Why We Need To Be Less Rational

Make Myths Great Again

The other day I was in a bookstore. Not searching for anything in particular, just looking around.

After a while, I came across a book that seemed like it could be interesting.

The book was about the philosophy and culture of a very specific group of people, living in a specific region, during a specific time period.

The author tried to bring their way of life and their values closer to the reader through a series of essays.

Since this was my first time hearing about both this book and its author, I decided to go online and look at the reviews.

Overall, the reviews were positive.

But what I found interesting was that all of the criticism that I was able to find looked exactly the same.

“The author’s sources are a bit suspect. He illustrates his points using examples from their mythology, literature, epic historical poems, and folk tales. He doesn’t cite any official historical documents.” - that’s pretty much every single negative review summed up.

If this was a school textbook, or simply a strictly history book, I would say that this kind of criticism is valid.

But, as I understood, this was a book that essentially tries to get the reader to know this specific group of people on a level that goes deeper and beyond just historical facts.

And the soul of the people is not passed on through dry facts.

It is passed on through their mythology, their literature, poems, and folk tales.

I don’t really care if a certain man faced 25 enemies on his own in order to defend his tribe’s honor, or was it actually 5 enemies.

I don’t need any historical documents on it.

If a society has been passing this story from one generation to the next for centuries, a story of a person doing something as reckless as going into a certain death for the sake of honor, it is clear to me that those people valued honor more than life itself.

Whether the hero of the story faced 5 men, but the story was made more epic with time, or was it actually 25 men, is irrelevant.

Whether, long ago, a brave mother walked 100 miles barefoot to save her children, or if it was 50 miles in worn out shoes, or maybe 30 miles but her shoes completely fell apart by the end of the road is, again, completely irrelevant.

You don’t need any historical documents and precise numbers to understand that the story is trying to keep alive the message that the mother’s love and sacrifice is one of the strongest forces in the world.

Coming from a region that has an immensely rich (but also violent) history that was passed on from one generation to the next mostly through epic poems, I know there was never a question about how precise and accurate the details of those songs were.
The only thing that mattered was what were they trying to convey.

But, unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised when I was reading the negative reviews of this book.

When making my instagram posts about the power and importance of the myth, I would get questions such as:

“But how can there be value in something that is objective falsehood? We know it didn’t happen.”

These are the words of a person whose mind might be full of information, but their soul is starving.

Myth is an eternal truth.

Myth is a dramatic representation of the moral wisdom passed on from generation to generation, ever since the earliest days of human civilization.

As Rollo May said,

“There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.”

"Myths are essential to the process of keeping our souls alive and bringing us new meaning in a difficult and often meaningless world."

It is not numbers and statistics that speak to the human soul.

What speaks to our soul is a story, a poem, a myth.

I invite you to open your mind and your soul to the power and beauty of the myth.

Read a poem, or a folk tale, or a mythological story.

You will find that they hold no less truth than your university textbooks or any encyclopedia.

Thank you for reading.

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