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Properties6
created2026-08-02
updated2026-09-06
typeconcept
confidencelow
sourceshttps://johnvervaeke.com/series/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/, https://meaningcrisis.co/
tagsphilosophy, organizational-behavior

5 min read

Myth Gap and Collective Psychology

The myth gap is Alex Evans’s term (in The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough, 2017) for the vacuum left when a society’s organizing stories fail — the observation that facts and arguments don’t move people, but myths (shared narratives of who we are, what’s sacred, where we’re going) do, and that the old ones (progress, the nation, the market) have collapsed without replacements. Nathan encountered it via Evans’s 2020-04-22 Exponential View briefing on collective psychology and the climate crisis, and it threads into his 2018–2024 writing on meaning, democracy, and social cohesion.1

The briefing (2020-04-22)

“This week I’m joining the Exponential View briefing with Alex Evans about collective psychology and the climate crisis… threat perception, tend-and-befriend, agency/belonging/self-awareness… the collective shadow.”

Evans’s argument (as Nathan took it in): the climate crisis is a collective psychology problem before it’s a technical one. Societies under threat don’t rationally assess; they regress — into the “collective shadow” (Jung), into tend-and-befriend tribalism, into whatever story feels like safety. The myth gap is the condition in which no shared story is available to organize a collective response, so the response fragments into the shadow-material.

Why it belongs in the wiki

The myth gap is the civilizational version of the wiki’s personal-scale meaning cluster:

  • logotherapy — Frankl’s existential vacuum is the individual myth gap; Evans’s is the collective one. Same diagnosis, different scale: a person or a polity without a story defaults to the shadow.
  • paradise-christianity — Brock & Parker’s paradise is precisely a myth in Evans’s sense (a live organizing story of this-world-as-garden), and their book is the claim that the West traded it away for a crucifixion myth. The myth gap is what happened when the crucifixion myth, in turn, died.
  • noosphere — Teilhard’s Omega is the most ambitious modern attempt to author a myth to fill the gap (a convergent, personal, forward God). Evans would call it exactly that: an attempt to write a new organizing story.
  • life-liberty-happiness-trilemma — Nathan’s “democracy has become a destabilizing social force” (2023) reads differently against the myth gap: democracy as a myth has failed (the story no longer organizes), so democracy as a mechanism now just amplifies the shadow. The trilemma’s drift toward stability is the shadow-preference of a mythless polity.
  • gonzo-futurism — Pickard’s immersive, idiosyncratic sense-making is the rogue-scholar answer to the myth gap: small, live, local myths instead of one big dead one.

The hook, honestly assessed

Evans’s book is a pamphlet-length provocation, not a research program, and “collective psychology” is a contested frame (it can shade into the same reification-of-crowds the discontinuous-self page warns about at the individual level). The durable kernel: societies, like people, run on stories, and the space of live stories is currently empty — which is both a diagnosis and a call to authorship. The wiki’s whole ethics cluster (atonement, mutual aid, paradise, noosphere) can be read as candidate myths to fill the gap.

Intellectual relatives

The myth gap is one statement of a diagnosis several research programs have reached independently:

  • Vervaeke’s “meaning crisis” (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, 2019, 50 free lectures) is the most fully worked-out version: a historical-cognitive account of how the West lost the “wisdom traditions” that once made the world legible and the self at home in it, leaving people “drowning in an ocean of bullshit” — disconnected from themselves, each other, the world, and a foreseeable future. Where Evans is a pamphlet, Vervaeke is a syllabus; the two diagnoses coincide almost exactly, and Vervaeke supplies the philosophical machinery (relevance realization, the Axial Revolution, the Jungian shadow at civilizational scale) that Evans gestures at. 2 Full free episode transcripts are available for close reading. 3
  • Harari’s shared fictions (Sapiens, 2011) — the observation that large-scale human cooperation runs on intersubjective myths (money, nations, human rights) that exist only because enough people believe them at once. Harari gives the myth gap its mechanism: myths don’t have to be true to organize, only shared — which is why their collapse is disorganizing rather than liberating.
  • Jung’s collective shadow — the psychological substrate Evans borrows directly: a polity without a live story doesn’t become rational, it regresses into projected shadow-material (the enemy without that masks the disorder within). This is the engine of the “tend-and-befriend” tribalism Evans fears in climate politics.
  • Terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, developing Becker’s The Denial of Death) — the empirical literature on how mortality salience drives worldview defense and out-group hostility; the closest thing to experimental evidence for Evans’s claim that threat without a story produces regression, not deliberation.

Cross-domain connections

Sources

Footnotes

  1. Nathan Acks — Selected journal entries (Day One export, 2012–2024) ↩

  2. John Vervaeke 2019 — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (50-part lecture series hub) ↩

  3. Chris King; John Declan; Benica Chua (curators); John Vervaeke 2020 — Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — complete episode transcripts ↩

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