The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough

(In psychological language, this is a shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation, which research shows over and over again is a far more powerful basis for action.6)

Myths are the most fundamental narratives of all. The ones that tell us where we are, how we got here, where we’re trying to go, and how to get there – and, underneath it all, who we are. Myths don’t just explain the world: they explain us, too.

With lower group participation and less social capital, there are fewer places to think collectively about our myths and values – a particular problem given that small groups have such a crucial role to play as the building blocks of long-lasting movements which have the power to incubate and diffuse new values. Where then can we look to kindle mor

And, amid my disappointment and disillusionment, I lost the faith that had sustained me through a decade and a half of work as a policy geek: the conviction that rational arguments, backed up by well-presented evidence, would be enough to persuade politicians of the radical actions needed to build a fairer and more sustainable world. Which made me

To animate a movement on this scale, we need powerfully resonant stories, and they need to be stories that unite rather than divide us. Not so long ago, our society was rich in these kinds of stories, and we called them myths. Today, though, we have a myth gap. And to fill it, we need new myths that speak about who we are and the world we inhabit a

The recurring discovery I made in each virtual world I entered was that although every one of these environments was fake, the experiences I had in them were genuine. VR does two important things: One, it generates an intense and convincing sense of what is generally called presence. Virtual landscapes, virtual objects, and virtual characters seem

climate activists can often seem more interested in maintaining the moral high ground than in bringing along people who think differently. Marshall notes that the climate movement often displays contempt for the right-leaning mainstream and their concerns, talking acidly about conservatives’ selfishness, greed, or stupidity – in the process ignorin

The missing truth, deliberately avoided in enemy narratives, is that in high-carbon societies, everyone contributes to the emissions that cause the problem … the real battle for mass action will be won not through enemy narratives [but through] narratives based on cooperation, mutual interests, and our common humanity. Marshall’s point isn’t that w

More subtly, these images of a world made whole again speak of what happens when the process of atonement – at-one-ment – is completed.

For Jung, the path to achieving this task involved sacrificing the grasping ego and the fake personae that we assume in dealing with the world, in the process opening space for a whole, genuine expression of the true self. Just as atonement is how wholeness is restored to creation, individuation is how wholeness is restored to individual personalit