On the Necessity of Fables and Myths

During my years working in public education, I was constantly faced with a segment of education professionals who insisted on promoting a sterile, pure “fact-based” education environment. It was not popular, yet for its harsh ideology, it’s presence remains strong. It remains simply because most of those who don’t share it don’t have a good response when defending cultural traditions. That, in turn, is because most of what they defend is indefensible.

It won’t matter what flavor it comes in, this intellectually sterile movement is the underlying assumption behind much evil we all recognize: fascism, communism, religious fundamentalism, and any other form of harsh control atmosphere which seeks to take away freedom.

The point here is we don’t understand very well the necessity of myth and fable in human development. Because of this, we have a very bad intellectual landscape in the West where we have allowed the most pernicious influences to construct our mythology, making it patently harmful. This merely feeds the fire, giving the controllers an excuse for trying to destroy the flavor of culture.

For example, here in the US, our fables regarding Santa Clause are entirely the result of materialistic marketing. The current imagery does draw on more noble mythology from European history, but it has become entirely the domain of junk sales pitching. It’s so bad, even the Christmas Story of Jesus is perverted as a sales pitch. Every holiday in the US is just another opportunity to make people feel obliged to spend money on junk which clogs the landfill the week after.

Fables and myths are the stepping stones to understanding reality. Surely we all recognize children learn by first grasping the widest generalities, and gradually refining until they reach a modicum of awareness of the finer points about the world around them. In the process, we make broad generalizations which are never quite accurate, but which form the foundation for gaining accuracy. It’s not that kids can’t handle truth; they’ll ask for it all too soon. It’s that we all need an imaginative flavoring to stimulate the interest and curiosity of the human mind.

The brain is designed to respond more strongly to narrative than any other identifiable form of input. Story-telling is the single greatest form of education over all other methods and frameworks put together. We know this instinctively, even when we have no idea how to make it work.

In the broader sense, then, mythology becomes “truth” because it is opens the pathway to reality. The ultimate truth of things cannot at all be put into clinical terms. It defies human language because it cannot be received in the intellect; it must be handled on another level. We use symbols and parables for the mind to become comfortable with what that higher faculty will suggest is necessary in our choices on this plane of existence. Parables are not lies, though in the sterile imagination of materialists, it would seem they are. Parables are necessary wrappers for truth.

The burden upon us is to build mythology and fables which properly open the door to truth. To this day I regret surrendering to the religious fundamentalists in robbing my children of some of the better fables of childhood. On the other hand, by no means do I regret trying to steer them away from what was merely popular, provided by Hollywood and Wall Street, much less the filthy trash from our lying government.