TO MYTH OR NOT TO MYTH

"The greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth—persistent, pervasive and unrealistic." —John F. Kennedy

"When ideas go unexamined and unchallenged for a long time, certain things happen. They become mythological, and they become very, very powerful." —E.L. Doctorow (novelist)

I picked up a another book to read today while working down at the Friends of the Library used book store on the main floor of the downtown library. We call it "Buy The Book." The book I bought today is HOUSE OF CARDS by Robyn Dawes. A psychologist, he claims he'll debunk many modern psychological beliefs with clinical, evidentiary data. The two quotes about mythology are on the credit page. I include them because, lately, I've been reading and entering into my BLOG data from Joseph Campbell's book MYTHS TO LIVE BY.

To Joseph Campbell it's absolutely necessary for people to have some sort of mythology by which to enlighten and fire up their mundane lives, and to give people a sense of transcendence over their fears and mortality. As for myself, I like Joseph's help in debunking the Bible myths, but I don't think I'm living with any myth at the present time. Yet, I have and will have transcendent moments.


SELF-WORTH

Since I believe so much in self-esteem as a positive force in the nature of any human being, I thought I'd present a view contrary to my opinion. I'm looking forward to reading this book in its entirety to see how much of my learned self-help ideas, what others call psycho-babble, might be false. I know that it took me nearly fifty years to raise my own self-esteem, and I know I was the most troublesome when I felt poorly about who I was, yet I do realize that raising my self-esteem might have been a combination of action as well as doing some of the grief work that men and women like John Bradshaw suggested.

From HOUSE OF CARDS, pp. 9-10) "... the mental health professionals who claim expertise without a scientific base have apparently had a profound effect on our culture’s beliefs about what constitutes a good life, what types of behavior are desirable, and—most important—how people “should” feel about the world (see Part II). The most pernicious of these beliefs is that adult behavior is determined mainly by childhood experiences, even very subtle ones, and particularly those that enhance or diminish self-esteem. Self-esteem, in turn, is believed to be an important causal variable in behavior, even though the California Task Force on the Importance of Self-Esteem could find no evidence of such a causal effect. Especially, low self-esteem is believed to yield, with unerring consistency, personally or socially destructive behaviors, so that people who wish to change their behavior must experience an elevation of self-esteem first (as the result of therapy or an esteem-raising self-help group) and attempt serious change in their lives only later. Again, the evidence for these beliefs is negative. What these beliefs do is discourage people from attempting to craft a decent life for themselves and instead encourage them to do whatever is necessary to feel good—about themselves. Sometimes such striving after “mentally healthy” feelings and attitudes simply result in ludicrous behavior (like clutching a teddy bear while proudly proclaiming oneself undoubtedly an incest victim, despite an inability to remember any credible instances). In general, however, this strategy is self-defeating, because it ignores the simple principle that much of our feeling results from what we do rather than causing us to do it."


A PRICKLY RIGHTIST

A friend and I were having a laughing discussion of the Bush family the other day in a McDonald's restaurant. We were talking about why Bush Jr. hates people smarter than himself and why he spent his youth rebelling against his father and grandfather's Eastern upbringing. Why doesn't Bush like to read, for example? A lot of this is very interesting stuff. Anybody who votes would be interested in such material. We wanted to know why he doesn't read a lot and why he's not interested in anything in the world other than power and religion, why he was never interested in books, movies, autobiographies, or the major ideas of the world.

Before we'd finished our discussion an angry women sped past our table and growled in passing, "Why don't you move to France?"

My friend and I were shocked into silence. The old lady who'd been eavesdropping and who'd just insulted us went to stand at the counter. Finally, I got up and walked to her side and offered my hand.

"Parlez vous, Francais," I said. "Thank you. I live in France part of the year," I lied.

"I won't shake your hand," she trembled.

I stepped back and said, "You are a bitchy old... an angry old woman, aren't you?"

"You can't talk about my country like that."

I leaned ever closer and spoke into the side of her face for she would not look at me at all. "I wasn't speaking about America. I was talking about our stupid President." Then I returned to my seat and my friend and I left the restaurant.

Why do these rightists keep asking people who don't agree with them to leave the country? I've been told to emigrate at least three times recently. Why do rightists and fascists like them not want to hear any dissent? Why did they drive Marlene Deitrich, Freud, Einstein and others out of Germany when the fascist right were in charge in that country? Why did they kill Jews because they imagined that Jews didn't think like other Germans during the first world war? Why did they burn the books of those who were dead with whom they didn't agree? Why can't the fascist right bear to be contradicted?

My guess is they can't stand to be challenged because they don't have any facts to back anything up with. That's my experience with them. When you begin to debate with them, they have nothing but prejudices and opinions they picked up when they were kids, and they don't read and study enough to learn anything which could change or modify those childhood prejudices. Like George Jr. who said that all poor people are lazy and who couldn't come up with any data to prove his point when he was in Harvard business school and his fellow students challenged him to prove his contention. So, if they can't back up their claims, of course, all they could wish is to silence through book burning and exile those ideas and people who disagree with them.
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"The only way to succeed is to make people hate you." —Josef von Stermberg (My sentiments exactly, von!"