On mythical thinking

When we’re faced with a question of a broad and general character, one that touches many facets of the world or of society, our go-to reflective response tends to take place on the mythical level. Not so much so if we’re trying to remember where we put the house keys or to figure out what to cook for dinner, but when the level of abstraction is great enough to invoke the more basic anchor points of meaning and the broader spheres of existence, we immediately default to myth.

So, for instance, if the average modern human being encounters the question of why we have a gender pay gap, or what were the main causes of World War II, the immediate response will be this associative mode of thinking that evokes certain symbols, emotions, colors, moods and snippets of meaning that form the outline of the main dominant narratives of our society.

Malmström, Fritiofs lycka. 1880s.

There’s nothing inherently strange nor negative about this. From a reductionist perspective, this sort of response can most obviously be interpreted as a heuristic tool, a kind of shorthand thinking with the purpose of quick and efficient problem-solving, or for basic navigation in complex realities that cannot readily or economically be dealt with in their minute details by a single person.

Of course, there’s so much more to myth than what the pidgin logic of scientistic reductionism can make out. Myths are not reducible to rationalist discourse, and they're not simply heuristic placeholders in lieu of more “accurate”, formal modes of conceptualization. But suffice it to say that mythical reflexivity isn’t something necessarily undesirable even from the inherently hostile perspective of modern rationalism.

I’d even go so far as to argue that mythical thinking is the default mode of human reflexivity in our natural and undomesticated state. The mythical space, if we look to anthropology, emerges as a holistic mode of thought where intricate rational connections harmonize with complex symbolic associations, moods and emotional patterns, and perhaps most importantly, with real and tangible relations to others and the world.

But assume you have been taught that the gods may speak to you while you are awake, or in dreams, that they may give you strength when you least expect it, that they make you angry so that you carry out their plans with greater vigour, assume you have been trained to listen to their voices, to expect definite answers and that you have been given examples of such answers - assume all this, and your internal life will again become more definite, it will cease to be a hardly noticed interplay of cloudlike shapes and become a battlefield of the clear and distinct actions of the gods. Looking at Greek literature we see that this was indeed the way in which the Greeks experienced their surroundings, and their 'inner life'. Their experience of the material universe was the experience of a world full of gods. Gods were not just fanciful ideas, they were parts of the phenomenal world. The experience of self, too, was an experience of divine forces and messages and this to such an extent that the notion of an autonomous self, even of a single, coherent body was unknown to the Greeks at the time of Homer.

Feyerabend, P. (1991). Three Dialogues on Knowledge.

There’s a caveat to the value of this “heuristic”, however. If a key role of myth historically has been to amalgamate and make useful tools out of sprawling complexes of situated knowledge, then they are unlikely to perform very well if the quality of the latter is poor, or if our traditions of knowledge have been significantly disrupted.

We will still make myths, of course, because this is how human social and communal reflection operates, but they will now be running on garbage input. And if we’re also unfamiliar with myth and trained to exclusively think about the world from the perspective of a reductionist-rationalist type of analytical reflexivity, we’re then most likely going to be poor stewards of the myths we actually do put together. We will have difficulties to see them for what they really are and to apply them, criticize them and live by them in appropriate ways.

I remember an anecdote from my undergraduate studies in world religion, where this Indian or Nepali guru supposedly was questioned by a researcher whether some event in the stories about a bodhisatva’s life had actually happened. The guru was then said to have responded by himself asking if the interlocutor wanted to know whether it had actually happened or whether it was true. All of this was supposed to function as an illustrative juxtaposition, emphasizing how something like myth contains deeper complexes of truths and meaning that can’t be reduced to a context-free set of empirically verifiable historical facts.

This is true to an extent, but the juxtaposition is also decidedly problematic, since it feeds right into the same notion of a contradiction between myth and fact (as illustrated above) that’s nothing less than a colonial prejudice of Enlightenment modes of knowledge. The idea that myths, when interpreted through the accurate lens of empirically-grounded science, anthropology, history or psychology, actually amount to a set of false or mostly false propositions.

This is an astonishingly conceited sentiment. It literally (if not always consciously) amounts to saying that no other human traditions of knowledge that predate the Enlightenment could produce theories, practices, or bodies of factual statement that in the main accurately or usefully reflected reality.

In other words, it’s then quite the miracle that human beings at all survived.

The Shwedagon Pagoda, built some time between the 500s BC and 0 AD. Designed through pure luck and random chance

The immediate defensive response then is often along the lines that the actual and obvious achievements that populate the historical record has nothing to do with myth, but should rather be regarded as anchored in “proto-science” or actual crafts and engineering, that ultimately reduce to, and which are superseded by, contemporary Western traditions of practical and theoretical knowledge.

This notion is challenged by the remarkable historical achievements seen with traditions clearly steeped in and reliant upon forms of knowledge that do not, without remainder, translate to modern paradigms. Roman engineering is one clear example, where knowledge was preserved, transmitted and improved upon in connection with an elaborate theology and ritual practices specifically connected to the god Vulcan and probably also Minerva. In this context, myth, ritual, religion and actual practical knowledge interpenetrated and comingled to an extent that it’s hardly reasonable to try to tweeze them apart.

In actual practice, identities were formed through ritual anchored in myth, which generated specified roles through the transmission of important knowledge, that then predisposed the initiate to his specialized work. Connections between science, crafts, the arts and the wider social sphere were explained, negotiated and maintained through the mythical narratives that undergirded everything, and which resonated in all of the interwoven specializations in the local society. The Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer’s now near-forgotten The Golden Bough (1890) provides an early example of the observation that myth, religion, magic and science are only virtually separable in actual traditions of knowledge, and similar insights were rather plentiful during the mid-20th century heyday of anthropology:

But there is more. Archaeology and especially the new discipline of astroarchaeology, combining scientific resources with a new and more realistic approach to myth has revealed the extent and the sophistication of Stone Age thought. There existed an international astronomy that was utilized and tested in observatories, taught in schools from Europe to the South Pacific, applied in international travels and codified in colourful technical language.

The technical terms of this astronomy were social terms, not geometrical terms, so the science was factually adequate as well as emotionally satisfying, it solved physical as well as social problems, it provided a guide to the heavens and those harmonies between' heaven and earth, matter and life, man and nature which are very real but which are overlooked or even denied by the scientific materialism of today, it was science, religion, social philosophy and poetry in one.

Feyerabend, ibid.

There’s another and particularly pregnant example from indigenous medicine, where this shaman from the Amazon, when asked how he can tell which plants will be helpful in addressing a patient’s specific ailments, responds that he simply listens to the plants.

When pressed further, it becomes clear that there’s really no other way to say this, the shaman’s statement is not simply shorthand for any heuristic of trial and error, for any sort of systematic process of scientific or proto-scientific observation - he simply listens to the plants, and you cannot actually understand what this means unless you actually learn to do the very same thing. Preferably through his specific tradition and its myths and rituals. It’s just like how you have to learn to interpret what you see in a microscope within the framework of a particular tradition of knowledge and its unique and contextually rooted theories to actually make sense of the perceptions at hand.

So let’s just say that myth and its associated modes of reflexivity, while decidedly other, can hardly be called inferior to the systematic analytical rationality ideally ascribed to contemporary science. Myth is arguably a crucial aspect of science as well, and not in any negative sense, i.e. that science is still full of superstition and impurities, but that science at the best of times harmoniously and creatively integrates mythical modes of thought and reflexivity in its quest for knowledge.

But all of this brings us back to the initial remarks above. We live by myths, whether we like it or not. Mythical thinking seems to be a predominant way in which human beings organize knowledge and experience in correlation with our relational embeddedness in each other and the outside world.

Moreover, the particular mode of reflexivity that is associated with myth, while perfectly rational, is not rationalist in the forensic or analytical sense (as per our Enlightenment mythology), where separate pieces of evidence are sifted and connected through a step-by-step empirical procedure. The mythical mode of thinking is rather holistic and operates at a much higher level of abstraction, which not least is why a lot more information can be compressed into the often terse yet pregnant symbolic connections upon which myths are structured:

Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the weirdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith.

Chesterton. (1905). Heretics.

Through operating at this higher level of abstraction, myths are incredibly powerful tools for shaping perceptions, opinions and the overall discourse. They bring a synergy of social relations, symbolic associations, emotional attachments, ritual and rational reflection that punches straight through any flimsy cardboard facades of contradicting forensic evidence (the kind of evidence which is rather the structural foundations of myth when amassed over time).

And that’s just as it should be.

In the actual experience of the average human being throughout all of history, this resilience and predominance of the mythical space makes perfect sense. The meticulously structured, tried-and-true body of myth that a society lives by is namely the amalgamation of the experience, trials and rational conclusions of countless generations past. This complex legacy accessed through the mythical mode of reflection has thereby historically been the most safe and secure repository of useful knowledge of the world around us.

It makes little sense to abandon or change such a foundation just because some disjointed piece of evidence seems to entail a contradiction. And even if this legacy tradition of knowledge is somehow imperfect, if it evidently still provides useful information conducive to survival and a meaningful life, who then cares if a Xenophanes comes along and argues that we should simply abandon our traditional view of the gods? What does he first of all suggest we replace them with, how will that substitute even work, and how shall we go about constructing it?

Wikipedia. “Colonization of the Moon”.

But in today’s society, we face two separate challenges that independently undermine the normal role and function of myth. We deny their existence, which in a sense make them invisible, while they’re at the same time harnessed to this enormous machinery of marketing, propaganda and strategic opinion-formation.

So in summary, the problem we’re facing today is that this enormous power and resilience of the myth has been hijacked by propaganda, while myths as such have been cloaked and pushed out of view so that we can’t properly think about them.

This latter issue, that we’re oblivious to the fact that we live in myths, has ironically been effected through one of our most important modern myths (the Enlightenment narratives of scientific rationalism) specifically denying their contemporary presence, and rather insisting that our society only lives by a reductionist-rationalist type of analytical reflexivity.

The result is a society replete with poor, one-dimensional and disjointed myths, and if we on top of that add the influences of the capitalist mode of production, the inevitable progression is towards a situation of a multitude of competing specialized quasi-myths mainly designed for establishing consumer identities (as opposed to e.g. the complexly situated role of the Roman engineer) in a constant struggle over unique and miniscule market niches.

This is a far from optimal situation. The resulting structure will not only be fragile and increasingly incapable of providing a robust sense of identity, meaning and belonging. Neither will we as a society be able to maintain this rich tapestry, this ecosystem of myths synergizing, completing and balancing each other, akin to the situation in the classical Mediterranean world or ancient Scandinavia.

We will instead have simplistic and unbalanced myths that additionally cannot be properly criticized, since they’re inevitably interpreted as the infallibly true expressions of scientific knowledge - our modern myths and any interpretation the power structure gives them are more or less considered as one-dimensionally certain as the conclusions of formal logic.

And what’s worse - you cannot engage with them as myths. You cannot joke with them, play around with them or publically wrestle with them to improve upon them, rebalance them or adapt them to new problems (like the Greeks always did in the theatre, through poetry, literature or public debates) because they’ve become crystallized and stiffened tools for the projection of power, rather than the collectively stewarded and intimately known intellctual commons of the people.

The myth is now opaque, and its enormous power is laser-focused and harnessed towards highly specific, and ultimately destructive ends. The roles it can ascribe are so narrow and unbalanced that they could not possibly be healthy or adaptive, and the general worldview that contemporary mythology is able to provide is so impoverished and devoid of meaning that most of us have really no way to tell the difference. No way to separate that which is healthy from that which is sick. A tell-tale sign is probably how pathologies increasingly are raised to the level of identities and celebrated as such.

My suspicion is that with so much of daily life mediated by electronic media, even in places with far fewer computers, and this coupled to the loss of books, and the disintegration of public education, there exists a new kind of background to our lives. A background that has as its most salient quality, an utter opaqueness. And I think this is true even for those, like myself, who think we are critiquing something that, therefore, we view from a distance.

…

“Contemporary society thwarts agentic, rebellious subjectivity. It frustrates deconstructive, antinomian, and complexity dimensions of analytic freedom. A breakdown in thinking marks contemporary politics across the political aisle. Neoliberal capitalism tightly regulates not only work, but also leisure or free time, foreclosing critical analysis and reflective spaces through its long productive hours and hypnotic entertainment. { } Digital capitalism also demands a sort of personality commodification and marketing antithetical to analytic character development. In a world where material resources are largely controlled by a powerful elite, we are forced to mine our selves for a living—we have become the product in our modern economy. At ever younger ages, we mold our subjectivity through the algorithm of cultural capital and profitability.”

Amber M. Trotter (Psychoanalysis As a Subversive Phenomenon)

The evolution of interiority took a marked leap with the advent of the internet. On one level the internet, and particularly social media use, amplified trends already in place, and behavior already in place.

“Concerning the broader question of whether social media is causally related to the rise in rates of adolescent mood disorders, self-harm, and suicide since 2010 in the USA and UK, it has been pointed out that the rise paralleled the years “when American teens were obtaining smart phones and becoming daily users of social media platforms such as Instagram” . The same is true of the unique clinical presentation of FTLBs (Functional tic-like behaviors) which first emerged into clinical awareness in 2019 in Germany, as well as with the increasing recognition of the DID-plurality (Dissociative Identity Disorder) community and emergent discourse. More broadly, there has been a recognition of vast online ‘neurodivergence’ ecosystem in which classical mental illness symptoms and diagnoses are viewed less as mental health concerns that require professional attention, but rather as consumer identities or character traits that make individuals sharper and more interesting than others around them.”

John D. Haltigan, Tamara M. Pringsheim, Gayathiri Rajkumar (Social media as an incubator of personality and behavioral psychopathology: Symptom and disorder authenticity or psychosomatic social contagion? Comprehensive Psychiatry, vol 121)

The conditioning in young people, in the West mostly, to shop for everything, including themselves, is not new. Even I was writing about this a dozen years ago. Shop for an identity, and then *own* that identity. The rise of victims rights cuts across this evolution of self diagnosing psychiatric disorders.

John Steppling. “The Sickness”.

Myths.

Myths, again, can helpfully be defined as as complex narrative, emotional, symbolic, relational and aesthetic phenomena that connect with fundamental facts, truths and deep-seated aspects of our human nature and how it intersects with the world around us.

They’re social, psychological, existential, historical and practical. Their function is towards meaning-making, existential security and practical heuristics all at once.

Mythical reflexivity is not a harmful thing in and of itself. It’s rather unreflected magical and mythical thinking that we need to be very careful with.

For myths can also, quite powerfully, obscure our vision of reality, especially if they are narrow, unbalanced, or if they run on faulty basic input. But we won’t be able to discern this if we cannot properly scrutinize them as myths, but rather read them as something else entirely. And when the myths we live by are associated with falsehoods artificially connected to them through propaganda, rather than slow, plodding experience and practice and generational trading of knowledge in a stable environment, then we’re in quite a bit of trouble.

Forest nymph, illustration by Per Daniel Holm from Svenska folksägner (1882). Note her tail.

This obscuring effect can be likened to how you would focus on a theoretical scheme that denies color to such an extent that the experience of color eventually becomes difficult to integrate in your perception/interpretation of reality so that a cognitive dissonance finally arises.

While the perception of color as such exists before interpretation, and is pre-theoretical, the immediate reality of complex theoretical constructs or mental or experiential models can alter substantially the mode of our basic perceptions. This takes a good bit of elaborate work to bring about, just like how only musical compositions of a certain character can add new dimensions to your perception of sound, or how an artist by the name of Enya for many people managed to add unimaginable emotional depths to the color cyan.

It’s the very same thing with myths.

We need to see them for what they are. We need to become conscious of the myths that populate and shape our reality, what they are and how they operate, and not try to read them as something they’re actually not.

Then we need to reclaim them as our own, and use them as tools of creativity and liberation.

And the surprising thing is that most of them can be repurposed or rebalanced when they’re actually approached as myths and thus potentially subjected to the creative scrutinty that can be mounted through the mythical modes of reflexivity.

Aristotle took up the challenge. Tragedy, he said, is more philosophical than history; it does not only report what happened, it also explains why it had to happen and thus reveals the structure of social institutions. This perfectly describes the Oresteia of Aeschylus. The trilogy shows that institutions may paralyse action. Orestes must avenge his father - he cannot avoid this obligation. To avenge his father he has to kill his mother. But to kill his mother is as fearful a crime as the crime he is called upon to avenge. Thought and action are paralysed - unless we change the conditions which dictate what must and what must not be done - and such a change is indeed suggested towards the end of the trilogy. Note the form of the ‘argument’: there is a set of possible actions. Each action leads to an impossibility. So our attention is directed towards the principle that demands the actions and yet declares them to be impossible.

The principle is revealed, an alternative is suggested.

Feyerabend, ibid.

References

Chesterton. G. K. (1905). Heretics.

Feyerabend, P. (1991). Three Dialogues on Knowledge.

Frazer, J. G. (1890). The Golden Bough.

Haltigan, J. D., Pringsheim, T. M. Pringsheim, Rajkumar, G. (2023). “Social media as an incubator of personality and behavioral psychopathology: Symptom and disorder authenticity or psychosomatic social contagion?” Comprehensive Psychiatry, vol 121

Steppling, J. (2024). “The Sickness”.

Trotter, A. M. (2019). Psychoanalysis As a Subversive Phenomenon.