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.
Cross-domain connections
- logotherapy / tragic-optimism — the individual-scale myth gap
- paradise-christianity — the myth that was traded away
- noosphere — the most ambitious myth-replacement attempt in the wiki
- life-liberty-happiness-trilemma — democracy’s myth-failure as the root of its mechanism-failure
- rogue-scholar — the small-live-myth answer
Sources
- Selected journal entries (Day One export, 2012–2024)
Footnotes
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Selected journal entries (Day One export, 2012–2024) ↩