Mythic Values/Folk Values
I have a theory that every social group has two sets of values: Mythic Values, and Folk Values.
The Mythic Values are the qualities of that group’s exceptional members, its heroes, the semi-mythical figures that everyone in the group more or less aspires to emulate.
For example, the Mythic values of Catholicism are about emulating Christ and the Saints, their self-sacrifice, their faith, their not-of-this-world-ness. The Mythic values of nerd culture center around figures like Nikola Tesla and Steve Jobs, the archetype of a Mad Scientist/Captain of Industry hybrid. Scientific knowledge, inventiveness, not giving a fuck about what the muggles think. The Mythic values of movement Conservatism are embodied in the archetypal cowboy and archetypal soldier. The physical strength, the physical courage, the combat ability, the sheer animal dominance.
Folk Values, on the other hand, are the qualities of that group’s average members.
Nerd culture’s folk values center less on scientific knowledge, more on nerd trivia. The key question is “how devoted a fan are you?” Are you an Old School D&D player? are you a Hardcore Gamer? Have you memorized the entire screenplay of Monty Python and the Holy Grail? Conservative folk values are about liking country music and spaghetti westerns, and complaining about hippies, reciting the republican talking points. I haven’t spent enough time in Catholic communities to know what Catholic folk values are, but i suspect is has something to do with celibacy and Chesterton quotes.
In a sane world, we’d recognize folk values and mythic values as two separate things, and use them to differentiate the members of a community from the leadership of a community. But we don’t.
Instead…. we invest the practice of Folk Values with a… talismanic property. a kind of sympathetic magic, where the symbolic qualities of one thing are supernaturally transferred from one entity to another. Do you think wearing that ten gallon hat means you’d survive a day on the Frontier?
I am not a man of singular integrity. I didn’t realize any of this until circumstance forced me to.
It was kind of like… dreaming. like in some superstitious way I thought I was laying the foundation for something real. All I had to do was hold on to the Folk Values hard enough, and for long enough, and one day the Mythic Values would simply pop into existence within me. When the time came, I would suddenly transform into the man I wanted to be.
But of course the time never did come.
Once you understand on a visceral level that mourning John Wayne doesn’t make you John Wayne, you can’t really be a conservative.
You’re either a Soldier or a Civilian. A Cowboy or a Tenderfoot. A Hero or a Bystander. there’s nothing in between.
Once you understand on a visceral level that Fucking Loving Science has nothing to do with possessing scientific knowledge, you can’t really be a science nerd.
You’re either a Scientist, or a Layman. A Morlock, or an Eloi. there’s nothing in between.
Once you realize that there is no connection whatsoever between the folk values and the mythic values, so many cultural milieus become off-limits to you. But what’s more, you realize that… everyone around you is holding themselves to despicably low standards. Every subculture– or at least the ones with a lot of subcultural pride– starts to look like a bunch of puffed-up chest-beating macho bullshitters who’ve made a secret pact to never call each other out on their bullshit.
(“I’ll pretend that you posting all those Neil DeGrasse Tyson memes means you actually possess scientific knowledge if you do the same for me.” “I’ll pretend that you owning every Rage Against the Machine album means you’ve actually contributed to Anarchist politics if you do the same for me” “I’ll pretend that your encyclopedic knowledge of Clint Eastwood films means you’d survive a real world shootout if you do the same for me.” )
You start to realize that the act of sympathetic magic that makes participation trophies work is the same magic act that holds society together. The magic that says “You can be one of the Good Guys even if you’ve done nothing to deserve it.”
@raggedjackscarlet has a way of writing posts that prey on the mind, and this one is no exception. Which, I guess, is how I came to be dwelling on it now.
The division between Folk Values and Mythic Values is real, but it’s not inherent to human nature, and it’s not found in every context. It is an outgrowth of particular forms of social organization.
If you look at the myths of hunter-gatherer / horticulturalist / primitive-agriculturalist tribes – and my best source for this is Native American myth, but maybe people who know more than I do about other tribal societies can chime in here – you don’t see it at all. The mythic heroes are pretty much just the folk of the tribe, writ very large. Your legendary paragons are, like, a really good hunter, a really good shaman, a really good mediator, etc.
Which is not surprising, given that we’re talking about cultures that have basically no role differentiation apart from “community leader” and “community priest.” What else could their heroes possibly be?
Things get a bit wonkier when you start looking at the stories of class-differentiated late-agriculturalist societies, but in a predictable class-based kind of way. Achilles and Arjuna obviously can’t serve as role models for everyone, but they’re perfectly capable of serving as role models for wealthy warriors, and there is in fact a real class of wealthy warriors for whom such stories are likely to prove illuminating.
…fast-forward to now, when we’re really not very far from having a maximally differentiated society, with literally every single person having a unique job requiring unique skills. How the fuck are mythic values supposed to be accessible, in such a world? How are you supposed to emulate the great Steve Jobs – “be really into phone phreaking during the days when computers are just starting to get big?”
That’s an unnecessarily snarky frame, of course, but it’s not hard to see what the actual problems are.
(1) It’s actually really hard to be a Great Scientist or a Great Tycoon, much harder than it ever was to be a Great Warrior. One-in-a-hundred talent isn’t nearly enough, not in a globally-connected world of billions dominated by the superstar effect. Hell, talent of any magnitude isn’t enough; past a certain point, if you want to be splashily successful, the most important factor by far is luck. (Also, social/marketing skills generally do more work than actual task-oriented skills once you’ve hit a certain tier of competence, even for scientists and writers and so forth.) And “local greatness” is close to meaningless in mythic terms, because the myths are structures such that they have to be played out at global scale.
(2) More importantly – being a Scientist or a Tycoon, at all, is very hard. It requires some heavily-gatekept credentials, and (again) a lot of luck. Your average folk aspirant can’t meaningfully put himself on the mythic-hero track, even at the very bottom rung.
I confess that I think much less about the “mythic values = being a rugged cowboy / Green Beret / etc.” memeplexes, but I imagine you get similar difficulties. The world doesn’t actually need very many rugged cowboys or Green Berets. Chances are that you’re never going to be rewarded for pursuing those paths, you’re never going to be called upon to save the women and children with your muscle and grit, so either you devote your whole life to pointless toughness-grinding or you give up and accept that you’re a tenderfoot.
In any case…you get cargo-culting of the kind described here. You have to connect with your values somehow.
You want to fix this? Find some worthy myths that can work in parallel to our infinitely-complex social infrastructure, without actually being embedded in it and without piggybacking off its demands.
I agree that there’s a certain “sympathetic magic” conflation between the folk values and the mythic values.
But hard disagree about there being a sharp boundary between Mythic and Regular people with nothing in between. And that makes your analysis wrong and actively harmful.
Learning to use the Mythic values is actually possible, and potentially helpful and enriching, even if you never become a Mythic figure. The world doesn’t need many Green Berets, but if the Myth of the Green Beret inspires you to start exercising, you’re better off for it. If hearing “go and sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” inspires you to give a little money to the poor, you’ve actually helped someone even if you fall short of Christ-like perfection.
You just have to make sure you’re chasing the actual Mythic values, not falling into the trap of following the Folk values and hoping that Mythic values will follow.
There’s not even necessarily anything wrong with Folk values either, if you’re enjoying them for their own sake instead of hoping they’ll somehow transmute into Mythic values.
I think @balioc is missing that there’s a big gulf between “be Steve Jobs” and “be a cowboy or a Green Beret” because you could actually be a seasonal ranch hand or join the reserves at least. Like, the blue collar hero archetypes are still fairly accessible. You might even get called up to help with disaster relief and get to literally save some people.
Heck, when I started as a security guard, I spent a lot of time thinking, “What would Captain America do in this situation?” because I was totally thinking of myself as being on the bottom rung of the ladder that Cap is on the top run of.
I kinda wonder though, does the OP even check out, on a folklore/mythology level?
Also, didn’t we have this discussion before, about car fancy and skill with guns? Let me check and mod this post in a moment.
Edit: dur, it was my very own previous commentary on this very post.
Often, the folk values serve directly as feeders to the mythic values. In Catholicism, the goal is for everybody to embody the mythic values to the degree that that is possible.
Nobody cared about St. Jaime Barbal until the Spanish Civil War started and the Anarchists were able to murder anybody they wanted.
Modern rural conservative culture seems to be more than a bit decadent, but the older/better parts of it are probably far more useful for i.e. joining the army or forming a militia than the alternative, and that matters. Also, OP seems to have focused unnecessarily strongly on what I would consider shallow aesthetics rather than meaningful stuff at the everyman level.
…OP seems to have focused unnecessarily strongly on what I would consider shallow aesthetics rather than meaningful stuff at the everyman level.
– that’s not an accident.
Or, less glibly: I think most of the discussion here has done a good job missing the OP’s actual point. Which, in fairness, is a problem exacerbated by @raggedjackscarlet‘s somewhat-too-thoroughgoing willingness to separate out the mythic heroes from the folk.
But it’s only a little too thoroughgoing.
“Folk values” (as defined here) are a thing. Practice, or imitation, of the “mythic values” is also a thing. They are not the same thing.
Look, let’s be maximally charitable here:
Any “tacticool asshole” who sees fit to hit the gym and bulk up and learn to shoot straight, so that he can come closer to living up to his Green Beret idols, is stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to being a real actual Green Beret. Any devoted Christian who works hard at cultivating faith and hope and love, so that he can come closer to the standard of the saints, is stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to being a saint. Any self-consciously-intellectual nerd who bothers to learn some real science is stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to being Newton or Einstein. Any would-be billionaire who actually goes out and creates a business, any business, is stepping onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to being Steve Jobs or Elon Musk.
There are, of course, lots of people who do all those things. But doing those things doesn’t define the cultures that idolize the associated myth-heroes, not even a little. The toughness-worshiping folks are not, mostly, proto-Green-Berets. The members of the Christ fandom are not, mostly, proto-saints. Etc.
In fact, I’ll be even more cynical than that, and say: at this stage in our cultural evolution, practicing the “mythic values” of a culture, at any scale, is unlikely to be particularly well-correlated with belonging to that culture at all.
Instead you have OP’s “folk values.” The people who use Green Berets as a totem recognize each other, and connect to each other, through certain patterns of speech and certain political leanings and certain shared media and so forth – none of which remotely resembles “trying to become a Green-Beret-in-minature.”
It’s even worse than that, in fact. Sometimes the culture actually manages to latch onto an honest-to-God practice of the mythic heroes and use it as a mass-participation ritual for the folk…and this almost immediately results in an otherwise-maybe-worthwhile practice being perverted into useless spectacle, because the folk aren’t in the business of sincerely trying to be like their mythic heroes, they’re just trying to signal cultural affiliation. This has been the complaint about prayer since, well, at least since the Gospels were written, but you sure see plenty of it now. The grotesque thing that political protest has become, for the hip lefty set that considers protesting to be an important personal experience, is similar. I’m not even going to start talking about the self-identified intelligentsia’s endless hunger for “studies” that give its moral beliefs and values the imprimatur of Science.