How myths drive our lives

From www.13draw.com

In 1978, more than 900 people consumed drinks laced with cyanide and committed suicide. They were obeying their leader, a man named Jim Jones.

Jim Jones was the founder of a cult called The Peoples Temple. There was nothing original about the cult. Its credo was a mixture of Christian rhetoric and socialist ideology. Jones was a charismatic orator. If you have charisma and eloquence, you can get people to do anything, provided you know how to wield religion effectively. You can even get people to kill themselves or others.

Thomas Theorem in sociology states: If humans define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. In other words, much reality is a creation of humans. Reality is a social construct, shaped and developed by a culture. Culture is a particular way of thinking, feeling, and doing. It resides in a people’s collective thoughts and emotions, shared beliefs and behaviours, many of which are sheer myths. For example, milk and milk products are considered ‘pure vegetarian’ in India.

India has a god called Krishna who loved cows. So milk and milk products are vegetarian. As simple as that.

Lord Rama of Ayodhya is no more real than Noah of the Bible. There is no evidence of Moses having ever existed or of any mass exodus of the Jews from Egypt in the late Bronze or early Iron Age. Yet some two billion people in the world today strive to abide by the ten commandments given to Moses by his god. Lord Rama, who was a gentle soul until about 2014, is now a warlord in India because the myth surrounding him has been rewritten by an Indian Jim Jones.

Myths drive societies and nations. Myths shape reality. It’s the same thing I said in the beginning of this post. And they can be changed overnight by a charismatic leader, as I show below.

You can convince a whole nation that they were a great civilisation in the ancient past until a particular invader from another religion came and destroyed the civilisation. Create an enemy and bring in some gods too to support your contention, and there you are – an invincible leader, a Messiah. Create any number of myths and people will believe you, sing alleluias to you, die for you, kill for you…

Hitler and his followers killed over 6 million people for the sake of a myth. The Christian Crusades and Islamic Jihads killed an equal number of people in the medieval period in the name of their own respective God. The crusaders cried “Deus vult, God wills it!” while the jihadists chanted “Allahu Akbar!” And both groups believed that they were the advocates of peace and compassion. Which was the myth that really drove them: God or the ideals of peace and compassion? Race was Hitler’s myth. 

Crusade

Anything can be a myth. The plain truth is that human behaviour is driven by fictitious ideas of shared myths. Anything is possible if you can get a big enough group of people to believe in something like the sanctity of a national border or the greatness of an ancient civilisation.

It’s not at all difficult to get people to believe in any myth. The people of France who believed in the divine right of kings to rule them changed that myth overnight and started believing in the sovereignty of the common people. And those common people behaved even more brutally than the kings whom they had accused of brutality.

Have you ever wondered about how many myths drive your life? 

Jihad

PS. These are some random thoughts that ran through my mind as I happened to read about Jim Jones this evening in a book titled Dignity of Life by Avichal.