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

So, in one sense, the story arc of human history is, above all, the grand narrative of how humans have kept becoming part of a larger us, over and over again. The evolutionary biologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw this process, which he called ‘planetization’, as directly comparable to evolution – indeed, as an extension of it. Hu

Much as we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, pollsters and psychologists know better. When it comes to how we make up our minds about political issues, it turns out that evidence, facts and data matter much less than the values held by the people we hang out with: family, friends, colleagues. (For proof, look no further than your Faceb

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

Jonah Sachs. A natural storyteller and the author of a bestselling book on how to use stories in marketing, Winning the Story Wars,

These are stories in which we go much further than merely halting the damage we’re doing. Instead, they’re about healing, repairing, resurrecting environments and returning them to their natural state.

There’s no intrinsic need for narratives to have an enemy, he observes: many myths are instead about a quest, or a challenge, or overcoming some internal weakness. This was a central preoccupation of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, he continues, who wrote at length about the challenge for each of us of confronting our own ‘Shadow’: the ‘greedy interna

So one myth that clearly won’t help us to confront our current crisis of unsustainability is the myth of collapse: the idea that we’re inevitably heading for a massive ecological crash, and that the best guide to our shared future can be found within the pages of post-apocalyptic fiction.

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

The most basic and fundamental responsibility for each of us is to make a conscious decision about which myths we adopt, rather than unconsciously allowing them to be chosen for us by the media, people around