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

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

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

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.

We are creatures of story, at our strongest when we tell of how the forces of good can conquer evil, and at our weakest when we allow others to tell our story for us in terms of false virtues and little more than what makes us content.

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.

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.

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

Together with Danny Hillis, Brand chairs the board of the Long Now Foundation, an organization devoted to returning us to thinking in generational timescales.

I was asked to come on board as the panel’s writer, the person charged with finding the right words to express the collective view of its members.