Fairy Tales of the Media and Opium for the Tenured

Here's a thought: "There are, and always will be, aspects of our existence that require for their expression and exploration the analogical language of myth. Philosophy, mythology, and religion, from this point of view, are linked in essential continuity" (Webb).

Frankly, I don't think this statement is controversial at all. In fact, we could turn it on its head and affirm that man qua man always lives within a mythological space or structure, even -- or especially -- when he convinces himself he doesn't.

I say "especially" because no one is more faithful (or better, credulous) than the man who believes he isn't. A stark raving atheist, for example, who has no faith in God, will always be found to have blind faith in something else -- in scientism or some other modern primitive superstition.

To grab at the most conspicuously low hanging fruitcakes that come to hand, is there anyone more mythbound than a Marxist? I am hardly the first to point out that Marx and all his retarded progeny live in a perverted space of inverted Christianity, featuring paradise, original sin, revelation, apocalypse, redemption, salvation, and countless demons. I well know about the demons, because I am several of them (i.e., white, Christian, male, cisgender, armed, etc.).

Bear in mind that our implicit mythological structure is indeed a structure and a mythological one at that.

Or, put it this way: the explanatory stories we tell ourselves are both structured and logical, although the structure isn't necessarily linear nor the logic Aristotelian. Rather, the former is vertical and the latter symmetrical and bi-logical.

That last book is NOT recommended. I just linked to it to show that I'm not alone. However, I glanced at one of the reviews, and this is helpful:

What Matte Blanco proposes is that there are two co-existing modes of being, one homogeneous indivisible mode and another heterogeneous dividing one. So we human beings live in two realities at once, merged in one being, which in turn produces the actual behaviors going from normal, neurotic, schizophrenic, psychotic and so on.

Now, human beings habitually collapse these two modes and dimensions, which is how one can end up living inside an unexamined, reified mythology that seems self-evident to the one living in it.

If you've ever wondered why leftists are so smug and superior, this is why: because you are so stupid that you can't even see what is self-evident, e.g., that President Trump is a Russian agent, that he conspired with Ukraine to defeat Joe Biden, that blacks who support Trump aren't actually black, et al.

You and I could spend all day recalling similarly malignant myths -- that the US and USSR are morally equivalent... or just say Feminism, Patriarchy, Homophobia, Islamophobia, Xenophobia, etc., each one the title of a simplistic mythology that organizes an otherwise chaotic world.

Alternatively, just survey your own past and consider all the idiocies you once believed with all your heart and mind, but have since discarded. What was that all about? How is it that so many things you believed to be self-evidently true turned out to be self-evidently false? What would have become of you had you not discarded these psychospiritual malignancies and still lived in one those reality tunnels?

Like anyone, I am sometimes a bit nostalgic for the past. But I always project my current self there, and forget about the cramped reality tunnel I inhabited at the time (different ones in different developmental times). Actually re-entering those mythic spaces is nearly impossible -- analogous to trying to "remember" what it felt like to be a pre-linguistic primate. Supposing you are successful, "you" are no longer there to experience it.

Back to the reviewer:

Matte Blanco says it is extremely improbable that psychical phenomena can be described in terms of only three dimensions. The main hypothesis is that the mind can be better understood and explained by using a multidimensional model which relies on a bi-logical or symmetrical-asymmetrical relationship, between conscious and unconscious.

Yes. One must always look at the phenomena from no fewer than two angles. Think, for example, of a great novel or film, in which the plot takes place on one plane, while the theme not only occurs on another level but is the sufficient cause of the plot, even if the theme is never worked out consciously. In fact, the plot may be the conscious elaboration of an unconscious theme or structure. Which is actually a good definition of myth.

Lately I've been trying to dig down to the ontological foundation of all this. This foundation isn't in the distant past -- or not only there -- but also in the here and now. In other words, we again partake of this vertical structure at all times, because reality is this vertical structure.

Nor should we collapse this structure and pretend to have arrived at an unambiguous, once-and-for-all answer. The result won't even be a myth. Rather, some mediated fairy tale or tenured opiate.

Speaking of getting to the bottom of our cosmos, we'll leave off with this passage from The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, not forgetting that in the grand scheme of things we are those same men on that same adventure, i.e., still dwelling in the dark as (Plato's) cavemen:

The imagery of myth "is nothing less than a carefully chosen cloak for abstract thought." And try as he might, the modern barbarian "does not quite succeed in becoming a scientific object to himself. His need of transcending chaotic experience and conflicting facts leads him to seek a metaphysical hypothesis that may clarify his urgent problems."

The Narrative is just a reality tunnel propagated by the mythstream media and enforced by political correctness and other institutions.