X - MYTHIC LOGIC

The word “logic” normally refers to a careful, organized way of thinking in which abstract, emotionless reasoning based on facts leads to valid conclusions. I shall refer to this way of thinking as rational logic. The study of such logic has a long and respected history, yet most thought wanders about unimpeded by the principles of rational logic. Why should this be? Why do our minds jump into thought patterns that get us in trouble with false assumptions, bad choices, ineffective actions, and mistaken conclusions?

The answer is that there are two kinds of logic. The first, rational logic, arises from solid principles of reason. The second and more common kind of logic is mythic logic, which is based on story structure.

We honor rational logic yet live by mythic logic almost entirely. Indeed, the commonest use of rational logic is to defend conclusions obtained through mythic logic.

The principles of rational logic are widely known, so I shall not try to enumerate them here. The main postulates of mythic logic are these:

Information is valid only if it comes from or is confirmed by an alpha.

Characters are the source of actions.

Myths are absolute.

Every action is a moral demonstration.

Dominance over obstacles demonstrates the worth of myths and validity of moral demonstrations.

Any member of a group lives by the moral package of the group.

I will now explain how each of these affects our thoughts and actions. Note that they all serve to make your myth more credible, engaging, and dramatically satisfying.

Information is valid only if it comes from or is confirmed by an alpha. If we do not accept ourselves as alpha, we will not accept our thoughts or perceptions that contradict group myth, but instead will repress them or be troubled by them until we can ask someone we trust as alpha to give us an opinion that can put the matter to rest. “Did I really see what I thought I saw?” “No, you must have been mistaken.” From that we can deny our own eyes.

If alphas are the source of truth, then to prove you wrong, all I have to do is deny your alpha, which is much easier and more effective than rebutting your idea, since I simultaneously negate all your ideas, since by mythic logic if you are not alpha you don’t have any valid ones. This is the basis of the ad hominem argument, attacking the speaker rather than the idea. Some typical ad hominem statements are: Don’t be silly. What do you know? You just like to hear yourself talk. Says who? That’s a lie. Who do you think you’re fooling? You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re just in it for the money. You’ll do anything to win an argument. You just like telling other people what to do.

Do any of these sound familiar?

Rationally, being alpha doesn’t make you right and anyone can have a good idea, but our adherence to mythic logic makes ad hominem arguments universal because they work.

Another example of mythic logic’s making alphas the gatekeepers of truth is the appeal to authority. One’s credentials become the justification for whatever one says, even beyond one’s area of expertise. You see a man on television who is obviously an expert at pitching a baseball. Between innings you see him pitching the sponsor’s product, about which he knows no more than you do. His expertise on the playing field makes him alpha to you, so the ad works.

The baseball player is alpha because he is dominant on the playing field. We associate alpha with dominance. We assume a better myth will win out, so dominance reveals the superior myth, the one we should draw from. Thus, by mythic logic, might makes right.

Another basic assumption of mythic logic is that characters are the source of action. Our insecurity about our own alpha and worth as compared to other people draws us to stories in which the conflicts are between characters. Even in a story about one man against nature, the storyteller will probably give nature at least some aspects of a character. We can assign a larger meaning to actions a character did on purpose. The action came out of a moral package and a larger agenda instead of impersonal forces or randomness. The action was part of a larger pattern. Such a world is easier to understand and predict.

A common conception of reality is that “everything happens for a purpose”, which is another way of saying that there is an intent behind everything that happens. This intent is usually ascribed to a god or spirit or universal consciousness or some other character standing behind physical reality.

Also, turning sources of action into characters gives us more of a group to work with and decreases our feelings of abandonment. Notice how objects seem to have more of a personality when there are no other people around. The objects themselves remain the same, but our perceptions of them change to reflect our mythic need for a more satisfying story.

We need to believe in our myths. The inability to do so is a route to life crisis. We need to believe in our moral packages and that the myth we are living is how we really are in the world and that some other myth in our given circumstances is not happening. We all have fantasies about how our lives would be different if a few changes were made, but we believe the myth we see ourselves living is really how life is. Nevertheless, storytellers always make choices as they create their tales, choices that could have gone as easily one way as another. Ask someone who knows you well to tell you the story of your life, who you are, what you do, what you believe in, how you fit in with the world. I guarantee he won’t tell it as you would. The two stories will not be the same, not even close. Which one is right? Which one is really the story you are living, your myth? In one way they are both right, even if they seem contradictory. They are both your story, as each of you best perceives it. They are also both ultimately wrong; no one can know everything about your life, not even you. Yet you are continually faced with the problems of making sense out of your life and deciding what to do next, so you have faith in the validity of your version of your myth.

Closely related to the idea that everything happens for a purpose is the idea that every action is a moral demonstration, that everything that happens is either a validation of what we already know or a lesson not to be forgotten. The more mythically significant the event, the more we treat it this way. If your brother gets a hernia while crawling around in his attic, you will very likely be convinced that crawling around in attics is the royal road to hernias, despite all the multitude of attic crawlers who never get anything worse than dusty.

We sort through our experiences for the mythically significant ones that take our myth where, on some level, we need it to go. We use them as moral demonstrations to further our myths and confirm and elaborate our moral packages to give ourselves what mastery we can over our lives and shape our world as fits our characters.

Yet we have plenty of experiences we don’t know the cause or meaning of. Wake up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache and you will probably start reviewing everything you have recently eaten, looking for a culprit. You won’t stop until you find one. The cucumbers. It must have been the cucumbers. Or the shrimp. Or the pudding. Why can’t you admit you don’t know and have no way of knowing and it might not have been the food at all? Because then a significant event in your life is beyond your knowledge and understanding and therefore you are losing control. So you accept the moral demonstration, even if on shaky ground, to maintain mythic stability.

We further reduce the validity of moral demonstrations through questionable extrapolation. I can lose weight and be satisfied on a diet where I can eat all I want but only eat once a day. I would recommend it to you, but you probably couldn’t stand it, no matter how much you wanted to lose weight. I would have assumed you and I were equivalent in terms of the diet, but in fact we are not.

Mythic logic gets us in even deeper trouble through our attraction to metaphor, where we draw parallels on even more slender grounds. We say he was putty in her hands. Of course he wasn’t, really. Putty is sticky glop and she would have soon washed her hands of him. But that’s not what we mean. We assume a parallel between the physical pliability of putty and the social or psychological pliability of the man, equating the two. Yet rationally they are never equal, they cannot be equal. The social relationship between two people is categorically different from that of a hand and a sticky semisolid, even if he is a spineless wimp. The metaphor gives us a quick and handy simplification, a clear moral demonstration in a complex situation. Metaphors are all ultimately false, yet we use them to extrapolate our knowledge to cover the unknown, to stretch our moral packages to fit our lives.

Moral demonstrations that are always the same cease to hold our attention. If there is no wind, rain falls straight down. It always does, so we take it for granted and make better use of our attention by focusing on actions of uncertain outcome, such as our attempts to deal with nontrivial obstacles.

We either succeed or fail. Rationally, the outcome is just that. At that exact moment we could either solve that particular problem or we could not. Yet our anxieties about alpha, dominance, and social hierarchy lead us to turn obstacles into tests of our place in the herd, indicators of who we are, how alpha we are, and whether we matter.

The problem worsens with our wont to see alpha as a singular quality that you may have more or less of. If you are shown to be alpha, if you pass the test, then you are looked to as an idealized mythic source. Conquer the obstacle that others consider mythically meaningful but that nevertheless defeated them and you will be a mythic source, not just about how to deal with that obstacle, but also on subjects far removed from your victory, although poor performance in those areas can tarnish your newly won status.

We like to think of competence as a mythic source in one area as a sign of equal skill in other areas, even when rationally the connection is dubious. Being good at creating poetic insights is no guarantee of ability in creating mathematical insights.

How do we tell who knows that which we are unaware of and can lead us in the right direction into new mythic territory? Mostly we look for common mythic ground with the alpha and his success against obstacles that would deter the rest of us. His success is seen as proof of mythic superiority. If we follow his lead, maybe some of that superiority will rub off on us.
We assume this because if we align our myths with his we create a group myth between us, a tribal connection. At this point we wander into another assumption of mythic logic, the primacy of group myth over personal myth. We assume members of a group are all basically alike and for most purposes interchangeable. If you’ve met one, you’ve met them all. You people are all alike. He’s no good; he’s from a bad family. I’m better than you because my family came over on the Mayflower or my grandfather invented the string tie. If your team wins the World Series, you have a right to feel better about yourself.

This is the source of much prejudice. We draw a conclusion about what sort of people are members of a particular group and then we apply that judgment to all members of the group with no attempt to determine whether or not the judgment is really so in any particular case. For good measure, we also apply it to nonmembers who look or act like members.

Primacy of group myth would mean the members all live by the moral package of the group. While this may be true of fanatics, most members have private lives as well as membership in other groups with different, often conflicting myths and moral packages. People are not as predictable as one might first suppose. Yet we need quick information about the role, status, myth, and morals of anyone we meet so we can know what to do in his presence. We use whatever clues we can. We are all prejudiced.

Rational logic is learned; mythic logic comes naturally and is reinforced by constant example from others. In the mass of humanity, mythic logic overwhelms rational logic, no contest, even as it leads us astray. On a personal level, we can become more rational by learning and using rational logic and by knowing what mythic logic is and what it does, not allowing it to freely trip us up. We also need to develop a sense of personal alpha authority and create a richly satisfying personal myth to live, so that neither alpha starvation nor mythic shortage can cause our minds to make the assumptive leaps of mythic logic in their search for meaningful emotional mythic fulfillment.

Aspects of Life
This concludes our discussion of the basics of Biomythology. The chapters that follow show what can be learned by applying these principles to a representative selection of various aspects of life, a greater understanding of the subject at hand leading to a more effective dealing with it in your own life.