Cabal — “an all-powerful group of individuals secretly directing the affairs of the world”
• The Victim People — endlessly suffering people whose sometimes-masochistic martyrdom is deemed heroic
• The Source of All Evil — usually this “source” is a nation that those believing the myth have never visited and know nothing about
• The Evil Mastermind — that one person who is “behind” many of our problems, such that, if that person can be taken out, those problems will disappear
• The Prophet — “who sees the truth that others wish to conceal, or the danger that nobody wants to see”
• The Thucydides Trap — that there is “foreordained and predestined conflict between [certain] tribes, nations and civilisations”
• Final Conflict, Final Judgement, and the Good Guys Will Win in the End — myths based in both Christian and Islamic eschatology and teleology

Much of Aurélien’s essay is about the myths that have arisen about past wars, and how they are being resurrected by politicians, ‘think tanks’, ‘strategic advisors’, and pundits, to apply to today’s wars, and their causes and possible resolutions — badly and inappropriately.

So you do some perfunctory research and structure your article [or speech or manifesto] around a series of myths constructed from banalised history and popular entertainment, seasoned with the political flavour that your [audience wants].

He explains how popular culture (Hollywood in particular) has entrenched and concretized these myths, and how, for example, this has influenced the west’s staggeringly inept response to events in Ukraine: “So the 1955 film The Dam Busters and the attempted destruction of the Crimean Bridge have become essentially one concept, and no doubt The Bridge Busters is already in development somewhere.”

Immediately after he published this article, Aurélien was excoriated by several (regular) readers for suggesting that even our belief that the US is an Empire is a myth. In his defence, he responded:

It’s not disputed that there are people who see the United States as the latest iteration of the Empire myth, just as there are others who apply it to Russia. I’m interested in myths and their effects, not debating whether the US is “actually” an Empire, which is a different question.

(If you want to follow how that ‘non-debate’ turns out, you’ll have to read the whole article and the comments thread that follows it.)

His message, I think, is this: When the world becomes too complex and bewildering for us to fathom, we retreat into the comfortable embrace of myth, in which everything is easily explained and explainable, anchored to the recurrent patterns of the past, and hence certain and predictable.

That’s what we’d like to believe. So that’s what we believe.

Or, as Schiller put it two centuries ago, more poetically: “One cannot prevent people from thinking what they please.”