by Ray Burke

Created on: October 10, 2008

The weaponisation of myth:

When memory dies a people die.'

But what if we make up false memories?'

That's worse, that's murder.' 1

What are myths, but the false memories of mankind? But do myths desensitise us against reality or do they keep alive a half-remembered reality? How have the myths of the past affected us, how are they being generated today, and how will they influence our descendants? We can see this in four areas: Counterknowledge, finance, religion and climate change, before seeing how future myths could destroy us.

Counterknowledge:

I was reading a book called Counterknowledge' by Damian Thompson in which he argued against the spread of pseudoscience and pseudo-history being presented as fact2. Just recently, the myth that the Large Hadron Collider would create world-engulfing black holes caused a girl in India to commit suicide3. The 2012 myth is also a case in point mixing in the Mayan's end of their Great Cycle in that year with the predicted lining up of our solar system's planets; a coincidence that consumes a great deal of people's time in imagining the end of the world in some gravimetric cataclysm. But so it was with the previous Millennium Bug scare and tales of rampant nanotechnology grey goo. The Moon Landing, Princess Di, and 9/11 conspiracies and myths, though debunked by insiders and common sense, have continued to grow and become part of the fabric of history.

Such myths, if left unchecked, could undermine and destabilise whole communities and industries. Never happen? Then just look at the current financial crisis and the loss in belief in the myth of money.

The myth of money:

The value of money is based upon the mutual trust and belief that a piece of paper or metal has an intrinsic worth, so everyone believes that $1 equals whatever the powers-that-be says it does. The current global financial crisis reflects this with perceived values of companies, stocks and currencies plummeting, because the trust or faith in the monetary system collapsed. Myth can perpetuate belief; myth can destroy value. The myth of money construct was broken, because irregularities, bad practices, and management policies caused the breakdown in the myth that money was a constant valued and flowing commodity. Money can't just disappear from the system; its liquidity should ensure that it stays somewhere in the system, but the value of money can depreciate through sheer loss of confidence. The myth is so strong that when you hear the experts' speak, their pessimism

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