"The US Needs A New Mythos That's Not At War With the Facts"

[applegrove]

The US Needs A New Mythos That's Not At War With the Facts

By Paul Rosenberg at Crooks & Liars

http://crooksandliars.com/paul-rosenberg/aje-us-needs-new-mythos-thats-not-w

"SNIP............................



Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal.

What's more, she explained:


Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshipers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence.

But no one should think that mythos belongs only to religion. It belongs anywhere where questions of meaning and purpose arise - which is to say, in virtually every human realm. Mythos in this sense is precisely what the NRA traffics in - not just the NRA, but the entire range of movement conservatism. And they all replicate the modernist mistake of fundamentalist religion - which is a disaster for them in terms of producing workable policies. But it's their salvation in terms of selling themselves and their reassuring vision. While liberals and moderates focus their attention on facts, conservative activists like LaPierre simply ignore whatever doesn't fit their view of the world, and pound repeatedly on mythic, meaning-making statements, regardless of whether they have any foundations in fact.




...........................SNIP"