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

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.

our ‘empathy horizon’ keeps on expanding. As Wright put it to me when I met him: My own governing myth is an empirically based cosmological myth in the sense of sweeping historical narrative about how we got where we are today: there’s been this drift toward interdependence, and that has tended to involve a kind of moral progress, an ability to tak

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

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

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.

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.

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

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