Do myths exist?
Do Myths exist?
Perhaps it might be said that “6,000,000 died in the Holocaust” shouldn’t be challenged as a sign-use construct because it has “truthiness” -- even if the figure is mythic** and the description is sacralized.
** The same number is used three times as in “Save Six Million Men and Women in Eastern Europe” in March 1920 NYTimes ad.
Pardon, but I must submit in reply that the same could be argued for publishing The Protocols of The Elders of Zion – perhaps with a warning of fraud and disclaiming approval. “The authors certainly know what the Jew is like, how he thinks, whether they were Jews themselves or not,” would be the unconscious up-take of instinctive anti-semtism. In other words, it communicates “truthiness, ” to them. One man’s truthiness can be another man’s lie, which is one good reason not to predicate on mythic use of terms. “Truthiness” unleashes fantasy to search for fact, the way the Iraq war took shape.
If these were widely published, more people would likely start thinking along those lines. Why all the hush-hush about “The Holocaust,” that European countries would imprison “deniers” of it? If the record is clear and distinct enough to predicate so much on, why not welcome all talk and discussion? At bottom, I think, is a fear of mass contagion. Once started, where can it lead but to “revisionism”?
To say such and such* is a “myth” is to say it* exists as a collective mental content: something* a group as a whole (which may be a sub-group of a larger whole) imagine and fantasize about, whether true or not, though it is thought to be most likely based on fact. Thus urban myths abound: Peeping Toms peering into teen-age girl’s bedroom windows, “basically destroying my daughters feeling of security, for the rest of her life,” her father said on TV. The content is something the group wants to believe. It materializes out of the blue, like Smiths, because they want it to be. The goal of action, Freud held, is to bring about a match between desire and perception. In other words, we are ‘driven’ to fill the Big Screen with what it pleases us to see, and we won’t stop until it’s there.
To argue about whether a myth, or character in a myth, “exists” or not is, in a way, a betrayal of solidarity with the group’s fantasy state, even if the argument concludes “yes”. Thus, the “proof of the existence of God” offered by Descartes, after the term for “God” had been reduced to an innate abstract general idea in his psychosemiotics, was viewed with as much suspicion by “believers” as by non-believers. As if what it communicated needed logical certification. This was Descartes daring radicalism, taking what “God” communicated up to another level of sign-use. He could see that the token had lost its power to convey anything specific about the world except what could be retained by converting it into the rationality of text, itself, through its own self-necessity. His existence could not be denied, but its affirmation adds nothing to mathematical laws of actual motion.
Perhaps it might be said that “6,000,000 died in the Holocaust” shouldn’t be challenged as a sign-use construct because it has “truthiness” -- even if the figure is mythic** and the description is sacralized.
** The same number is used three times as in “Save Six Million Men and Women in Eastern Europe” in March 1920 NYTimes ad.
Pardon, but I must submit in reply that the same could be argued for publishing The Protocols of The Elders of Zion – perhaps with a warning of fraud and disclaiming approval. “The authors certainly know what the Jew is like, how he thinks, whether they were Jews themselves or not,” would be the unconscious up-take of instinctive anti-semtism. In other words, it communicates “truthiness, ” to them. One man’s truthiness can be another man’s lie, which is one good reason not to predicate on mythic use of terms. “Truthiness” unleashes fantasy to search for fact, the way the Iraq war took shape.
If these were widely published, more people would likely start thinking along those lines. Why all the hush-hush about “The Holocaust,” that European countries would imprison “deniers” of it? If the record is clear and distinct enough to predicate so much on, why not welcome all talk and discussion? At bottom, I think, is a fear of mass contagion. Once started, where can it lead but to “revisionism”?
To say such and such* is a “myth” is to say it* exists as a collective mental content: something* a group as a whole (which may be a sub-group of a larger whole) imagine and fantasize about, whether true or not, though it is thought to be most likely based on fact. Thus urban myths abound: Peeping Toms peering into teen-age girl’s bedroom windows, “basically destroying my daughters feeling of security, for the rest of her life,” her father said on TV. The content is something the group wants to believe. It materializes out of the blue, like Smiths, because they want it to be. The goal of action, Freud held, is to bring about a match between desire and perception. In other words, we are ‘driven’ to fill the Big Screen with what it pleases us to see, and we won’t stop until it’s there.
To argue about whether a myth, or character in a myth, “exists” or not is, in a way, a betrayal of solidarity with the group’s fantasy state, even if the argument concludes “yes”. Thus, the “proof of the existence of God” offered by Descartes, after the term for “God” had been reduced to an innate abstract general idea in his psychosemiotics, was viewed with as much suspicion by “believers” as by non-believers. As if what it communicated needed logical certification. This was Descartes daring radicalism, taking what “God” communicated up to another level of sign-use. He could see that the token had lost its power to convey anything specific about the world except what could be retained by converting it into the rationality of text, itself, through its own self-necessity. His existence could not be denied, but its affirmation adds nothing to mathematical laws of actual motion.
posted by Sid Thomas | 1:43 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home