“Those health freaks are going to feel pretty silly, years from now, when they all start dying of nothing.” –Redd Foxx.
We’re all doomed. Again.
Back in the 1970s, we were killing all the whales and saying “Nein danke” to nuclear power. In the 1980s, the Brazilian rain forest was being cut down, resulting in the human race being unable to breathe by the year 2,000 AD.
Late last year, there was a barrage of articles on the levels of toxicity spread by chemicals in black kitchen utensils. The message was, toss your flame-retardant black plastic utensils or get cancer.
Before that, gas stoves were trying to kill us. And just this week (right in time for Dry January) we learned that wine is off the table.
And we thought the kitchen was a happy place.
The funny thing about warnings is they come in waves. Sometimes, they’re spot on: like when doctors figured out smoking isn’t exactly a health tonic.
Sometimes, they’re way off – like the persistent myth that vaccines cause autism or that the school nurse is secretly performing gender transition surgeries.
The sad thing is, once the stories take hold, whether they’re eventually proven right or wrong, almost doesn’t matter. The narrative has already done its work.
To go back to the kitchen: When the plastic utensil research hit, everyone was calculating their nanogram exposure. Later reports showed that they’re only 10% as unhealthy as first reported. Seems the research around the negative health effects of alcohol may also be questionable. But try telling that to someone who’s already cleared out their kitchen.
Conspiracy theorists think there is a dark cabal that controls the world, but the fact is nobody is in charge. What exists instead are powerful currents of influence – media policymakers, institutions – all pushing and pulling at our shared reality and working to shift the culture. Each wave builds on the last, shifting how millions think and act.
Joseph Campbell liked to say that myths are collective dreams, and a society cannot decide what myths they end up with any more than a person can decide what dreams they’re going to have that night.
The truth is it’s not about truth. It’s about how mythologically embedded in the collective psyche something is.
Myths control perception. Perception controls reality. Not the other way around. All societies – big and small – countries, businesses, political movements, military organizations, etc are governed by them, whether they like it or not.
Change how people see the world, and you change the world itself.
