TOWARDS A MYTHOS OF METAMORPHOSIS!

Why I believe we should replace the Myth of Revolution with a Myth of Metamorphosis

“We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths.”

It is with these eleven words that David Graeber and David Wengrow conclude The Dawn of Everything, their ambitious attempt to rewrite world history.

After hundreds of pages exploring different ideas about why and how the world finds itself in its current state, the authors end not with a bang, but a whimper.

It’s a pretty anti-climactic ending, but they’re not wrong. As they explain:

In developing the scientific means to know our own past, we have exposed the mythical substructure of our ‘social science’ – what once appeared unassailable axioms, the stable points around which our self-knowledge is organized, are scattering like mice.

They then ask a very good question, which isn’t asked enough:

What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become?

They then call on their readers to rediscover the meaning of freedom, specifically the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality. They then call for the creation of a new Mythos:

Myth in itself is not the problem here. It shouldn’t be mistaken for bad or infantile science. Just as all societies have their science, all societies have their myths. Myth is the way in which human societies give structure and meaning to experience. But the larger mythic structures of history we’ve been deploying for the last several centuries simply don’t work any more; they are impossible to reconcile with the evidence now before our eyes, and the structures and meanings they encourage are tawdry, shop-worn and politically disastrous.

This is exactly right, though it is hardly revelatory.

Anarchists have always known that what is politically possible is a corollary of what people believe in politically possible, which is the reason that we have gone to such lengths to counter the disempowering narrative forever being peddled by statists.

To use one example, Kropotkin wrote Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution in order to counter the eugenicists who used Darwinian ideas to support their belief that Might Makes Might. This led to the founding of sociobiology, the academic discipline which studies human cooperation from an evolutionary perspective.

When Fredy Perlman set out to write out Against His-story, Against Leviathan, he deliberately set out to recast the story of the world because he knew doing so would also recast people’s sense of what is possible, realistic, desirable, and undesirable.

If the authors of The Dawn of Everything had read Perlman’s classic mytho-poetic masterpiece, or if they had been building upon actually-existing anarchist theory, it would not have taken them ten years to realize to figure out that there is a mythic dimension to all human activity, including activism. Whatever one’s political goals are reflect one’s beliefs about what is desirable and what isn’t, and wherever there is belief, there is Myth.

What is Myth?

The word “myth” does not simply refer to false beliefs. There’s more to it than that.

I am aware that the word “myth” has the connotation of "untrue” in the vernacular, but myth has a specific meaning in anthropology that Graeber could not possibly have been ignorant of.

As Ronald Wright put it:

Myth is an arrangement of the past, whether real or imagined, in patterns that reinforce a culture’s deepest values and aspirations… They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time.

Mythology is neither true nor untrue, because it does not adhere to left-brain logic. Generally myths are composed of some combination of fact and fancy, and serve to explain, in a general way, things that would quickly becomes bewilderingly complex if one really took the time to think about them.

Now, the reason that the word “myth” is associated with false beliefs in the popular mind is because Myth functions according to the logic of the right hemisphere of the brain, which is not primarily concerned with factual accuracy.

ARE DREAMS TRUE?

As dreams as to individuals, myths are to cultures. They do not conform to the rules of rationality, but they are massively important because they encode the values of a given society. Dreams can be highly meaningful, but are dreams true?

It depends on what your definition of truth is. Dreams might not be true, but they are often meaningful, and interpreting their meaning can lead to insights. The same is true of literature.

Is Papillon a true story? Who cares? Reading it will make you a happier, healthier person. Arguably, this points to the existence of some kind of Higher Truth, although I wouldn’t argue that point. I don’t believe in arguing over the definitions of words.

I agree with Robert Anton Wilson:

All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

This is what Jordan Peterson means when he says “the Bible is more than true”. He isn’t saying that there really was a monarch called King Solomon who had 700 wives. He is saying that Scriptures contain metaphors and allegories which will lead to genuine insights if properly understood. He is saying that the Bible is true because it can lead one to discern certain truths about the human condition.

One of the annoying things about The Dawn of Everything is that it suffers from a crippling lack of self-awareness about its mythological aspirations, which is part of the reason that I don’t believe that it was really written by David Graeber. It just contains too false assumptions, logical fallacies, disingenuous theory, and factual errors. David Graeber was way too smart to have made so many mistakes.

Let me give you particularly salient example - the fact that the authors pretend not to know what mythology is, or what role it plays in human culture. David Graeber was deeply familiar with anthropological theory and made major contributions to the discipline. Yet we are supposed to believe that he doesn’t know what mythology is, or what purpose it serves. It’s ridiculous.

Take this statement, for instance, which comes from the book’s first chapter:

In some ways, accounts of “human origins” play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigour or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfil somewhat similar functions.

Um, yeah. No shit! That’s because there’s no fundamental difference between scientific theories and myths.

Do Graeber and Wengrow know what mythology is? How could they not?

THE WORDS “THEORY” AND “MYTH” ARE NEARLY SYNONYMOUS

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “theory” as:

1. a formal set of ideas that is intended to explain why something happens or exists

2. the principles on which a particular subject is based

3. an opinion or idea that somebody believes is true but that is not proved

It defines “myth” as:

1. a story from ancient times, especially one that was told to explain natural events or to describe the early history of a people; this type of story

2. something that many people believe but that does not exist or is false

So, according to the Oxford dictionary, the only difference between myths and theories is the former are likelier to date “from ancient times”. Logically, that means that myths are theories which have stood the test of time.

The quasi-indistinguishability of myth and theory is exacerbated by the idiom “in theory”, which according to the OED is “used to say that a particular statement is supposed to be true but may in fact be wrong”.

See where I’m coming from? You could say the exact same thing of myth. Both are words for beliefs, especially beliefs shared amongst members of a given culture.

The hubris of Western Civilization, however, is to assume that “the West is the Best” and then work backwards. Because the science is modern, the “generally accepted theories” of science are superior to the “superstitious beliefs” of primitive societies.

Because of Progress, Science is true. Because of Science, Progress is good. Because Progress is good, Science advances. Because Science will always advance, Progress will continue forever. This is how Mythos works. Its logic is always circular. It begins and ends in the same place.

MYTHS ARE TO THEORIES AS STORIES ARE TO MOVIES

This is because the purpose of myth and scientific theories is to explain the world. To say that myth and theory fulfil similar functions is like saying that books and films fulfil similar functions. At its best, science aims to replace existing myths with better ones. That begs the question - better for whom?

There is a hidden assumption here: That it is possible to create an objective, true account of humanity’s history. That’s a very big, very dubious assumption. If you ask me, it’s absurdly wrong. Theory is always aspirational; we are always attempting to understand the world, which is always changing. Beliefs are provisional interpretations of aspects of reality. They are never “correct” in any absolute sense.

Furthermore, the assumption that it is possible to write an objective, accurate, true history of humanity contains a host of other hidden assumptions.

To believe such a thing, one must also believe that:

1. There exist knowable reasons for all natural phenomena and the material conditions that human beings must adapt themselves to.

2. Those reasons are discoverable by human beings.

3. Once discovered, it is possible for the individuals who discovered them to transmit them through language in a way that will not be subject to distortion over time.

4. It is possible to simplify those insights to the point where they will be generally understood.

5. The means exist to transmit such insights to a given population so that they become common knowledge.

In The Dawn of Everything, the authors promote the idea that there is a fundamental difference between the belief systems of traditional cultures and the secular materialist paradigm of the modern world. This is a fatal flaw.

They don’t seem to be aware that the entire point of writing an anarchist history of the world is to reframe the World Story that already exists in the collective unconscious, in order to encode certain values about how people should understand their place in the world and how to relate to others.

Traditional cultures explain the world with stories that tend to include both supernatural forces and larger-than-life characters such as Gods, heroes, and monsters.

Materialist science explains the world with stories that emphasize natural forces (such as evolution), and deemphasize magic and the mutability of reality. This a problem because the reality that any individual is ultimately a projection of their beliefs. To say that there is such a thing as a “Correct Reality” is the type of thinking that leads to inquisitions, pseudo-scientific quackery (like virology and gender theory) and the Crusades.

It is true that the belief systems of indigenous people are based on myth, but so are our own beliefs. The difference between superstition and dogma is a subjective value judgement. Civilized people tend to always consider their own beliefs superior to those of indigenous people because they consider themselves superior. Colonization justifies itself through post-hoc rationalization.

HISTORY IS THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A MADMAN

The fundamental fallacy of The Dawn of Everything is that it is possible for a culture to create a non-mythological, ideologically-neutral history.

This is wrong, and I have a hard time believing that David Graeber didn’t know this. As the American anarchist historian Howard Zinn famously said:

Now, to be fair to Graeber and Wengrow, they are aware of the risks inherent to myth-making, which comes down to the Law of Unintended Consequences. They note:

If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3m years, there actually was a time when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how.

It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns.

As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.

Now, this is exactly right… but what’s wrong with that?

If you ask me, a certain “working out of our collective fantasies” sounds like it might be a good thing. Indeed, it might even be indispensable to the project of creating a better world. The purpose of play is to make trying new things fun. Experimentation is essential to learning, meaning that play is often a way of learning. If one considers how essential fleeing, searching, and hiding can be to survival, it’s no wonder children of every culture in the world (probably!) play tag and hide-and-go-seek.

As I am constantly repeating, the project of creating a revolutionary movement is a matter of creating a counterculture which matures into a “permanent culture”.

Because there’s no such thing as a culture without mythology, the process of creating a new culture involves creating a new Mythos. Because myth is a matter of what people believe, it follows that if we want to create a new Mythos we must be willing to change our own beliefs. Because beliefs are manifestations of consciousness, that means that consciousness change is an essential part of revolutionary strategy.

Once we come up with our own answers to the questions that mythology must answer, the task then becomes one of transmitting them to the next generation.

As Immortal Technique once said: “The Mind of a Child is where the Revolution Begins.”

Therefore, revolutionaries should aim to:

1. Come to agreement about a certain basis of unity

2. Mythologize this basis of unity

3. Create Songs and Stories which encode the values of this Myth

4. Share these songs and stories with others whilst allowing them to share their culture with you if they wish (Unidirectional proselytizing is not the way! You gotta meet people where they’re at.)

5. Encourage Syncretism and Cultural Hybridity by seeking currents within different cultures which are resonant with our goals

NOT REVOLUTION, BUT METAMORPHOSIS!

It is only in the last chapter of The Dawn of Everything that the authors reveal the meaning of the title, which turns out to be a reference to the work of Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of shamanism.

Perhaps the book’s greatest contribution to political theory will be to decouple anarchist ideas about revolution from Marxist ones.

In the popular imagination, anarchist ideas about “the Revolution” differ from those of Marxists primarily when it comes to ideas about should happen “after the Revolution”. In reality, what should happen “after the Revolution” is almost never what actually does happen.

What predictably does occur when there is a coup in a statist society is that opportunists see their chance to seize power for themselves.

The general tendency is that Marxists betray anarchists as soon as they no longer have a common enemy. Simply put, Marxist fantasies about “the Revolution” have not tended to end well for anarchists. Plus, the truth is that anarchists aren’t great at war because successful armies require commanders. You can’t run an army by consensus. Decoupling anarchism from Marxism entails differentiating between our visions for societal transformation, which are mutually exclusive.

Perhaps we need to reimagine our whole concept of the process by which we hope to achieve our goals. If revolutionary activism is all about the transformation of power relations in a given society, perhaps the metaphor of Metamorphosis would serve us better than that of “Revolution”.

I could flesh out this idea by explaining why I think Metamorphosis is a better metaphor than revolution, but I’d rather let it sit with you. I kind of think this argument makes itself. It’s a simple perceptual shift, but it’s profound.

Also, it’s a new way of framing things, and novelty itself has value. Nevermore’s readership increased dramatically after we dubbed our ideology “the New Anarchism” because people love shit that’s new. The subconscious mind accords as much importance to form as to content. Remember that. It is better to present new ideas with new words, because people are more likely to make an effort to understand ideas if they believe they are truly novel. Otherwise, concepts such as “the Revolution” will remain glued to other ideas that exist in their minds, and they are more likely to reject them.

When anarchists talk about revolution, we are not talking about seizing factories and monopolizing credit under the aegis of a central bank. We are talking about a fundamental transformation in our political, economic, and social realities. We are talking about a paradigm shift.

In the final chapter of The Dawn of Everything, the authors write of their intuition that a major political paradigm shift loomed on the horizon.

We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible.

Philosophers sometimes like to speak of ‘the Event’ – a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic masterpiece – that is, a breakthrough which reveals aspects of reality that had previously been unimaginable but, once seen, can never be unseen. If so, kairos is the kind of time in which Events are prone to happen.

In other words, revolutions happen when people want them to happen, and people want them to happen when the political Reality of a given society has become intolerable. If the concept of “conscious choice” has any utility, it is this - people can and do choose to transform their realities.

The important thing for us to realize is that by transforming Reality, we will also be transforming ourselves. Once the Metamorphosis is complete, we will be living in a new world. We will be new people with new beliefs, because our beliefs changes as our reality changes, because belief is about adaptation to the material and social reality we inhabit.

If you ask me, Graeber has dealt a death blow to Marxism by revealing it to be nothing more than a secular recasting of Christian eschatology. Both Marxism and Christianity are based on the idea that time is linear and history has a destination. Whether we are talking about the New Jerusalem or the socialist utopia that will remain after the Dictatorship of the Proletariat has withered away, we are presented with two formulations of one Myth - that all of human history is leading inexorably towards some kind of Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. In both versions, we are told that there will be a point in the future when history will end.

Francis Fukuyama, the quintessential secular liberal statist, proposes that history already HAS ended, which I guess means that, we’re already living in the New Jerusalem. Apparently dissidents are just a bunch of ingrates too busy whining to notice that we’re in paradise.

What if that’s not true? What if history is neither linear nor unidirectional? What if civilizations inevitably rise and fall? What if science cannot make humans more rational? What if there’s no way for humans to know “the Truth” in any kind of ultimate sense? What if the Truth is a social construct? What if our assumptions about the nature of reality are false? What if magic is real? What if humans beings have simply been making everything up since the beginning of time? What if there is no way to escape the fact that all human cultures are based on social fictions? What if the tendency to separate human activity into different spheres, such as economics, politics, and culture, is itself part of the problem? Wouldn’t that change everything? Wouldn’t that require revolutionaries to come up with new answers to the question of how best to transform our reality? How might we integrate and synthesize different types of knowledge? How might we create a culture in which the love of wisdom is generalized throughout the population?

These are big questions. It’s an exciting time to be alive.

I suspect that the whole idea of an End to History stems from the fact that we are mortal beings, which means history will end for each and every one of us when we die.

As for humanity, different rules apply. As Peter Lamborn Wilson revealed in The Shamanic Trace, civilization is not an inevitable, unidirectional process. Previously civilized peoples can and often do revert to subsistence strategies favoured by indigenous people. When they do so, their belief systems will inevitably change, because beliefs are ways for individuals to adapt to their circumstances. Likewise, their Mythos will change.

As Graeber and Wengrow explain:

When Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian historian of religion, proposed that ‘traditional’ societies lived in ‘cyclical time’, innocent of history, he was simply drawing the obvious conclusion. As a matter of fact, he went even further.

In traditional societies, according to Eliade, everything important has already happened. All the great founding gestures go back to mythic times, the illo tempore the dawn of everything, when animals could talk or turn into humans, sky and “earth were not yet separated, and it was possible to create genuinely new things (marriage, or cooking, or war).

People living in this mental world, he felt, saw their own actions as simply repeating the creative gestures of gods and ancestors in less powerful ways, or as invoking primordial powers through ritual.

According to Eliade, historical events thus tended to merge into archetypes. If anyone in what he considered a traditional society does do something remarkable – establishes or destroys a city, creates a unique piece of music – the deed will eventually end up being attributed to some mythic figure anyway.

The alternative notion, that history is actually going somewhere (the Last Days, Judgment, Redemption), is what Eliade referred to as ‘linear time’, in which historical events take on significance in relation to the future, not just the past.

And this ‘linear’ sense of time, Eliade insisted, was a relatively recent innovation in human thought, one with catastrophic social and psychological consequences. In his view, embracing the notion that events unfold in cumulative sequences, as opposed to recapitulating some deeper pattern, rendered us less able to weather the vicissitudes of war, injustice and misfortune, plunging us instead into an age of unprecedented anxiety and, ultimately, nihilism.

Amen to that. Rest in peace, David Graeber. Your message has been received.

Darren Allen might not get it, but I do. And I’ll do everything I can to transmit that message, so help me God.

If we do succeed in starting a new religion, by the way, I’m going to nominate you for sainthood. Thank you for the contributions you have made to human knowledge, and for laying the groundwork for the Metamorphosis which will usher in a New Age of Eternal Prosperity in a Post-industrial Anarchist Utopia!

Just kidding. So long as humans are human, there will never be a Utopia. That doesn’t mean we can’t create something better than the rinky-dink janky-ass Reality that we’ve got now.

At the end of the day, the message I want to promote is simple: If we want to create a better world, we must dream it into being, and if we dare to dream boldly, it will take more than one generation for to get to where we want to go.

The mind of a child is where the Metamorphosis begins.

for the Wild,

Crow Qu’appelle