Challenging National Myths: Our Reality is Vulnerable to Alternate Belief Systems
By Devin Bowen
The slogan of the “99%” has had a profound effect on our national discourse and highlights our increasing inequality, as well as promotion of an alternate belief system that poses challenge to our cultural myths. We often compete for definition of reality through frame debate and there are times that there is no, or very little, overlap in our shared frame of reference. This is where the power of metaphor and its conceptual imaginative rationality can attempt to bridge those gaps. Metaphors can reflect cultural values, powerfully shape much of our thinking, behavior, contribute to the construction of our social reality and can also be utilized to dispel cultural myths.
Chris Hedges beautifully states, “Cultures that endure, carve out a protected space for those who question and challenge national myths.” Artists, writers, poets, activists, journalists, philosophers, dancers, musicians, actors, directors and renegades must be tolerated if a culture is to be pulled back from disaster. Members of this intellectual and artistic class, who are usually not welcome in the stultifying halls of academia, where mediocrity is triumphant, serve as prophets. These rebels are often dismissed, or labeled by the power elites as subversive, because they do not embrace collective self-worship. They challenge us to confront unexamined assumptions, ones that, if not challenged, could lead to destruction. They expose the ruling elites as hollow and corrupt. They articulate the senselessness of a system built on the ideology of endless growth, ceaseless exploitation and constant expansion. They warn us about the poison of careerism and the futility of the search for happiness in the accumulation of wealth. They make us face ourselves, from the bitter reality of slavery and Jim Crow to the genocidal slaughter of Native Americans, to the repression of working-class movements, to the atrocities carried out in imperial wars, and to the assault on the ecosystem. They make us unsure of our virtue. They challenge the easy clichés we use to describe the nation—the land of the free, the greatest country on earth, the beacon of liberty—to expose our darkness, crimes and ignorance. They offer the possibility of a life of meaning and the capacity for transformation.
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