V - MYTH

What is a myth? The word has more than one definition. In this book, I use the word “myth” to mean a story whose purpose is to guide one’s life.

All stories have a mythic quality, but some are more mythic than others. To what extent is the intent and effect of the story to be a guide to life rather than to entertain, impress, distract, etc.? The intent is determined by the teller or enactor, the effect determined by what happens to the teller or enactor and any other audience the story may have.

People have always had myths. People have always told stories. Myths are used throughout the world to explain reality, to understand, to make sense out of the infinite possibilities.

We think of myths as being archaic, quaint stories from long, long ago or far, far away, not to be taken seriously. But for the believers in that time and place, the myths were not to be taken lightly, nor as fiction, but were seen as accurate accounts of what actually happened. Even today there are millions of people who would take object to hearing the myth of the Garden of Eden described as symbolic fiction.

Myths are not about Falsehoods
The word “myth” is commonly used to mean something that is false, especially a falsehood many people believe to be true. Please keep in mind that in this book the word “myth” is used to refer to a type of story, not to denote falsehood.

Confusion results from our application of the word “myth” to morals at odds with our own in order to label them as coming from mere stories and therefore false, no rivals to the truth we hold. We have it wrong. All our knowledge comes out of stories and their moral demonstrations, whether we experience them, think them up with all the authority of our own personal say-so, or pick them up from other people. Everything we know is at best only approximately true, a theoretical model of reality, our moral package. Full, ultimate truth is beyond our grasp.

We sometimes set up closed systems, smaller worlds in which we define certain postulates to be true and take them on faith. Mathematics and religion are examples of this. Given the postulates, we can state other things to be true in our artificial world, but any correlation they may have to the larger reality is still uncertain.

Myth is not false. Myth is all we have and we do the best we can.

Modern Myth
All cultures have myths. They are the basis of culture. I can’t imagine a culture without them. “All cultures,” of course, includes us, here and now. Do we have, as a culture, stories that give direction to our lives? We most certainly do. We are awash in them. They are everywhere. This is the Information Age. What is the information? It is stories. Everywhere you turn you are confronted with stories. Television, movies, music, radio, newspapers, magazines, and people’s conversation are all loaded with stories. It is hard to escape them. Try to think of one day in your entire life when you were at no time the audience for a story. Even if we are alone, we tell them to ourselves. At night we sleep and dream them.

Each of these stories is a moral demonstration, an enactment of one or more morals showing its validity. They are mythic. They transmit cultural values. They show us how to live. Some are purely personal, some are for a small group such as a family or one’s circle of friends. Others are for an entire region or social class, for an entire culture, or universal, for all people.

Sports are an important mythic enactment. A sport is a structured dominance contest, designed to reward certain actions stemming from moral choices the participants and audience idealize, such as teamwork, preparation, physical fitness, intelligence, hustle, concentration, and sacrifice. If the team we root for wins, we feel that they more nearly embodied the moral ideals than the opponent, and by association, we are morally validated and therefore have the right to feel better than, and thus dominant over, the other team’s fans. Rationally, this latter makes no sense. Mythically, it is obvious. The human brain is much better at myth than reason. Give people a logical argument and they can get lost. Give them a good story and your point is made.

Although everyone’s life is different, we all deal with many of the same moral questions—Who am I? What does it all mean? Why did this happen? What is love and how can I get it? What is the best way to get ahead? There are many others. Stories demonstrate answers to these questions. If the entire audience is dealing with some question and a story is doing a good job with an answer, the audience will be right there for it, dependably. Some moral conclusions that have had recurring popularity throughout history are the worth of virtue, the worth of alliances with others, the dependability of causality (you are affected by the consequences of your actions), and the danger of taking a position contrary to one’s culture.

Mythic Living
Myth is more than a story we are told, more than an archetypal story we have long believed. Myths guide our lives. Our myths are the stories we live by. We each live our lives as a story, or more exactly a group of interrelated stories (a story with a subplot is also a story within a story) which combine with the stories of the family, the group, the region, the nation, the world. We see our lives in story form, and we live them that way. The value of our lives comes through the demonstration of morals that we deem good. We live in demonstration of moral choices. Myth is the defining structure of our thoughts and our lives and is thus central to human existence. If you want to make a computer think like a person, give it a moral package, make it see itself and others as characters, program it to organize and process its data in the form of stories and moral demonstrations and give it a myth to operate under.

Although nearly everything we do follows story structure, virtually everyone is unaware of the mythic quality of life. We blindly follow the form, trying to make our myth a better story. We don’t know that is what we are doing; we do it because actions improving the story line feel like the right thing to do. Such actions feel right because they produce more dramatically satisfying demonstrations of our morals.

The story you are living is your myth. You have one from birth to death, a lifelong story in which you are the protagonist. You are also a character in other people’s myths and they are characters in yours. Take a moment to consider the mythic story you are living. Your life is not just a semirandom collection of biographical facts. You have been living as a variety of related characters in pursuit of demonstration of your moral package. The actions of your characters are what you normally see. Try looking at actions as moral demonstrations and they will fall into recognizable patterns. Why your characters are who they are will also become clear. Your myth is held together by your moral package. Figure out your morals and the rest will fall into place. If you have trouble seeing your life as a myth, read Appendix A, Personal Myth Analysis.

A myth centered on a single person is an individual, or personal, myth. A myth centered on a group of people is a group myth. Group myths will be discussed in the next chapter.

We live to advance our characters from what we see them being and doing to what we think they should be and do, using a feedback loop of action and moral demonstration. This locks us into story form whether we know it or not.

The heart of any story is the morals being demonstrated. Yet if you ask someone “What is the story of your life?” you will probably get a recitation of bare biographical facts. We focus on the details of the plot rather than the moral through line behind them. We focus on the demonstrations of our morals but remain only dimly aware of most of our morals themselves. If you want to understand who you are, you need to know your moral package, for only then can you understand your character and see your myth clearly.

Your moral package is enormous. You have been building it since the day you were born, perhaps before. Every waking minute since, you have been interpreting your perceptions and experiences as moral demonstrations as you have built your personal moral package. Those morals have changed and multiplied constantly over the years as your life has given you countless interactions with the world.

Your myth started out as a simple story. You had just a few needs and ideas. Each day brought adventures, obstacles not quite like any you had faced before. Coping with them gave you new morals, new details about what life was and what to do about it. As your moral package grew, so did your myth, involving more and more characters, obstacles, and actions, becoming a story far more complex than could ever be told. Soon your myth outgrew what your conscious mind could hold, so today most of your myth is beyond your normal awareness. Furthermore, we remember our moral demonstrations, not the morals themselves. After a good moral demonstration, we absorb the moral and assume reality to be that way, usually without ever being aware of the specific moral. We see the world differently and believe it is so.

Moral package awareness also suffers from the nonverbal nature of most morals. Moral demonstrations arise out of action which is usually not verbal or rational. The resultant morals make statements about reality that do not involve words and are thus harder for us to remember precisely. Words help us stabilize our thoughts and make them specific. Language helps us categorize and make sense out of our experiences and resolve contradictions in our view of reality. This is a major reason why we tell stories.

Language has its limits in describing reality. Words are only a reflection of what they stand for, but they are still a valuable tool. We use whatever we can to understand. A major function of poetry is to extend the reach of words deep into wordless experience. The poet uses careful word choice, rhythm, rhyme, and other literary devices to recreate for the reader what normally could not be said. One common element of poetry is metaphor, the equating of two dissimilar things, so that an easily understood moral demonstration by one is understood to be equivalent to the obscure moral demonstration by the other, so the cryptic is made clear by association.

Beyond poetry lie music and visual arts. Both are used to express moral demonstrations that are beyond the reach of words. Words are often associated with art and music as song lyrics or titles to works of art, but the mythic significance of the expression goes beyond words.

When we think of our personal myths, the stories we live, we think first of what we do and what the world does to us, our adventures coping with the progression of our lives. But that is only part of our myth, the external part. The myth is also internal, playing in our imaginations, our plans, our thoughts, our fantasies, and our dreams. The external world of experience and the internal world of the mind work together to keep the myth moving forward. Both mythic arenas are filled with characters, actions, and moral demonstrations and each one feeds mythic material to the other.

In our lives we think of actions that seem right for our myths and we do them. The consequences of what we do give us moral demonstrations that help us with the evolution of our moral package. On the internal arena, we imagine actions and play them as thought experiments and see what happens and learn from that. Some of us make greater use of the external mythic arena, others are more inclined to the internal, but for all of us the myth is an interplay between the two.

The internal quality of much of personal myth makes it hard to figure out the myth of another person. Actions are visible, thoughts are not, so much of the myth remains hidden.

Stories have questions with actions that lead to answers. When we say “I want,” we raise a question in the story. Action stemming from that desire yields consequences that provide answers. Did you get what you want? After you got it was it really what you wanted, and did the attainment of that goal get you to where you needed to be in the progression of your myth; is your life on track here? You want to reach that goal because you see your situation there in some way better than otherwise, “better” being a demonstration of the world as you think it should be.

Actions give answers but they can also raise questions. “After all that work, this is all I got? What now? How did that happen? Why didn’t I get what I wanted? What should I do next? Where should I go from here?” The questions raised help drive your character into the next obstacle.

The heart of action in a story is dominance conflicts over obstacles. We have problems standing between us and the goal. Our virtues are tested in these dominance conflicts; without them our abilities are in doubt. For without obstacles, the goal would be too easy—anyone could have done it. With them, we show how our sterling qualities make all the difference. Overcoming problems demonstrates our worth, the validity of our morals, and our right to feel dominant over others.

Characters in the Myth
We are characters in the myths of our lives. In a well-made story, the protagonist will evolve as a result of the actions of the plot. This parallels the evolution of ourselves throughout our lives. We are each our own myth’s protagonist. In a well-made life we grow as a result of our actions. But which way do we grow? There are many, many more possibilities open to us at any moment than we could ever act upon. We make our choice on the basis of “What would my character do in this situation?”

We depend on the myth to tell us what to do. Beyond the myth there is no moral demonstration and therefore no awareness of causality. Action would appear independent of effect and have no larger meaning. It would feel empty and pointless. Moral demonstration is how life makes sense. We stay inside the story, in character, and that is where others expect to find us.

Do something radically new in your life and others will say “But that’s not like you to do that,” or even “But that’s so out of character for you.” We normally take such comments are normally seen as negative. The negativity arises because we are also characters in their myths. Lurches in our behavior produce unexpected moral demonstrations that interrupt the even flow of their mythic progression, creating stress in their lives. Do other people care about your myth? Only insofar as it affects theirs.

Other people are also characters in our own myths. Each one stands for a mix of moral qualities which make him an individual, a unique person, and a distinct character in our myth. When we meet someone new, at first that person is an unknown quantity, although we make quick judgments based on action, appearance, context, and prior information and experience. As we get to know something of the myth and moral package of that person, what sort of character is being portrayed, we can integrate him into our story and we say we know that person. Yet we never really know people; we can only know the characters we perceive them to portray.

Unscripted Myth
We each star in our own myth. We have a similarity to characters in a play on stage, but there are major points of distinction. A stage play is a greatly focused and concentrated slice of human action, whereas the ongoing enactment of life has all the little distracting details that make life so morally messy. A good stage play is cleaned up action with a clear progression.

A good play has very few morals being demonstrated. There is a central moral to which everything in the play relates so that the progression is clear. One’s life consists of a very large number of semi-simultaneous moral demonstrations, often inconsistent, inconclusive, or even contradictory, all of which make for multiple morals vying for demonstration. The result ranges between complicated and chaotic. Real people are always far more complex than any theatrical character.

A play has one main question and when that question is answered, the play is over. In life, the myth is not over until we die, and even after our deaths, parts of our myths may be carried forward by others. While we are alive, we deal with many questions that may or may not have anything to do with each other. Parts of our myth are cyclic, dealing repeatedly with certain ongoing questions. Sometimes the myth appears episodic, with a series of questions that seem mutually independent. A closer look should reveal longer term questions that organize our lives.

Another distinction is that the actors have a script. The progression of action is all worked out and rehearsed beforehand. There is a map that shows the dramatic route from beginning to end. Life is not like that. In life there is no storyteller. The characters are running the show. That does not mean we have a completely free hand. We are still guided by our moral packages and the ongoing situation, yet because the future is never completely an extrapolation of the past, we never really know what we are doing. We are always moving into virgin dramatic territory, and we are in a fog that limits our vision ahead. Our hindsight is also limited. No one can remember exactly what happened. We can only remember a mythically significant version of what happened. Our minds sort for mythic significance; we forget what the myth does not value. Ask any two people to describe an event they both witnessed. Notice how much the stories differ.

Still, we plunge ahead into the jungle of the future, as dangers and opportunities come our way. We have choices to be made—our way is not fixed. The myth is not a written script, but lives and evolves as we do. We write the script as we go. Life progresses through myth and myth progresses through life. Each feeds the other.

The expansion and development of our personal myths is not solely driven by our experiences. Rather, who we are at that point determines our interpretation of our experience to yield certain moral demonstrations and not others. The moral demonstrations will then shift our moral package to a greater or lesser degree. Who we are is greatly but not wholly determined by our myth. Genetic behavioral tendencies will bias us toward morals that support those behaviors. Beyond that, some decisions are influenced by physiological condition or semi-random free will.

The standards we use to make choices are based on the moral demonstration priorities we have at the time. We call them our needs. And what we need is what our character needs, or rather, the character we are playing at that moment. A wife has one set of needs, a mother quite another.

Mythic World
We all have a variety of roles that we play, yet it can seem a surprise to see someone we think we know well in a different role. It was quite an experience for me the first time I saw my father, a lawyer, argue a case in court. Here was this man, a huge part of my life, acting and talking in ways I had never seen before, that had nothing to do with me, and yet it was still him. How could this be? Yet there he was. It was up to me to make sense out of what I saw. The scope of my myth enlarged. We are all that way.

The characters in our myth are not out there in the world. Those are people out there. The characters are creations within our own minds. The actors are on stage; the play is in the mind of the audience. My father was a lawyer since before I was born. His character in my mind became more fully a lawyer that day in court. At the same time the character the judge was watching was just another lawyer in his courtroom, not a father at all.

This concept is similar to color. Out there in the world is electromagnetic radiation of a huge spectrum of frequencies, from near zero to gamma rays. Photons with frequencies in a relatively tiny range called “visible light” stimulate the nerves in our eyes, and the different frequencies of visible light do so in ways that give us the sensation of the various colors. The radiation is out there; the colors exist only in our minds. Is the grass green? No. Green is not a quality of the grass but a quality of our perception of the grass. We assume others see colors as we do, but there is no way to know for sure. So it is with the events of the world. We see them through mythic eyes, in moral colors. Most of what is out there we cannot see at all, for our myth is not sensitive to it. If you want to see more, widen the scope of your myth. Let it include a greater range of story questions, characters, obstacles, actions, and moral demonstrations. What we see, we assume others see in the same moral colors. This is rarely true; we can get very upset when their perceptions are radically different.

We all live in different worlds. The world is a quite dissimilar place for each of us. We don’t want to think that, for it reduces our own sense of group identity and authority, as well as our faith in the validity of our perceptions and myth. But it is so. We are different because we have different myths. Our myths are different because we each carry a different moral package. Those morals are statements about what kind of place the world is and what it means, bearing implications for what is appropriate action. For example, in my world, television is a big waste of time, the stupidest of distractions. But for many, it is exciting and a great source of companionship. What is television? It all depends on what world you live in. Here is another example. If you are not an alcoholic, ask yourself what kind of place the world would have to be to you to make being drunk most of the time be the right thing to do.

You take actions appropriate to the world you live in. Your actions are demonstrations of the validity of the morals that define your world, so you are living in a world in which actions you take prove the world to be what you thought it was. Of course, things do not always go as planned or expected, but largely, our individual worlds are self-confirming, so we come to assume that of course reality is as we perceive it. We live in a positive feedback loop of world view confirmation.

Most people resist strongly when you tell them that what they have experienced to be true every day of their lives is but one possible description of the world and that another, contradictory to their own, is equally valid and is a better basis for a good life.

We each try to do the best we can in the world we inhabit. Your actions make sense in your world. They may be crazy in mine. The morals of my myth seem to me reasonable and rational to demonstrate; other morals do not. If they did, they would be part of my myth. When other people demonstrate morals not in my myth, they appear weird and strange. When their demonstrations contradict my morals, they appear mistaken and wrong.

Fortunately for the culture, we all have a lot of overlap in our moral packages and thus in our myths, which allows us to get along with each other. The overlap is not just beneficial to the culture. It is the culture.