Man in Need of Myth
The most foundational problem we face and three potential solutions
I. Medieval
Medieval humans would have been better psychologically prepared for the technologically advanced era ahead of us.
This provocative claim was made by a religious scholar who is friends with Marc Andreessen, which he shared in his November 2024 appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast.
The rationale is that medieval humans inherently accepted that higher beings existed. Granting them a far greater ability to handle the existence of superintelligence that we are creating within our technologies (AI). The presence of higher beings, namely God, is a viewpoint that is criticized and mostly ignored these days.
When and how did we lose this collective understanding?
Nietzsche was the first post-enlightenment intellectual to signal this change to the masses, known as the Death of God.
The basis of this proclamation came from the personality born from the Enlightenment, one that gave birth to a scientific criticism of all things, rendering traditional belief1 of God, spirits, divine creation, and the Christian historical view as incorrect because it couldn't be reconciled with the scientific view.
In my estimation, this attitude toward the material validity and historical account of the bible discarded something of immense value by casting the text and its teachings as wholesale incorrect.
Nietzsche regards this death as a terrible loss for the masses2. Terrible because it meant that the underlying structure that guided an individual's actions in the world would be wiped out since their central guiding principle would be lost.
Downstream, this would cause mass confusion and anxiety, sending people to either slip into a meaningless nihilism or adopt a state doctrine mimicking their religion.
The loss of this guiding force is still present today.
We struggle to get our hands around how to behave in the face of social media algorithms. What does this say about our ability to emotionally and morally prepare for artificial superintelligence?
How are we to navigate alongside digital superintelligence?
What about when they're embedded into robots, and we walk alongside them physically?
Frankly, I don't think we're prepared for a future where we have ready access to an extremely deadly weapon arsenal that increases the threat of a human-made extinction-level event. Or—unassuming yet potentially far more dangerous—a sophisticated digital weapon arsenal that can cause mass psychosis or hedonism to the effect that we are practically dead.
We are not psychologically ready.
But we need to get there, and I'm hopeful we can.
So, what about medieval humans would have made them better off dealing with this conundrum?
I think the primary reason is that they shared an undeniable collective belief in a story with a focus on aiming toward the good. It provided them with a toolset to keep climbing in that direction. For medieval man, this was primarily the Christian religion.
The important notion is that there was a deeply believed shared story—why is believing in a story important?
Story is foundational to our ability to live in the world. Psychology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience all converged on this idea: we MUST view the world through something approximating a story. We are action-predicated creatures. Our actions are oriented toward a goal (conscious or not). Dopamine (positive emotion) mediates the process of achieving sub-goals toward the goal, and negative emotions arise when an obstacle gets in your way. This is a narrative structure in that you're a character, and objects in the world act as tools and obstacles, as do other characters in the story3.
Our European medieval ancestors implicitly embedded a hierarchy of aims in their behavior. Those aims were structured in accordance with the will of God as defined in the religious story.
All that on the table, we must ask: what can we do to morally and emotionally prepare for this future? And aside from a technologically sophisticated future, how can we navigate out of this Nietzschean death of God into a rebirth of the same spirit?
I see three overarching solutions playing out in our modern era, which I will review through this piece:
Explicit value construction divorced from religion
Return to traditional religions
Adoption of new emergent myths
I am not here to pick a solution and say, "this is our way forward."
That seems like a foolish game to play. As Historian Will Durant brilliantly pointed out in an interview,
"No individual mind, however brilliant, can ever safely sit in judgment on the traditions of mankind, because the traditions are the result of trial-and-error thinking of hundreds of generations. So that every book of philosophy is an audacious wild enterprise, uncalculated risk. It's like a drop of water suddenly standing up on the crest of a wave, and announcing it is going to analyze the sea."
The problem painted is one that we have faced for hundreds of years and are still struggling through.
Today, I will act as a drop of water, not in an attempt to analyze the sea, but to make sense of the patterns forming in the water as the storm clouds drift above. Throughout this piece, I lean on respected voices, ideas, and some historical insight. As is the nature of The Frontier Letter, I also take exploratory leaps with personal insight.
I do not give the final answer, but try to bring us one step closer.
To start, I will build upon the suggested solutions in our modern era by providing more depth into each path forward.
II. Modern
There are three overarching solutions.
The first solution is explicitly constructing our own value structures.
The second is a re-adoption of the traditional religious myths. While they may not align with our scientific paradigm (as we currently understand it), we would choose to adopt them, given the clear benefits of collectively believing in its framework.
The third solution is to adopt the modern myths that are developing and are compatible with our current scientific understanding of the world. This would be analogous to living through the era when Jesus lived as he developed Christianity. While it is difficult to say what new myths we may be living through, there are certainly some hints to be found in both the objective world and the inner world, namely the collective unconscious. The key myths I see being born are the UFO/UAP phenomena, simulation theory, and the artificially intelligent gods, which may be subcomponents of an overarching technological religion. This is not to say that these things don't objectively exist; rather, our subjective experiences form collective stories rooted in the existence of these phenomena. The supporting canon of these religious myths has a basis in quantum physics, which seems to have layers of supporting philosophical texts in things like techno-optimism.
Let's walk through each solution and see where they take us.
Option 1 doesn't seem a sustainable solution.
Carl Jung noted that much of what guides our actions lies beneath conscious awareness. Trying to construct rational value structures is nearly impossible because we don't even understand the full extent of all the values we act out daily and why we act that way. Our unconscious minds are so expansive that we do things and have no idea why we do them all the time!
Anyone who reflects on their behaviors knows they do things they don't like about themselves all the time! So, who's to say we can just define how to act and then do it? It seems largely difficult to implement, if not impossible.
For example, I have an obsessive, over-indulgent nature to me, which, up until recent years, I struggled to reign in. I would set up reminders on my phone to remind myself not to impulsively overeat, and, at best, I managed to avoid it on occasion. No matter how much I told myself, "You need to stop, this is harmful," I struggled to make progress.
It wasn't until I uncovered a suppression of authentic expression that the addictive nature released itself, given that the over-indulgence was an impulse to silence authentic thoughts. This anecdote highlights a failure to modify behavior merely by making a value explicit.
Beyond telling yourself how to act, there's an issue of integrating undiscovered behavioral patterns into your value structure.
Humans grow into new situations all the time, collectively and individually. Creative exploration brings new moral and behavioral discoveries. We codify the observation into dramatic representation. Downstream, the discovery is made explicit with words. Action goes through a codification process in a story before becoming explicitly articulated discovery. This is why I conceptualize story as a technology.
So, before we explicitly say, “X behavior is what to do when faced with Y scenario,” we act and then abstract that action in story.
Meaning: It doesn't seem we can truly have a 100% conscious grip on our actions and all potential future modes of behavior.
Option 1 fails both at trying to make yourself do something already known and when trying to keep up with future moral and behavioral discoveries.
Option 2 is probably a better solution. If conscious value construction is a near-impossible task, perhaps the answer lies not in reinvention but revival.
Traditional religious structures have moved our current civilization miraculously far. Most of the stories communicate universal rules to live by that lead to a meaningful and good life. These stories seem to properly orient true believers in the world.
This option is not without its drawbacks.
It faces the problem of integrating new ideas. This is a problem because we frequently discover new ideas about the world. So, if we find something that we believe warrants a necessary change in the tradition, by design, these religions have a hard time accepting newness. Though, this problem is partly a benefit, given that being anchored to tradition is necessary for exploring new ideas.
So, while option 2 seems a better approach than Option 1, it is still a less-than-optimal solution.
Option 3 is incredibly fascinating and mysterious.
It’s partly so incredibly fascinating because I see part of how I've lived my life as an emergence of an individual myth born from within (around?) me by following intimations of divine signals.
Carl Jung explored in his book, Aion, that we are entering a new era, one that will be more individualized. I think his framework of individuation serves as the path to individual myths for those who choose to follow. I think the individualized myth will be ritual in an emergent overarching story.
These new stories are unraveling in front of us today; a seemingly clear one is the UFO phenomenon.
The UFO/UAP phenomenon as a development of a new religion is best explored by Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka, who wrote American Cosmic and Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligence (I recommend both if this sort of thing interests you).
I was first introduced to the UFO-as-religion concept from her work. It opened my eyes to the religious experiences people have alongside UFO/UAP sightings. An additional interesting point is that scientists who work closely with these phenomena are deeply religious or partake in Cosmism or occult practices.
Option 3 requires a significant amount of thought. Laying the nuanced groundwork is necessary. It’s hard to point to a development occurring in the overarching story of humanity as a whole, especially while you’re in the moment. Caution is warranted. We will be exploring this throughout the year and beyond.
If you're interested in the first solution, Nietzsche is a good place to start, and for a modern outlook, Sam Harris (though his approach is not exactly the same as Nietzsche put forth).
On the second solution, Jordan Peterson is the most prolific figure reintegrating the culture en masse with the teachings of the bible. His biblical lectures are a good place to start. Learning the cultural teachings of the bible and other traditional religious texts is important for all three solutions. If you manage to derive the explicit meaning from the biblical texts, you can use those learnings to orient back to option 2, embed the learnings into option 3, or if you choose 1, you now have an explicitly defined set of beliefs.
Regardless of the path forward, I think there is a consistent pattern missing from the life of modern man, and that's the requirement of our unifying story – Myth.
I briefly stated in the introduction why a story is necessary from a scientific perspective.
I want to build a stronger foundation for these options and more fully explore why a myth is necessary, as I will write in the future about emergent myths or the potential return to old ones.
Before dissecting solutions, we must confront a foundational truth: myth isn't optional. It's the psychological bedrock of human action—and its absence leaves us lost.
So, what about myth is necessary for humans? Why can't we live without it?
III. Myth
At a minimum, the argument for believing in a religious myth is that it's useful.
Those who believe in religion often believe they are part of something greater than themselves. By following the beliefs, they contribute to the collective good of the religious community.
Religions serve as a means of constructing your hierarchy of values. Downstream, it creates a shared field of perception with those who share the same structure.
For example, let's say we both follow a religion that places the love and care of the family as the highest on the hierarchy of values. I invite you out to dinner tomorrow night, but you turn me down because you want to spend time with your family. I would not make a big deal about this, in fact, I'd agree with your decision based on our shared value structure.
However, If I structured my values where I placed myself at the pinnacle of the hierarchy (narcissistic and Luciferian), I would expect that all who interact with me place me at the pinnacle, and when they don't act in accordance with it, I'd lash out. Not going to dinner with me? How could you do such a thing? I must be more important than anything you have going on!
This example highlights how religion helps orient the psyche and create stability in our perceptions and, therefore, our actions.
I was raised Catholic and was highly skeptical of it for a long time, but over the past 5 years, I have been deeply curious about its teachings, which have pointed me to a deeper investigation of the underlying meaning of the stories and their utility. Through rediscovery and deeper investigation, the teachings of these stories have beautiful insights into life that, when acted out, make for a better life instilled with a purpose of significant meaning.
Religious stories can also be seen as lessons about how real-world consequences have shaped human behaviors over thousands of years—a behavioral evolution narrative.
Religious stories clearly hold a strong purpose in the function of humanity. It seems something that we cannot separate from.
The modern mantra was that it must be false because it doesn't align with science. However, the teachings of religious stories transcend material science.
The learnings through the bible are stories of eternal recurrence, meaning that they teach us ideas that can be applied repeatedly, generation after generation, to help us understand how to improve our lives. In the context of religion as a hierarchical structure of value, it's clear why we need these stories. Without them, we would be in collective realms of confusion, perceiving the same objects and situations completely differently, like the dinner invitation example. We'd construct somewhat opposing goals because our inherent values that align our perceptions are inconsistent and misaligned.
So why do we not all see this, adopt a mythic framework, and move forward?
Well, there are a handful of problems. These religious myths have institutions that have become outdated and corrupt and have exploited the powers granted to them. However, the problematic response to that is to throw the baby out with the bath water and say that's ultimately the fault with the text—though that isn't a naive argument.
We are a confused and anxious collective in a confusing and anxious time. Modern man is in need of myth.
So, what is the next best step that one can take if they're lost and without a story?
Jung identified something of profound importance: life is meant to be lived according to a hero's story, which, when abstracted, follows a pattern now identified as a hero's journey. From a religious perspective, the goal is to essentially listen to God who is driving you to live out this journey.
From a secular perspective, it's to follow your conscience and that feeling within that drives you to do something. This is the Jungian Self. The Socratic Daimonion.
It's a guiding light that points you in the direction of adventure. I think that's, at a minimum, what options 1, 2, and 3 provide us. A framework for a path forward.
Though I think that the religious texts point to something otherworldly, and for those that have interacted with it, it seems to be something deeply mysterious that can't quite be explained, which is only granted by options 2 and 3.
It wasn't that long ago that we discovered an unseen world that drives everything we know about the universe: the world of quantum physics. Similarly, I believe that morality and fiction may exist on a separate, hyper-real plane outside our current understanding of material science.
In the way math is an abstraction, so true, it drives discovery in the material world. I think that fictional stories are an abstraction, so true, that they drive discovery in the moral world.
While not well-measured, profound study in this area awaits. Until then, we must find a way forward.
So, what is the best way forward?
I think it’s to orient yourself with some framework that structures and aligns your values, interests, and motivations in accordance with what you see as the best way to live. Simultaneously, we should keep our eyes open for new developments on all three fronts, particularly on the emergence of new myths.
Where does that take us?
The medieval mind thrived on myth; the modern mind dismisses it as merely a tale. Yet, dismissing myth is a refusal to accept a fundamental aspect of human life.
My personal journey—guided by Jungian individuation—led me back to the stories modernity rejects. Dreams became maps. Religious stories became guidebooks. And the hero's journey ceased to be a metaphor. To walk this path is to realize the foundational importance of myth in the life of a human; they shape how we ask questions, navigate the unknown, and find meaning in a world where it has faced a drought.
What path should we walk? This question still remains.
But there is one certainty:
Without myth, we are lost, wandering alone in the darkness.
With it, the path is lit and the direction regained.
Until next time,
Take care of yourself everyone
Dom
A note on ‘belief’: when I use the word believe or belief, I am not concerned about what people say they believe in. I’m concerned with action. If someone says they are “religious”, yet all they do is go to a church on Sunday and their weekdays are filled with infidelity, resentment, and infantile sexual compulsion, then I would say they’re anti-religious. Acting out the doctrine, story, morals, values, and teachings of a belief system is what “believing” is to me and how it’s used in this piece and through all my pieces.
God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
“What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”
Thus the madman’s cry rang out into the dawn, leaving behind in its wake a haunting void—a silence that would trouble the hearts of all who had once taken the divine for granted.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Section 125, “The Madman”)
The supporting science for the statements in this paragraph:
How Storytelling Affects the Brain
Neuroscience confirms that stories shape how we perceive reality, engaging brain regions tied to empathy and problem-solving. AI systems like ChatGPT mimic human storytelling, framing goals and obstacles like characters in a plot.
Robots use story-like scripts to interpret their environments, mirroring how humans navigate challenges.
Dopamine drives progress toward goals, whether finding food in a maze or completing a daily task. Obstacles trigger cortisol (stress hormone) and anxiety, akin to a protagonist facing a plot twist.
MAGNet Model of Dopamine Dynamics
AI agents use dopamine-like signals to prioritize actions, mirroring human motivation.