Never have so many people been less poor. So why are many people so miserable? Why are the young especially troubled?
I think that today, we don’t have a unifying story that gives us both a shared hope for the future and a reassurance from the past. The Young need such a story more than any other group for they have the most years of the future ahead of them.
All humans need such a unifying story to become emotionally settled. No matter how awful the day to day circumstances of life, the right kind of collective story can lift your spirit and enable you to cope.
There is an archetype for such a story.
It is the Exodus story in the Bible. The right kind of story always begins with a heroic struggle against the powerful. Moses challenges Pharaoh. To break free, demands an all out commitment, even war. Once freed, however the most painful struggle begins which is the internal struggle against doubt. Many fear the new and long to return to the old, even if that was to be a slave. This was the moment when the children of Israel built an idol. In the Exodus story, God punishes the doubters by keeping them in the desert for a generation. But finally the next generation who have never been slaves take over and they enter the land of milk and honey, sweeping all resistance away.
Such a story still evokes social coherence, collective bravery and belief in the future of the Jewish people.
This archetype is also the founding story of America. It is the founding story of modern France. It is played out in longer form in Britain beginning with Magna Carta, the Civil War and the killing of the King and the rise of Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law on all men no matter what their station.
This story worked in the west until 1918. It could be summed up as:
God or Core Belief in a Higher Power, Monarch or Constitution, Blood, Place, Country. We know it as “God, King and Country.”
Before 1918, this story bound Western peoples together in a shared understanding of how the world worked and their place in it. This story was how people found their identity. This is how they overcame adversity. This is how they found meaning.
This is what ended this collective big story.
By 1918, it was clear that God has forsaken the people and that they had all been betrayed by the leaders of their country. Many people began to see that they had been used by the powerful, and that the levers that the powerful had used to co-opt them into giving everything, was this story itself.
So God, King and Country began to lose its grip on the imagination of people.
A vacuum in story grew as confidence in the old story was lost.
A vacuum that has always to be filled. We cannot live without a story for that is how human tribes and belonging are shaped.
In Germany and in the former Russia, this vacuum was filled in part in the 1930’s by two new secular religions and collective stories: namely National Socialism and Communism. Both offered solace to the betrayed and the abandoned. Both offered a collective struggle and a hope for the future.
These were compelling stories that set off a titanic struggle for dominance that was only settled finally in 1989.
They were defeated by a new story that began in 1945 in America. Victory in 1945 was seen as a triumph of Democracy combined with Free Market Capitalism and a supportive big-government bureaucracy.
For 50 years, this story worked. It raised the standards of living and provided more freedom than any other story before it.
But just as this story triumphed in 1989, at the time of the fall of the wall in Berlin, the rot set in.
An ever more corrupt elite took over the levers of power and bypassed the flow of wealth from the people to themselves. At first this was hard to see, But now we can see that the system is being gamed.
Just as God, King and Country was used by the elites in the Great War to manipulate the people, so Democracy, Capitalism and a Government that looked after you was exploited in our own time.
The problem for the elites is that by 2000, most of us saw that we were being used. That “Democracy” was a fake. That Capitalism was funnelling wealth to a tiny elite and that Big Government was the elite’s agent.
It was time for a new story. The Elites are delivering this to us today.
Like the stories of the 1930’s, these are dangerous stories.
They make our education system into Madrassas.
They make our health care system into Witchcraft.
They make our media into Pravda.
They make our police in the Stasi.
This has all happened in a generation.
No wonder the young are depressed.
They are told that the world is literally coming to an end in their lifetime.
They are told that this is all their parents’ fault.
They are told that their ancestors were all evil.
They have been robbed of their education to save Granny.
They have been made indentured slaves by the costs of an education that they are told they must have.
They have been robbed of their natural identity as men or women.
Motherhood and raising a family is now for losers.
Family is a toxic community.
Men are beasts.
Women are amazons except they have to be protected as well.
The past is entirely filled by criminals.
There is no future.
There is only a personal identity.
The only valid identity is as a victim.
The only friend you have is the government.
Is there hope?
Yes there is.
We in the west have been here before.
It is the story behind the Reformation that began in 1500.
See Part 2 - coming up soon.
The Exodus story is indeed a powerful story and there are some nuances that are even better lessons for our times (and warnings not to take these stories literally). First, The story is about a People and not a Leader. The only humans who actually left Egypt and made it over the Jordan were Moses' brother Aaron and their parents. Everyone else perished in the desert and those who entered the Promised Land were born in the wilderness, and knew only that as their life. You cannot create a new world by relying on what we took for granted in the old. Our captivity (to predatory capitalism and dehumanising economic and political systems) needs to be erased from memory, cleaned of the legacy of stories about what is possible and not possible. New worlds need to be allowed to open and take root in the conscious of individuals and peoples. Moses never made the journey over the Jordan. He was punished for the sin of allowing his people to worship to Golden Calf, and his punishment, such as it was, required him to live atop a mountain with God. Mosese paide for the sins of a people who were trying different ways of making meaning of their lives. I have worked with many founders who actually take comfort in this price - if allowing people to experiment and leading them through uncertainty means they can't make the journey home but rather need to spend the rest of their days with God, that is a fair trade.
The other nuance to this story is the genocide that is documented in the rest of the story, as the Israelites entered Canaan and destroyed everyone who lived there. This genocide, historically, never happened, but it certainly did embolden the Judeo-Christian adventures in colonization, and it's a part of the story those of us who practice in the tradition must confront. As a contemplative, I take a much more interior view of this story, and that is, if one is to enter the "Promised Land" of spiritual freedom, one must "kill" all the enemies one finds already occupying that land. Those enemies are greed, ego, anger, judgement, fear, worry...all those things that get in the way of me being a loving person, and receiving the full grace of God.
So yes to new stories. And yes to noticoing the helpful threads that underlie new stories that we can't relate to because we come from an older world. And maybe yes to seeing the old ones with eyes that refresh them and that are lifted beyond the temporary irritations of momentary culture wars. Men are not beasts, but we are questioning the toxic attributes of masculinity that result in sexual abuse, and that makes us better men. Our ancestors were not all evil, but we are living in a world in which hundreds of years of genocide and slavery have costs that are coming due, costs that those of us who have benefitted from the theft of human beings and their lands need to reckon with, and that makes us more just citizens. And the past is not entirely filled by criminals, and there is joy and wonder in bringing to light the stories of people who did amazing things that set the groundwork for a world of kindness, mutual support and shared prosperity, even as they worked against those that were trying to suppress them.
We can be better without being polemical. We can evolve and grow into new stories that tap at and transmit the roots of what thriving human community can be all about. We will always get it wrong, and we will always react to ideas that sting, and retreat into the wounded child. All of us do that. And what we can then do is realize that it's all a huge part of the tumbling forward that might take us into our Promised Land.