America and Other Myths
Mythos, logos and what conspiracy theories teach us about ourselves
How do we choose what stories to tell about the world?
Some 17% of Americans believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory. Tens of millions of people genuinely think that a cabal of Satanic cannibal pedophiles is running the world from the shadows and that Donald Trump is here to expose the truth and bring them all to justice.
4% of Americans believe alien lizard people secretly run our country. Half of us think God plays a role in who wins the Super Bowl. 5% believe the Covid-19 pandemic was definitely planned, and a whopping 20% think it probably was.
Why are these the stories that we tell about the world? Why such fervent belief when the evidence is so scant, if it exists at all?
Since as far back as at least Ancient Greece, we’ve witnessed culture caught in a war between story and fact, between intuition and rationality, mythos and logos. Mythos makes sense of the world through narrative, explaining life as the work of the gods or the interplay of animate forces. Logos makes sense of the world through observable phenomena, through empirical evidence and reason.
There’s a now-debunked assumption (another myth, as it were) that the course of history flows from belief…
