Our way of looking at ourselves is shaped by our culture. As with the other myths described on this site, some of the stories we are taught about ourselves can be harmful to our own healthy development.
This page questions some of those myths by examining where they came from and their context. The descriptions given are overly-brief, and are meant to just be the beginning of an explanation. Each explanation can be easily validated by doing your own research.
- Myth: Individualism.
- Myth: Mind is the self, inhabiting a body.
- Myth: Body is a machine.
- Myth: Illness is external.
- Myth: Old age equates with uselessness.
Following are several myths about the way we understand ourselves, and the stories that lead us to those views.
Myth: Individualism.
Humans are deeply social animals. All humans (meaning genus Homo, extending back nearly three million years) have depended on cooperation and community for their survival and thriving.
When the Earth suddenly warmed up (less than 12,000 years ago), food surpluses enabled some individuals to withdraw from food production and started to differentiate themselves as superior to the others around them.
It felt natural for them to promote a philosophy of individualism, a framework that supported private property and gave deep nuance to the enforcement of that system.
By the industrial era, this logic had evolved into a definition of “freedom” as detachment from family, neighborhood, or collective obligation, leaving ordinary people increasingly isolated, under-resourced, and over-burdened.
While there are many valuable outcomes of a philosophy of individualism; the way our culture over-emphasizes it does not serve us as individuals.
Myth: Mind is the self, inhabiting a body.
It is common in modern culture for people to talk their body as a tool that they happen to inhabit: their “meat suit,” or the “vessel” that their spirit is using. That perspective equates the mind with the self, as if all of one’s being is just one’s thoughts.
This myth denigrates the roles of body, heart, and spirit; instead creating a life that is exclusively evaluated from the purely-analytical perspective of mind.
Living life stuck in only mind can create anxiety and fear; while depriving the self of connection to the other parts of the soul can lead to angst in the spirit, neglect in the body, and unresolved emotion in the heart.
Myth: Body is a machine.
This myth is sort of a corollary of the above myth, that the mind is the self. When caught in that myth, one then can view the body as a machine. It is common to hear analogies between the body and an automobile or other mechanism.
Machines work in a very straightforward manner, being made up of discrete components. If a component breaks, it can be repaired or replaced, returning the machine to its original state.
While our mammalian bodies are made up of what look like distinct organs and parts, no part exists independent of the others. Bodies are complex interplays of circulatory, nervous, lymphatic, digestive, etc., etc. systems; many of which include non-human organisms. And these systems themselves are not actual distinct things, but more like a complex balance that is found in the interplay of many, many different actors (proteins, chemicals, microbes, genes, electrical signals, etc.).
One of the notable downsides of this body-is-a-machine myth is some of the elective surgeries that our modern medical system ends up advocating, such as foot surgeries. These surgical solutions ignore the rest of the body, assuming that one part broke and it just needs to be fixed. But that something broke for a reason, and just “fixing” it does not solve the cause of the problem. In the case of foot surgeries, the root problem is often the extended use of modern shoes and/or the way the person is organizing the rest of their body.
Myth: Illness is external.
Similar to the above myth, modern society tends to look at many illnesses as something that just happens. By ignoring the reasons for why illnesses happen, our modern economy can generate a great deal of revenue from selling medicine to treat them.
Illness in the body can be broken into three major categories: injury, infection, and stress/trauma related disease.
Injury is indeed external, and we generally understand injury very well.
Infection is external as well, but there are clearly internal factors involved. Very few if any infectious diseases infect 100% of the people who are exposed to them.
Most other diseases, such as neurological or autoimmune disorders are relatively unexplained by modern allopathic medicine, but can be explained by the psychological and social makeup of the subject. To learn more about this line of reasoning, read the well-documented research by Dr. Gabor Maté.
Myth: Old age equates with uselessness.
Modern culture has pushed older citizens into the margins, letting go of any value they might hold. We push them out of the economy through “retirement.” Then as they get older we push them out of the culture entirely, relegating them to facilities where they can “receive care,” but where few in the outside world ever get to see them.
Elders used to be the store of generational knowledge. Now we rely on schools and data stores to transfer knowledge to future generations… but those are not exclusive to also learning from our elders. And stored knowledge does not give us situational wisdom: the discernment to know the best response to specific real circumstances.
Further, this devaluation of elders leads us to experience angst and depression as we individually face the prospect of becoming less and less valuable as we age.
A large part of the deprecation of elders’ value comes from our detachment from the land and from our ancestral heritage. When people reconnect to a specific place and build a generational relationship with that place, the wisdom of elders can once again be valued. This is especially true if the elders remain in the community instead of being shipped off to a facility.
Return to: Unhealthy Myths
Further reading: What is Healing?