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

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

Myths are powerful creatures, after all. They create our reality as much as they describe it: as the novelist Terry Pratchett once put it, ‘People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.’10 And if the myths we reach for in conditions of stress and crisis are ones about overshoot and collapse, and we all start to

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

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 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

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

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