Reckoning With Truth and Myth
And why we cannot abandon the West.
Everyone has beliefs. Whether they are religious, political, philosophical, or about something of far less importance, you have them. Seldom do you slow down and contemplate how you came to these beliefs. In the buzzing age of pings and dings and the irresistible urge toward the black abyss of the smartphone, it is an absurd ask for someone to evaluate where their beliefs come from. So, like most things in life, we use heuristics. Heuristics are incredibly useful. They save the human brain lots of time and energy and with the constant demands of vita activa, they are more necessary than ever. Add a couple of heuristics on top of one another, and you can easily convince yourself that you have good reasons for why you hold the beliefs that you do. The reality is that you likely do not have good reasons for everything that you believe. If you are the curious and studious type, you have perhaps sat down to give yourself a solid foundation for your most fundamental beliefs, such as your religious faith. But, even then, it requires far more work than could ever be expected of you to see how your religious faith fares against Heideggerian ontology or some niche thinker in the secular humanist tradition.
Beliefs are a gunfight, with bullets whizzing by every second, ready to pierce into your mind and rip apart the network you have constructed for yourself. You turn your beliefs into a black box. You do not allow yourself to look inside, because doing so might force you to contemplate, and if you are forced to contemplate you will not be productive. And, let’s be honest, there is too much to contemplate anyway. You have to cut some corners. So, you bury this black box deep inside where mysterious javelins cannot hit it.
This is you. This is me. This is all of us, to some extent. We have to cheat a little bit if we are going to function in the world. There is a reason it was the fruit from the tree of knowledge that condemned mankind. There is a reason Ecclesiastes says that to increase in wisdom is to increase in sorrow. There is a reason there is the image in our popular cultural consciousness of the crazed genius, the brilliant insane one. Nietzsche comes to mind. As he said, when you peer into the abyss, it will look back at you. Schopenhauer notes this connection between genius and insanity as well in The World as Will and Representation. McLuhan said that mass literacy made us all schizophrenic. Walter Ong touched on the debilitating effects of literacy as well.
This is the curse of rationalism. The world we live in today prizes reason above all else. Bare, naked, and emboldened Reason is expected to build from foundations of nothingness and end up matching our perception. This is a pipe dream because Reason is not as all-powerful as the likes of Descartes and Hume hoped. Reason is not the puzzle. Reason is a piece of the puzzle, a specific subset of the human experience meant for highly specialized tasks. If you put all your chips on bare Reason carrying you through life, you will quickly go bust.
The fact that you have a web of heuristics in place to justify your beliefs is not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, this is just a statement of how the mind works. Vilfredo Pareto sought to create a robust sociological system to describe society as it is. Coming from an economic background, Pareto thought that economic analysis was too limited to create a robust understanding of society. He started with the internal dynamics of the human mind to provide a foundation for his project. Pareto thought that the drivers of history and human behavior are what he called “residues”, which are driven by “sentiments”. Sentiments are instincts, gut feelings, and completely pre-rational. Pareto divides the sentiments into four classes:
Class I: maxims are repeated to the point that they become broadly accepted as truth
Class II: Authority, whether in individuals, ideologies, groups, or God
Class III: Sentiments declared as universal laws, political formulas
Class IV: proofs, logical sophistry to justify sentiments with which one already agrees.
According to Pareto’s understanding, all of your beliefs are a consequence of what you feel, and then you rationalize these feelings after the fact. All ideas and moral philosophies are downstream from what individuals have already felt within them. They are post-hoc rationalizations/justifications for pre-existing sentiments. This is a somewhat nihilistic understanding of human ideas. Most of our ideas are "beautiful lies" but they are necessary for social utility, and an intellectual justification can and will exist at any given time. Despite this nihilistic understanding, modern psychology backs up these claims by demonstrating that intuition comes before reasoning. Pareto’s understanding of belief is kind of scary. Your beliefs may not have so good a foundation after all for the things that you believe in. Pareto is being descriptive, not prescriptive.
Plato wrote about the noble lie, the falsehood or half-truth that protects the social order despite what the facts say. This noble lie must be defended because even if the motivation for overturning is the pursuit of truth, the social order will collapse. Therefore, each regime aims to protect its noble lie, or “political formula” as the elite theorists will describe it. A political formula gives legitimacy to a political body. For absolutist monarchies, the political formula was that the monarch was in place by the will of God. For the United States, the political formula is a combination of the alleged will of the people and the Constitution giving legitimacy to the rulers. It does not matter if the political formula is true or not. The purpose of the political formula, much like the web of heuristics in your mind justifying your beliefs, is to provide legitimacy. Political formulas, and the justification you use for your beliefs, are not necessarily good or bad, or right or wrong, but rather they are simply necessary.
There is an illustrative case of the efficacy of the political formula at work in the Dune series. The Bene Gesserit, a shadowy female-run organization, undergoes the implementation of the 'Missionaria Protectiva', a series of myths and religious prophecies planted across the known planetary systems. These myths are carefully crafted to provide roundabout justification for the actions of the Bene Gesserit as they undergo their eugenic project. The Bene Gesserit used propaganda to create a political formula by sowing seeds of religious belief. Things go wrong, though, when the Bene Gesserit prophecies turn out to be true. This is much to the surprise of the Bene Gesserit because their prophecies were made up. Paul Atreides arrives and fulfills their prophecies, spawning a dynasty that would rule the universe for thousands of years.
This raises the same question Christ posed to Pontius Pilate: what is truth? The Bene Gesserit prophecies were not true because they made them up. Simultaneously, the Bene Gesserit prophecies became true. They became true through action.
Georges Sorel, the 20th-century Syndicalist political thinker, emphasized the importance of myth in creating revolutionary social change. Sorel’s conception of myth was not meant to merely be an intellectual plaything, but rather the motivation for action. Action and thought are distinct parts of the human experience. The written word is entirely confined to the domain of thought and can only speak of action detached from action. Actions speak for themselves, while words can only approach phenomena in the external world asymptotically. There is no perfect language. We know this because there are multiple languages, each with its advantages and drawbacks. Some languages have more advantages than others, but all fall short of a complete reproduction of the active life-world. Baudrillard discusses the story of the map and the territory, in which a map is constructed so large that it ends up being 1 to 1 with the territory. The size and topography of the map are identical to the territory itself. We like to believe that our language is this map, a perfect simulation of the territory. It is not.
Finding truth within the domain of words and theory is a futile endeavor. We cannot use reason alone to find the truth. With this realization, you run the risk of falling into radical relativism.
To fully understand the truth, I believe we must operate outside of the bounds of language and incorporate the domain of action. Action is mysterious to the world of words because it can turn what is false in the word domain into something true. This is the case in the first book of the Dune series. Myth motivates action, as Sorel describes, which fulfills the myth and turns it into something true. Sometimes.
This cannot always work. There are many myths out there, and they cannot all be true in a literal sense. Truth must be efficacious. Truth has to bring about desired outcomes in the world of action. A true myth is a myth that can be acted upon towards good ends. Goodness, in the Aristotelian sense, is when something fulfills its function. When a myth efficaciously brings one closer to the ultimate aims of human life, it can be considered a true myth on some level. Jordan Peterson’s most interesting work was his lecture series on the book of Genesis. Drawing from Jungian psychoanalysis, he demonstrates that the importance of the Biblical stories was their psychological efficacy. When those stories are internalized, they motivate action towards good ends.
Any story can play at this game. Some work and some do not. The best stories are the ones that demonstrate to us important facts about the human condition. We must look for the truth in stories because stories are accounts of action. Just like your beliefs, they can skip some steps to create coherence. A story can get behind concepts and escape the constraints of bare reason.
Stories are engaging. They make us feel things. They get at the sentiments that Pareto describes. That is where we receive stories. Byung Chul Han speaks of the importance of narrative. Narrative is how we perceive the world. We put the events of our lives into narratives to digest them. We do not categorize the bare facts like a computer. Instead, we cut and trim the bare facts to make them fit. Reason hates narrative because of its imprecision. Han writes in Psychopolitics about the efforts by rationalists to place statistics in a higher regard than narrative. It gives a cold and precise account of the facts. Big data collection continues this effort to de-narrativize reality and instead create a perfect account of the facts.
Data is pure truth in the rationalist sense. Han states that “the medium in the first Enlightenment was reason.” It sought to destroy the mythology of the world. The second Enlightenment, the Enlightenment of pure data and statistics, the bare facts without any unnecessary dressing, seeks to further this same project. All information shall be transparent, bare, completely cold, and naked. The rationalist is filled with glee at this possibility because they will be able to do science better or something like that. Han states:
Dadaism also takes leave of meaningful contexts of every kind. It empties language itself of sense: ‘The acts of life have no beginning or end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada.’ Dataism is nihilism. It gives up on any and all meaning. Data and numbers are not narrative; they are additive. Meaning, on the other hand, is based on narration. Data simply fills up the senseless void.
Meaning and context are necessary for information to mean anything to us. This is almost a tautology: to have meaning, you need meaning. However, this tautology is lost on those who aim for this view of information.
Protagoras famously said that man is the measure of all things. This is taken by many to be a plunge into radical relativism. There is no truth, but rather there is only your experience. Everything is only relative to you. This is a matter that Schopenhauer grapples with in The World as Will and Representation. Representation is the input that comes through our senses. The will, on the other hand, is that mysterious thing that animates change within us and without us. We know our will intimately. It is that thing that animates our inner and outer lives. We recognize the union of will and representation when we see the external representations of our bodies animated by the will. Look at your hand and wiggle your fingers and you will see what I am talking about. The sensory input of your wiggling fingers has a 1-to-1 relationship you’re your internal willing to move your fingers in such a way. Schopenhauer argues that we can recognize the will in all change and movement around us. The world, according to Schopenhauer, is composed entirely of will and representation, which can also be called perception. Our perception of the world is the world.
The world absent human observation is nearly incomprehensible. Look at another object in your near vicinity, such as a coffee mug or cup. Absent human observation, this mug exists at all sizes and scales at the same time. It is both infinitely large and infinitely small without an observer to understand its scale. Its color is also dependent on our observation. Without the human eye, there is no color, rather there are wavelengths of light emanating into nowhere. If a tree falls into a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? No, it vibrates the air. It only becomes a sound when an ear receives those vibrations.
Man puts the world entirely in context and gives the world meaning. Man’s memories of the world are most often in narrative form. We are meant to understand the world through narrative, through stories. Our minds do this automatically, storing memories as stories. New information about a certain memory is always incorporated into that story. Bare data is more cumbersome for the mind to hold. This is why a good history teacher will not just give you a series of dates with names of events and a couple of facts like the sidebar on a Wikipedia page. A good history teacher tells you the story, gives the event context, and puts it into a coherent narrative.
This is why Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West can be understood as both a book on history but also a book of epic poetry. Decline is a poetic history of man. Poetry collapses the distinction between the symbolic and the real, allowing us to cross over from the world of reason into the actual, living, experienced world. Reason must be subjugated to story and narrative for the world to become comprehensible. Without story, the world does not have context. Some stories will not be true, but that is okay. The best stories, which lead to the greatest well-being and motivate the greatest achievement, are the best stories. In the Spenglerian framework, you can look at the stories that motivate entire civilizations. Western civilization, driven forward by Faustian man, has been motivated by the stories of the Classical and Magian cultures, the union of Athens and Jerusalem. These stories burrow deep within the soul and produce the greatest well-being and the greatest achievements. This is why the decline of Western culture is such a crisis because absent these fundamental stories, nihilism creeps in. We are already facing the consequences, and we do not want more of them.
I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew with this one. I touch on many ideas, but I have raised more questions than answers for myself in writing this. I plan to develop almost every aspect of this piece in the future. If you know of any reading material that touches on the subjects raised here, please comment below.
I discussed some of the ideas here in a recent podcast episode with The Forest Rebel. Check that out below:
Great stuff as usual. The loss of narrative is also something closely related to a loss of common identity. Part of being human is that we share stories; we hold them in common and then pass them down. For a timely example given the calendar, consider the American Founding Myth. There was once a near-universally understood "story" about how this country emerged. I needn't recount it, as I think you (the reader, whoever you may be) are familiar with it. However, you must also be familiar with other founding myths. There have been explicit attempts in the last decade to shift the focus of the narrative and undermine the traditional Founding Myth entirely. Things like the 1619 Project. When we no longer share a common understanding of our history as a people group and country and when we no longer share the same principles, what can become of us except that we fragment and deteriorate?
TY for yor thoughtful comments. I'm a scientist (physicist). You might find my Critical Thinking Substack to be of interest. For example, I did a four part commentary about Beliefs <https://criticallythinking.substack.com/p/some-obervations-about-beliefs-part>.