When political disagreements become a battle between good and evil instead of a difference of information, there's more at play than just "misinformation."
As humans, we've spent thousands of more years making up stories to explain the world than we have finding facts and rationally discerning reality from fiction. As people become overloaded with information and underprepared to explain the world to themselves, our primitive tool of myth-making is rising to fill the gaps. But unlike with misinformation, a person rarely abandons their myth just because they've seen contradictory facts.
Being a functional individual and creating positive change requires not just a knowledge of reality, but an understanding of how humans have always navigated reality via myths.
In this livestream I'll share some of Joseph Campbell's ideas on the role myth plays in our life and society, as well as how to recognize when you're in the realm of rational truth-seeking vs irrational myth-making. We'll also discuss:
How mythological thinking influences our political beliefs
The dangerous myths driving our culture
Becoming aware of our own myth and consciously altering it
Here’s a preview:
Join my next livestream for a real-time black sheep hangout + discussion on topics like groupthink, the philosophy of individualism, radical self-reliance, and other topics people seeking meaningful lives in modern times need. Stop by via YouTube, Rumble, Instagram, Substack, or X, [almost] every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday evening.
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Hell yeah, Salomé! You're speaking directly to one of my favorite things to discuss. I studied Classics (Latin & Ancient Greek literature) for over a decade, waded into academia to explore Ovid’s myth-making and the explicit union of myth and reality, then promptly realized academia is... not my scene. But mythology and its intersections with everything—politics, psychology, identity—remain an obsession.
Joseph Campbell is such a perfect entry point to this discussion. I fully agree that we'd benefit tremendously if we truly internalized his point: humans are myth-making creatures, no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise.
Your discussion here made me want to throw two things into the mix, in case you haven’t come across them yet:
1. In Search of a Flat Earth, by Dan Olson/Folding Ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
This is a little dated now (centered on the evolution of flat earthers into QAnon believers), but its core idea is evergreen: what unites conspiracies that attempt to rewrite reality itself?
2. When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth by Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul T. Barber
This is a fantastic deep dive into how myths originate from real historical, natural, and cultural events. The authors argue that myths aren’t just random stories—they’re distorted eyewitness accounts, shaped by cognitive biases, oral tradition, and the human tendency to encode real events in symbolic language. The title comes from the abundant myths about gods severing sky from earth and how these could stem from ancient people witnessing something like a massive comet impact or volcanic eruption. The book traces how different cultures have mythologized things like earthquakes, floods, and meteor strikes, showing how symbols shift over time as stories are reframed through new worldviews.
You are clearly already exploring these intersections elegantly, and I’d love to hear your thoughts if you ever check either of these out.
Omg thank you for these recommendations! Wow, so appreciative of your insights on this topic. It feels like such a niche topic, so it's always exciting to me when someone else notices these connections between myth-making and today's narrativizing of current events/culture.
I think it's seriously under-appreciated how much better at story-telling humans are than rational analysis of facts, and thus how much more it's likely to influence our worldview than facts. My big question now is how we gain more awareness of this phenomenon in order to avoid the more destructive aspects of mythologizing reality gone wild. A lofty goal, for sure lol.
I'm really excited to check these sources out! Thanks for commenting and really glad you enjoyed the livestream; I might share my thoughts on some of what you shared in a subsequent one.
Grateful for your support 🙏