More things we aren’t allowed to say publicly anymore
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It's not so much a powerful mythology as it is an objective moral values system backed by divine power. The best book IMO to describe the phenomenon is After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre.
I'll paraphrase poorly but basically, MacIntyre argues that when society loses an objective sense of morality that is defined by a force more powerful than any one person, everything begins to breakdown.
Basically, when morality isn't backed by a power greater than man (God or the Gods), each person begins to see their own sense of morality as the objective morality. Everything becomes subjective in this sense. Most people though don't even realize they are doing it. What happens in practice is everyone's reality becomes their own individual "instance" of reality with fewer and fewer shared interpretations of reality among everyone else in society. Because we all aren't raised on the stories of bible or the same mythological stories, people's sense of morality becomes based on nothing more than their own experienced and the content their derive which happens to be considerably more diverse than a shared mythology/religion among people. This then makes it very difficult for people in society to effectively communicate and for a shared understanding of what is right and wrong. This is in part which you can tell two stories to two different people and have them both interpret the story as good or bad in completely different manners. This is why you can tell something to someone and they think that's a good thing or you can tell the same thing to someone else and they think it's a bad thing. Communication itself begins to breakdown because instead of everyone having a shared common understanding of what is right and wrong, people instead resort to arguing the very fundamentals of what is right and wrong. Disagreements no longer becomes disagreements among friends that just have different opinions on how to get to a better outcome. They become disagreements among enemies whose moral value systems are now fundamentalist opposed. Add in a bunch of diversity and inclusion on-top of a culture that doesn't have shared common morality back by a supreme being and you get chaos, more or less.
Unfortunately, it is "leftism" that the government is trying to use as the new objective religion in society but IMO it's failing because this "religion" is fundamentally opposed to nature and so not everyone will accept it despite people wanting to. Leftism isn't a realist ideology based on truth, it's an idealistic ideology being created and utilized to push the interests of those who control the culture of our society. Historically, despite religions being utilized in the same way as leftism, the origins of the religion and mythology were created from a place of real life wisdom and thus still had fundamental truth tied to them despite people trying to use religion and mythology for control. Leftism is a religion developed entirely from the position of controlling others without any regard for truth.
I think you’re taking what mythology meant in the 1970s and transcribing it to today’s vernacular.
What's interesting is that science agrees with you especially in regards to the idea of consensus and individual reality. I'm not sure if you were just using it as a metaphor, but everything I've looked into regarding quantum mechanics actually follows that as a basis. We all have our own "individual realities" or at least our own "individual observations of realities. Like the example of a car crash where two seperate people can say the car was "red" or "blue" we're finding out that both people are actually right, in addition they're finding out people can actually have a physical effect on reality just by observing it.
So like you said, when there is no higher power or agreement between people of that degree, shit starts becoming wonky because there is no more consensus on reality and it starts to diverge as people start dwelling down on their own "instance". It's ironic how so many scientists flock to leftism when it's breaking reality to a degree.
It's a fascinating subject with many implications.
That's why when I discuss morality I always start not with "how should we perceive this action: right or wrong" but instead I decide what outcome I want and then decide how the perspective of everything else must be to get that outcome. I'm no physicist but at the quantum level of things, if you know what your answer is already, can you work backwards to determine what everything else would need to be to 100% accuracy to get that answer? However, if you don't know the answer, can you predict it to 100% accuracy? Morality to me isn't about people's perceptions of right and wrong because that will always differ, it's instead entirely about what outcome you want to achieve.
It's a incredibly interesting subject because it throws alot of traditional ideas out the window and really puts the universe in your hands. It's fascinating too because the idea seeps into popular culture and rears itself in unexpected ways. My favorite use was in the Assassins Creed videogame, where to stop a disaster the ancient aliens were gonna use some thingabob to make every person on the planet think "We are safe" and reality would rewrite itself to make it happen. Consensus and belief in something can be very powerful and when there isn't things start falling apart.
And what you say about outcomes is on the money as well. There's definitely something to the Law of Attraction and similar things. You can't magically turn your car into another by thinking it, but you can nudge the outcome of getting a new one into your favor.
I've been trying to work through this. Proper moral philosophy... is hard. I was first introduced to Macintyre through his plenary talk "Human Dignity: A Puzzling and Possibly Dangerous Idea?".
Starship Troopers has a really good part where it talks about society failing, due to lack of discipline. If I didn't know better I'd think Heinlein had a crystal ball. More rational take is that this kind of rot goes farther back than I'd realized, since Starship Troopers was first published in '59.
Heinlein's works are more prophetic than you may realize. Not just with Starship Troopers, but also Friday ... a book that follows a synthetic human about in a future hypersexualized society that can change genders at will living in a balkanized United States.
Job: A Comedy of Justice was interesting as well as Stranger in a Strange Land but that last one is just a retelling of the story of Jesus.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress carries some interesting ideas about running a cell-based terrorist organization ... and The Cat That Walks Through Walls is just strange.
Heinlein was very open with the fact that his "predictions" were from him looking at his current world, then 20, 40, 60 years back, and then extrapolating from there. For a guy who could walk from his family's jewelry store to the bank with a literal sack of cash at 12, seeing a world where there was no safety in big cities wasn't a stretch for 1959.
Humans aren't stupid. Most of us can realize the majority of the failings in almost any societal system and point them out by instinct.
The issue is, humans hate to be hypocrites. So they will suppress any amount of noticing they do to make sure they don't implicate themselves when calling things out. Its self retarding to keep your moral highground.
That's why all the Lefties will crow about every type of injustice under the sun. Except classism, because that would require them to not only acknowledge their extreme flaw but be compelled by basic human morality to correct by giving up their cushy life.
Worse yet, many times they aren't even doing it deliberately at the outset. The brain is a shitty little organ that will absolutely do that shit for you, because it wants to avoid anxiety and challenge. It'll outright delete that information from your mind to keep it from taking hold, just like it deletes your nose from your vision every moment of the day.
Well for context of timeframe, Sowell walked away from professorship in the 60’s citing the lax of academic standards and the narrowing of focus on degrees. The same academic Joseph Campbell whose “book” is pictured above, left academics around the same time for the same reason.
"As was in the time of men that did as they would in their own house, for there was no King in Israel."
That's why gangs work so well. They use all the myths and ideas for their own benefits. If you compare gangland stories with knights in shinning armor or samurai they come off with the same vibe. That's because it's all aimed at boys the same age.
What is this an excerpt from?
The power of myth
I both agree and don't agree.
While I agree that "initializing" a child into adulthood is important, I don't think simple rituals do it. Why? Because we still have rituals to that effect. In the west, it's getting a college degree. They haze you for four years, taking your money and teaching you to hate everything and everyone, then they give you a piece of paper that says "CERTIFIED GROWN-UP :)" on it. The result? People are more infantilized than ever. It's not the ritual that's important, it's actually forcing them to grow up. Getting a job, buying a house, having children. That's what makes you grow up.
And tribes or communities? Everywhere you go there are racially separated tribes explicitly endorsed by the government. If you're black, every company you could ever work for will have a "black voices" group or some shit. Join the black caucus. Join BLM. There are more options for officially recognized black-only communities than there are stars in the sky. Yet black kids are getting more feral every year. They're not forced to join a gang, or even encouraged to, but they do it anyway.
Ultimately all of this actually boils down to one thing: single mothers. Think of a societal sickness. Any of them. Okay, you're thinking of one? It correlates with single motherhood. No, I'm not a mind reader, I just know that every single major problem in society has a causative link to single motherhood. And until this discussion reaches the front and center of every debate until it gets fixed, nothing will improve.