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Notes -
I think the problems you are mentioning are downstream of spirituality/religion. A well-functioning society has widely believed shared stories, practices, values, rituals, and agreement on what is sacred.
There is something like an “American Civil Religion” that includes things like:
I’m using the word myth as John Vervaeke uses it. It not something untrue, but rather a symbolic story that helps people make sense of reality.
Those myths have been losing their credibility/plausibility/power in recent times. This is because of information spreading and events like:
It used to be much easier to believe in the myths and to see bad individual outcomes as outliers that often resulted from individual lack of character.
I think instead of focusing just on material solutions we need new myths that people find widely plausible. There needs to be enough evidence that they are generally true. Without shared myths people become distrustful, conspiratorial, and tribal.
Given how divided the country is already due to the culture war, how do you see the country getting back to agreeing on a single myth?
The advent of the sacred is something that arrives and it is not something that can be top-down engineered.
Western society focuses on propositional knowing (knowledge expressed as facts - like cats are mammals). There are however other forms of knowing that don’t reduce to universal certainty and are hard to communicate:
A shift I see occurring is that people are becoming more open to non-propositional knowing. This makes myths about a pluralistic society more plausible and credible. If you accept non-propositional knowing as an important part of your worldview it makes it easier to understand other people’s perspectives without needing to collapse things into certainty.
The democratic myth can shift back to something more like how the parasympathetic vs sympathetic nervous system operates. There isn’t a one right way for every context. You need both parts to work together to reach the right balance. In democracy people are supposed to work together instead of trying to defeat the opposing part – this allows both sides to self-transcend their own self-deception.
Another myth that I see gaining traction is the idea of unhealed collective/generational trauma. When this is accepted it makes it easier to empathize with others because you can see how their actions are influenced by bad things that happened to them in their past.
Finally, we are in a psychedelic renaissance. Psychedelics and empathogens (and higher states of consciousness) show us the importance of non-propositional knowing and can lead to individual and collective healing. I think society is shifting to the myth of these being important and powerful medicines. These can help reveal shared myths like how ancient Greece had the Eleusinian Mysteries. Empathogens can help reveal myths about collective healing through cooperation and trust.
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