Myths Trump Facts

In the post-factual society we seem to be living in, it is important that we dig down to understand the nature of our minds and why they are so factually flexible.

The idea that we are rational beings, driven by logical deduction, is a myth with little evidence to support its claim. We are instinctual emotionally-driven creatures with overpowered brains designed for locomotion retooled for abstract thought. The notion that we are thinking clearly without bias and without a deeper mythos working within us is a dangerous delusion.

Mythology is the study of the stories that shape our minds. They are the basis of religion, the scaffolding that has shaped human history. Within them is the cosmology that shapes our attitudes, our beliefs about the world and ourselves. They establish our common moral code, the values that shape our culture. They give us the tools to take care of ourselves psychologically as we grow up and grow old and die. And they engage us with the mystery of life itself. Why do we exist? Why is there evil in the world? What is life and where does it come from?

Like Atlas carrying the world on his shoulder, our collective concensus reality is held up by our myths. But since the precipitous decline of organized religion in recent decades, western society has seen a new freedom from that scaffolding, and with it, a greater mental flexibility. But the mind hasn’t fundamentally changed. It still needs what mythology has always provided, and without religion, it will create its own.

Our predictive brains are always looking to establish cause and effect so that we can take action as soon as possible. We weren’t designed for “truth.” And yet that ideal can drive us to overcome our biases and our arrogance, to question our reality and remain skeptical, even when we’ve had an intuitive leap. “Truth” unites us behind a common value that no one has ever seen, only felt when a puzzle clicks together, when a mystery is solved, when mathematics beautifully resolves the problem. This aspiration can lead us to greater understanding and perhaps will eventually answer some of the questions for which myths were a symbolic placeholder.

But the mind will never be satisfied with the answers. Knowing relieves the mind of its job. Once we have knowledge, the mind will inherently look for a new problem to solve. The deeper yearning we have as human beings isn’t to know the answer, but to be the answer. We don’t just want to understand the meaning of life intellectually; we want to experience life fully.

And so, when people start going off the rails of what you consider to be the truth, just remember that they aren’t programmed for it and it isn’t ultimately that satisfying for them. They want to experience life, and if that means grouping into cultist factions with new-old mythologies, interpreting them literally as reality, that is what they will do.

It may be your delusion, as it was mine, that human beings have evolved past this cultish religious phase. But as it is well-evidenced, we have religion built into our brains. To group up in a hive-mind to act as a single unit has been our evolutionary superpower. This is what we do. We feel a longing for it when we haven’t done it in a while — that’s why we love singing together, dancing together, marching, partying, rallying, protesting, publicly shaming and canceling people. That is our nature, and we haven’t begun to evolve out of it.

So we could try to convince each other over Facebook that one or the other of us is crazy, but that would be a lie. We are all crazy to think we are rational. Amazingly, we can think critically, but that accounts for less than 10% of our minds’ activity. 90% of the iceberg is under the surface, and 90% of our consciousness is subconscious, moving us in the direction it wants to go. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt refers to it as the rider and the elephant — the rider thinks it is in charge, and occasionally it appears to be, but when that elephant smells what it wants and turns left, the rider rationalizes that action as a turn he meant to make.

We can’t understand the human mind without understanding our history as religious, tribal creatures. We not only have hard-wiring and software from our lifetime; we have genetic memory from many generations pulling strings within us subconsciously. If mice can remember to avoid dangerous circumstances for 7 generations without reinforcement, how long might our ancestral memory go back if it was consistently reinforced? Birds know how to build nests without being taught. We build groups around stories.

We have probably forgotten more than we know as a species. Separate us from all of our cultural knowledge and we would probably go back to tribal structures within us, worshipping gods of some sort to promote values that unite us as a team. Would we seek out the most virtuous of leaders or the most dominant? What gods do you respect most? The ones that are gentle or the ones that are powerful and ruthless? Our leaders are often those who most resemble our gods.

Donald Trump was not elected as a fluke. He is an archetypal symbol of a dominant warrior, a combination of celebrity gladiator and capitalist playboy — a young boy’s fantasy projection. And in some ways he was an answer to the prayers of people feeling their identity was being suppressed by the political left. While liberals have been championing diversity and compassion for the down-trodden, they have been instinctually using old wiring to carry it out, shaming and publicly destroying people they deem as “racist,” “sexist,” essentially, “evil.” These public executions and the PC censorship of free speech activated a deep tribal fear within millions of Americans and they sought out a warrior tough enough to challenge this new threat. He also happened to be a prophet within the modern religion of capitalism.

We can’t win by living in denial of our tribal nature. We are religious creatures who run on stories. Politicians and journalists seem to be telling us stories that further divide us. So let us tell a better story, one that incorporates a more accurate view of reality with the ideological tectonic plates brought to the surface.

In the beginning, before America was a country of united states, European settlers came to the “new world” inhabited by 20 million indigenous people. As they arrived with their very different culture, they viewed the natives as inferior and labeled them savages, even though they behaved very similarly toward their fellow man. These natives had a deep religious respect for the land itself, saw themselves as children to it. The western settlers had so disconnected from that concept with their religion of ownership that they saw the natives as crazy. Eventually as the natives got in the way of their plans, they killed them, with guns and with diseases.

The European settlers were largely comprised of second-sons who had no access to the family land or wealth, and they were here to make a little kingdom of their own. Their ambition to get rich evolved into the American Dream of rags to riches. On the land of dead natives, on the backs of imported slaves or immigrants they turned into wage-slaves, they became wealthy lords of the new world.

The Enlightenment in Europe, seemingly a separation of logic from religion, was really a separation of man from his context — nature. This powerful idea led to amazing technology and an arrogant ideology of dominating nature to fit man’s designs. As the industrial revolution erupted, an amazing lust for the power of technology driving it, many ambitious people became titans of new industry. They were the heroes of the capitalist mythology. “If I could do it, so could you.”

Meanwhile religions in America had exploded with the population. The freedom of new prophets to interpret scripture and write new books drove people into many new offshoots, and many cults arose as well. When the West reopened the East, the old nature religions resurfaced with their powerful ideas that had resonated in human beings for millennia. The Christians and the capitalists teamed up to squash this transcendental movement, calling it devil worship and dismissing it in so many ways.

The colonial revolution from the British empire, infused with disdain from second sons still being controlled by their big brothers, demanded an idea of equality or fairness, something that seemed simply built into the human psyche. And so a democratic republic was born, and in defeating the great British empire while it toiled with wars in Europe, this idea of fairness spread. Other nations rejected their monarchs and emperor families and pursued fairness through socialism which devolved rapidly into communism and ultimately ruthless dictatorships. Rarely did a socialist state survive long enough to test its merit. And so the American religion deemed socialism as evil. Meritocratic socialist societies that were the basis of human tribes for 70,000 years became demonized.

American ingenuity thrived on the knowledge imported by new immigrants and by the growing scientific community across the globe. Many did get rich on the great expanse of land that the natives had preserved for millennia before their arrival. As technology booms occurred, Americans were often at the forefront with cars, planes, and telecommunications. World War II finally disintegrated the European empires and showed the world that America was the new superpower.

Americans didn’t know how to feel about being on top when they were born as the underdog. How do you reconcile being the kid who fights off bullies and then becoming the biggest bully on the playground? Many Americans looked the other way as their government increased its military hold over much of the planet. The hippies briefly protested as psychedelics reminded them again of the nature religions on which our species was raised, concepts of unity and peace, the balance of yin and yang, masculine and feminine, desire and satisfaction. But the Capitalist religion was too strong and these revolutions were smothered by consumer goods — television sets, dishwashers, nicer cars, and eventually computers and videogames. As our ability to produce outpaced our needs, we reverse-engineered human minds to sell them more stuff they didn’t need. We produced more food and made it nutritionless and addictive so that we could sell more of it resulting in the most overweight and obese country in human history. Instead of solving that problem at its root, our for-profit medical system developed more pills and procedures to sell to fat, sick people. We dug up more of the Earth to consume more because we couldn’t stand the idea of contentment — only losers are content with what they have. This constant consumption is an addictive force that we use to suppress our anxiety of not having enough. This religion gives us no peace.

And now, with a global pandemic ravaging a physically weak population, an old hustler and gladiator populist president fanning the flames of our tribal distrust of each other, both sides of the political spectrum exaggerating the dangers of the other, stoking our religious fear of socialism, dictators and oligarchs, we are stuck consuming rhetoric instead of discussing our shared values and a direction for the future.

When does that conversation begin? Are we going to talk about what we want, or only what we hate?

Donald Trump, for all his faults, is impressively resilient. He doesn’t give up, and that is a heroic quality. One of his favorite books, The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, is a roadmap to his success. Focusing on the positive keeps you from getting lost in the negative traps that might slow you down, like naysayers on your project, or arguments on Facebook. Maybe we all need a bit of this attitude, to imagine how we could move forward as a nation in a healthy and responsible way, trying to bring everyone with us. But there is also a need to check in with the “truth” whatever it may be.

The stories we tell become our reality, from confirmation bias the self-fulfilling prophecy, we can rationalize our way into a reality that only exists in our minds. But if we are good storytellers, others may follow us, which means our visions become a collective reality. Trump is like a Pied Piper, massaging the facts into his positive narrative that his fans can believe in. And it makes them feel better, so of course, they keep following him. It only breaks down when some aspect of reality is too contradictory to the narrative — like when people start dying of a disease he is downplaying. Or when he encourages people to believe in an unproven deep state which they then interpret as an evil Cabal running the world and drinking the adrenochrome of sex-trafficked children to stay prematurely young (like vampires). There’s a point at which these stories break down because they are so far away from reality that none of the other puzzle pieces fit. If we try to keep the context in mind, much of it will shred the weak narratives and they will disappear from the collective, relegated to fringe groups. In their small little cults, people will drink the koolaid and die or they will test their theory and find out if it is broken. If all the president wants to do is stir up tribal conflict with his Twitter Feed, paying it less attention may rob it off oxygen. Trump keeps dictating the conversation because people follow it, but perhaps that’s the big distraction keeping us from the actual conversation that needs to take place between liberals and conservatives, reasonable people who want to solve our problems.

It may be over our heads to design the legislation, but we can start by discussing our values — who are we as a nation? What do we want? Are we bullies or are we peacekeepers? Are we cultural leaders or are we so capitalistic that we’ve sold out any culture we had? Are we rugged individualists to the point of letting our citizens die in the streets because they didn’t pay for healthcare? Are we so compassionate that we will coddle 50% of the population onto welfare?

Are we going to let people starve during this new economic recession or can we put people back to work in a way that is constructive, healthy for them, and doesn’t end up ballooning the debt and creating massive bureaucracy? How do we play with the power of socialism in a way that doesn’t get us hooked into the path of communism? How do we maintain a strong military as a deterrent without constantly using it to start new wars? How do we heal systemic racism and sexism without turning it into a culture war? How do we educate our people to think critically and creatively without feeding an overpriced college industrial complex that doesn’t necessarily teach that anymore? How do we bridge the divide between the right and left in our country to bring us back to consensus on the important changes we need for the future?

Let us brainstorm a synthesis of our values as the foundation stones to our new culture. Let us have the smart people sit down at the table and talk about what we could do with what we’ve got. Let us forge a new mythology based on our understanding of ourselves and where we want to go as a people. Let us then share that vision with the rest of the population through a story that paints the picture of where we are trying to go, a story imbibed with our shared values and an up-to-date cosmology. I’m ready for that conversation. How about you?

Andrew Shepherd is a writer, filmmaker, President of Converging Perspectives, and a founding member of Mind-University.