Myths: The Danger

Up early and have some time on my hands. I’m thinking about myths. I’m not thinking of myths in the sense of the late Joseph Campbell who sequestered himself in Woodstock, NY for five years while he read about them.

 I’m thinking of myths in terms of why so many people are willing to believe in them despite physical and empirical contradictions.  It may determine the future of America, maybe even the planet.

 What purpose do they serve? Perhaps they allow control. Yuval Noah Harari. an Israeli public intellectual, historian and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem thinks so. In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, he posits that while direct contact only allows an individual or group to control a small number of people, myths allow that control to spread to unknown limits.

 During my lifetime are vivid examples. Consider the fact that on November 22, 1963, a deranged former Marine and immigrant to Communist Russia, remained for lunch at his job in a high-rise depository in downtown Dallas, and with a rifle snuck in as “window shades” needing repair fired at a motorcade killing President John F. Kennedy.

 Today in America, there are college-educated adult Americans walking about us who don’t believe, despite contemporary—repeat contemporary—eye-witnesses and a preponderance of evidence, that it never happened. Oh, it happened all right, they admit. Only a few join the 32 percent of their colleagues who believe that Elvis is still alive and place the former president alive on a South Sea island. No, they believe, without a shred of reliable evidence and using ludicrous claims, (20 year-old repressed memories coming to the surface and such) that a coalition of city, county, state, CIA, FBI, U.S. military, mafia lords, and Cuban leaders led by then Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, carried off the greatest conspiracy in American history for specious reasons and were so powerful that no deathbed confession has ever disclosed its existence. Oh, and some believe that the coalition carefully and specifically chose and employed Lee Harvey Oswald to carry out the mission. It would have been an odd choice at best.

 Now consider a real conspiracy, say the one, by the Ronald Reagan administration to illegally sell weapons to Iran for money with which illegally to fund our side of a foreign war in South America. That real conspiracy, involving probably no one outside the administration, unfolded in a matter of months, not years.

 Results of mythology in America? Well hell, read today’s legitimate press.