This essay was kicked over in my head by a 4: 44-second video I viewed. What is below is not that video though there are structural commonalities between the two.
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In order to try and understand the thinking of a people in a set geographic location one has several tools at their disposal. One can examine peoples in worldview categories. How do they answer the cosmological, anthropological, ontological, teleological, axiological, and epistemological questions? Those answers are then compared and contrasted to the answers that the Holy Scriptures reveal. Another way of trying to understand the thinking of a people group is to consider what might be called their guiding mythos. This can be a bit more difficult because the guiding mythos for any people group is seldom explicitly articulated by the people in the people group that one is considering. The guiding mythos is a narrative that they are living and as living it they all assume it as valid, often without bringing it explicitly before their eyes. The guiding mythos becomes the environment that people live in and as the Chinese proverb has it, “if you want to know what the water is like, don’t ask a fish.”
One interesting aspect of a guiding mythos is that the people who are being guided by the mythos generally take the mythos, not as myth but as real reality. Correspondingly, people from the outside see the myth as a social construct not anchored in real reality. This is seen for example in Christianity. I as a Christian believe what others call my “guiding mythos” to be real reality while I consider their guiding mythos which analyzes my Christianity as a social construct, as a social construct.
When we offer that mythos of non-Christians is a social construct we do not suggest that there are not elements in the mythos that may be true. What we are saying instead when we talk about guiding mythos as a social construct is that which may or may not be true of it is providing a plausibility structure that as a whole does not correspond to real reality. There may be elements that correspond to real reality but the guiding mythos as a whole remains a myth. That is to say, it remains something that people take as true to give meaning to their lives, though as a whole, as it deviates from Biblical Christianity it remains a chimera.
All people groups, cultures, and social orders are organized around Worldviews, guiding mythos, macro-narratives, and plausibility structures and the way of life of said people groups are determined by these reality shaping molds.
Elsewhere on Iron Ink, we have offered how to analyze the Worldview of any particular people group. In this entry, we want to begin to toy with how to identify and recognize a guiding mythos or a foundation myth of people groups.
A guiding mythos must fulfill three functions for the people who embrace it.
First, the guiding mythos must explain the origin and structure of the world and the society around it. If we were to put this in Worldview language we would say that the guiding mythos must provide a cosmology and an ontology.
Second, the guiding mythos must define ultimate good and evil and from those definitions derive the values that are used to justify the holding of power. If we were to put this in Worldview language we would say that the guiding mythos must answer the question of axiology.
Here, it should be noted that the foundation myth will provide not only what is the ultimate good and evil but as a consequence it will also provide guilt for not aligning with the good as well as a means of atonement for one’s participation in ultimate evil or the participation of one’s ancestors in ultimate evil.
Third, the guiding mythos determines what is held sacred in that society. The guiding mythos delineates the taboos and provides the mysterium tremendum of a people. Find that which cannot be blasphemed, mocked or satirized in a culture and you will have discovered what is sacred in that social order per their guiding mythos.
One can easily argue that for modern Westerners, WW II and the social implications arising out of that conflict has become the foundation myth of the West as we shall see as we examine who WW II as guiding mythos fills all three requirements noted above.
First, our understanding of the world and of our institutions all stem from the world that WW II created. This is true of our policies. One example is that it is taken as axiomatic that the US must have a globalist foreign and economic policy. This was not the nearly universal policy engagement of America until after WW II. Before WW II there was a strong isolationist impulse in America. Another example is our nearly universal push towards a New World Order where there is a unified Internationalist governmental structure. This was all propelled into motion by the child of WW II, the United Nations, as well as the Bretton Woods Economic gathering.
Secondly, our current guiding mythos, which arises out of WW II, our definition of ultimate evil is Nazism whereas ultimate good is an opposition to Nazism. That this obtains for our guiding ethos is seen by the countless movies that are produced by Hollywood where if a real villain is to be created he must be a Nazi. The values that then arise out of opposition to Nazism which our guiding mythos provides are anti-racism (whatever that is), egalitarianism, diversity, and anti-nationalism. Each of these values can be traced back to America’s victory over ultimate evil.
These values are then projected back upon the American founding and are taken as values that good Americans have always embraced since 1776. As such, as one example, the language in our Declaration of Independence which speaks of “all men being created equal,” is reinterpreted through this guiding mythos grid to mean something Jacobin that the founders never intended it to mean. Obviously, our founders never intended the kind of egalitarianism that our current guiding mythos requires as seen in their reference in the same Declaration of Independence to American Indians as “merciless savages.”
Third, out of this modern guiding mythos, that which is taken as sacred and cannot be mocked or satirized are those things that violate the myth. Jesus Christ can be defamed in our current guiding mythos (see the 2015 film “Krampus” where one of the characters blurts out as an exclamation “Christ on a stick.”) Biblical Christianity in our social order can be lampooned, but what cannot be mocked or satirized is the holocaust, minorities, or sexual perverts. And, yes, there are certain elements of these that desperately need to be satirized and mocked. Here are just a few examples of where the values of the current guiding mythos needs to be picked as a target, frozen as a target, personalized as a target, and finally made a point of polarization.
1.) The alleged fact that victims of the holocaust were turned into soap or human lamp shades or bone china needs to be mocked.
2.) The thinking of Black lives Matter needs to be mocked as well as the false narrative of “hands up don’t shoot.” The thinking of La Raza needs to be mocked. The thinking behind sanctuary cities and states needs to be satirized.
3.) Current diversity models that sanction the perverseness of transgenderism, sodomy and incest need to be mocked and satirized.
4.) Feminism needs to be mocked and satirized.
However, as these values are now the values of modern Western man these values are sacred and to touch them is to touch the ark of the covenant. To touch these is to violate the guiding mythos of the West.
Problems lie at several points in our current guiding mythos.
First, this 20th century guiding mythos gives us a worldview platform that is dark, negative and destructive. Instead of a mythos, such as the Christian one which gives us the idea of redemption and a conquering faith the current mythos gives us the ongoing total genocide of White Christians who refuse to submit to the current guiding mythos. Consider the plight of South Africa today.
Secondly, whereas in Christianity ultimate good is seen in the Redemptive work of Jesus Christ and ultimate evil is seen as those who put Christ to death, what we have in this WW II mythos in the center place is the ultimate good is seen as egalitarianism and the ultimate evil generally assigned to Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.
Thirdly, as we have seen, that which is sacred in our current mythos is the Holocaust and its survivors as opposed to the Christian narrative where the Cross, Resurrection, and Ascension are that which are sacred.
All conceptual thinking is downstream from any guiding mythos. As long as this WW II guiding myth remains our guiding myth the trajectory of the current thought control and ultimately the genocide of the Biblical Christian is inevitable since this mythos teaches that Christendom and modern Western man is responsible for the violation of this now entrenched holocaust anti-egalitarian myth. If Christianity survives it can only survive as being reinterpreted according to this guiding myth. If it is reinterpreted according to this guiding myth it is no longer Christianity. Modern Western man can only atone for this false guilt that this false mythos engenders by ceasing to be White and Christian. White Christians are responsible for the holocaust and only the elimination of White Christians can answer for it.
Modern Westerners have lost their original mythos identity that was anchored in the reality of Creation-Fall-Redemption-Dominion and have taken on a new mythos identity that is anchored in the false reality of Nazism-Anti-Semitism-False Guilt-Genocide. There is no escaping the trajectory of this current mythos. This guiding mythos is so entrenched now that for a White Christian to deny this current mythos is valid is to prove that the current mythos is valid according to the current mythos.
The fact that this is our current mythos is testified to by the countless number of “Holocaust Museums” that dot the landscape of America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Holocaust_memorials_and_museums_in_the_United_States#Michigan
Even in 1981, in the small Wesleyan College, I attended I took a “Holocaust” course. All this despite the fact that Americans had zero role or responsibility in whatever did or did not happen in Europe during the time frame in question.
Also, the power of this current guiding mythos is seen in our ignorance of any other genocide that occurred in history. We are only aware of the Jewish holocaust. Our guiding mythos does not allow us to ask why we are seldom told of the genocide of the Ukrainian Christians in the 1920’s – 1930’s by the Bolsheviks or the genocide of the Armenian Christians in the 1910’s by the Turks, or the genocide of Christians by Muslims as they crossed the North African littoral during their rampage of conquest. Our guiding mythos being what it is cannot see these genocides for to see these other genocides diminishes the holocaust industry.
The ability to place guilt on a people is one of the powerful consequences of a guiding mythos. False guilt gives one the ability to manipulate people in almost any direction. Guilt and the ability to wield it successfully and the ability to offer ways wherein guilt can be assuaged is where power is leveraged. We saw this most clearly recently in the election of Barack Obama. We remained a guilty people for our primal national sin of slavery and one way to atone for our guilt was to vote for the black Democrat.
We might offer here that the mythos of the WW II holocaust and the mythos of American slavery coalesce and reinforce each other well. In both the 19th century American mythos (slavery) and the 20th-century WW II mythos, the white man is the guilty party. In both cases the White man was the oppressor of an innocent victim. In both cases, atonement can only be made by the giving up of the formerly embraced Christian mythos that stands as contrary to both the 19th and 20th-century mythos. In both cases liberation theology is the core of each mythos. In both cases, egalitarianism, diversity, and a reinterpretation of Christianity and its mythos is required.
All of this is reinforced by our literature, our flims, our Universities, and nearly every cultural outlet that one cares to name.
