From today's article in PJ Media, on "The Missing Hero's Journey: Why Our Culture Can’t Grow Up" by Jamie K. Wilson:
"Jonathan Gottschall, in The Storytelling Animal, argues that humans are wired for story. Narrative isn’t a cultural ornament; it’s how the brain organizes reality. We turn chaos into sequence, conflict into purpose. Our minds insist on meaning and structure in a chaotic world. We need the Hero’s Journey because it mirrors the way consciousness matures.
This is why the postmodern dismissal of truth as illusion is so destructive. The mind cannot live without a through-line. When we deny objective meaning, the need doesn’t disappear; it mutates. Instead of seeking truth, people construct identities. They perform coherence. Story becomes branding, not belief.
Gottschall’s insight explains why even in a cynical age, the same mythic pattern keeps resurfacing in pop culture. We hunger for it. The Hero’s Journey is how the psyche metabolizes experience: departure, ordeal, and return. Strip away the ordeal, and the story — and the self — collapse into fragments.
Our young are not just starved for struggle; they are starved for truth. Illusion can flatter the ego, but it cannot forge the soul. A culture that replaces pilgrimage with performance leaves its children with only one possible quest: to be seen, not to become.
When truth is replaced by illusion, the journey becomes theater. The old pilgrimage, a test of endurance and faith, has become a performance for an audience. The self is no longer tempered; it is curated....
We have spent a generation trying to skip the middle, though the impulse began half a century ago when comfort and theory first conspired to make struggle seem unnecessary. It hasn’t worked. The result is visible everywhere: anxiety, fragility, disillusionment, and a desperate search for authenticity."
2 comments:
Our young are not just starved for struggle; they are starved for truth.
Perhaps why all the churches of the New Age branches of established religion are closing and the ones offering That Old Time Religion are doing well.
I’m 75 years old. My generation lived through the civil rights struggle and the anti war movement. We prided ourselves as being singularly virtuous in this but , let’s be honest, except for a few psychotics, who doesn’t want justice for all and, except for a few psychotics, who isn’t against war? The generations that followed, although happily condemning Boomers, emulate us and think we were somehow gifted with noble causes. We had righteous fights, great music, fast cars, great heroic persons like JFK, RFK, MLK and the music icons.
I won’t say it was all a sham but I will say that there was a strong admixture of fable and fantasy around the era and Im afraid that is what still colors our culture today. Bernie Sanders is a throw-back to a fifty-year old fight and little minds like AOC and Mamdani are trying to fit on the mantle that was threadbare when it was new. The culture does indeed need to grow up.
Post a Comment