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

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

The transformation we need is not simply political: we have to be willing to transform ourselves, too. This isn’t just about ‘ethical consumerism’. It’s about how we work, and the signals we send when we take on leadership roles in our organizations. It’s about what we say to our friends, colleagues and families when climate change comes up – and w

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nowhere do we need these kinds of stories more than in the context of climate change. So far, our ambitions only extend as far as halting the damage before it reaches truly catastrophic levels – as, for instance, with current targets to keep global average warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. But what if we went further, and aimed to return the atm