Myth-making, the modern way

By David Simmons

In the ancient world, myths took a long time to percolate and, if successful, become entrenched in folklore or, if even more successful, in religious dogma. But like everything in the 21^st century, myth-making now is fast-tracked.

The most enduring myths born millennia ago probably started out as parables, the metaphoric tools of teachers and philosophers, coloured with the intricate poetic forms characteristic of, for example, ancient Hebrew. During my university years, I spent two years studying biblical Hebrew, initially out of interest in the Bible but later out of fascination with the Hebrew language itself.

I’m obviously no Hebrew scholar, but even studying it for as little as two years can shed light on how the Old Testament myths developed, and maybe even give us an inkling of how the ancient scribes and teachers who composed the great biblical stories thought. It should also put to rest the much later dogma of “divine inspiration”.

The Chinese Gun-Yu flood myth. Photo: Ancient Origins

For there is almost no evidence that the writers of the Bible had any intention of their parables becoming central to a belief system trapped in reactionary ignorance, with even wars being fought over their interpretation. In fact, some of the most powerful biblical myths, such as the flood story, were themselves reinterpretations of earlier lore from foreign cultures, rewritten with the cast of characters renamed to make them more relevant to the audience of the day.

Well, there’s nothing we can do about that now. Not many religionists want to burn people at the stake any more for suggesting that the Earth revolves around the sun, but there are plenty who still think our planet is only six thousand years old, and that destroying our environment is fine because Jesus is going to return any day now.

Once a belief, no matter how absurd, no matter how great the pile of evidence against it, gets burned into our psyches, it is very, very hard to extricate it.

Unlike those ancient scribes who simply wanted to use poetic language and metaphor to illustrate an important lesson, modern humanity has evolved a new breed of myth-makers who want to save time and get right to the indoctrination stage.

Possibly the most famous practitioners of this were Adolf Hitler and his propagandist Joseph Goebbels, advocates of the große Lüge (big lie). Though there is no actual record of Goebbels saying “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself,” there is little doubt he and Hitler employed that principle to deadly effect. But they weren’t alone. In a better-documented quote, Goebbels wrote in 1941: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.”

These days, that risk – of looking ridiculous – seems to concern no one. One of the most prevalent True Beliefs in recent political doctrine involves the Known Fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin “hacked the US presidential election”. Even otherwise intelligent people who know full well that “throwing” an election in such an intricately controlled system as the US electoral process is next to impossible in the short term (the system is instead manipulated and corrupted over many years by gerrymandering and special-interest bribery), opinion polls late in 2016 showed that fully fifty per cent of registered Democrats believed that the Russians had tampered with electronic voting machines.

While the Russophobia perpetuated by this and other big lies is potentially dangerous, especially if the wet dreams of the most mouth-frothing warmongers in the US Congress and the arms industry come true and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provokes Russia into war, it’s still possible that Wall Street and other non-military corporate forces will realize that there is more money to be made by making peace with Moscow. So this idiocy could be short-term.

Longer-term, however, and so far much more successful, is the war against democratic socialism. Recently in The Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, lamented in a piece comparing the Conservative and Labour manifestos in the current UK election campaign: “British voters look like they’re rejecting Santa and embracing Scrooge. Why?”

In a critique of Freedland’s piece, journalist Jonathan Cook argues that the answer is clear: British voters have been propagandized relentlessly for decades, perhaps from the very birth of modern democracy, that democratic socialists might be good-hearted and well-meaning, but they cannot be trusted with the nation’s treasure. This despite the fact that in rare cases when genuinely progressive political parties or movements have managed to gain power, they have nearly always spent taxpayers’ money frugally and wisely, while conservative governments have nearly always run up huge deficits by wasting money on corporate subsidies and military “toys for boys”, among other things.

Cook writes:

Here are some other pertinent questions for Freedland. How did most of the British public end up concluding – entirely counter-intuitively – that the global economy can grow indefinitely by plundering the resources of a finite planet? How did they determine that private corporations would care for them better than the state – or, for that matter, co-operatives of workers?

When did they decide that it was more important for Britain to become a “service economy”, run by hedge-fund managers, than a green, sustainable economy? How did they ever believe that a party openly representing Big Money would prioritize their interests above those of a global elite?

How indeed? Are these “alternative facts”, or poetic licence like that practised by the ancient scribes? I’m old enough to remember a time when journalists would ask questions like that.