AMERICAN DUALITIES

Part One: A New Myth

Indigenous myths, legends and fairy tales – the dreams of a culture – grow out of the infinite depths of the past; no one “creates” them. Myths speak of origins, of the divine figures that were present at the beginning. They describe dramatic breakthroughs of the sacred into the World. By contrast, mythic literature is created by specific individuals with themes gathered from the culture’s oral traditions.

In a sense, our story – the myth of American innocence – isn’t “real” myth, although we populate it with substitutes for the ancestral figures like Columbus (until recently), the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers. Some use the term “civic religion” to describe the beliefs about ourselves that we commonly call “Americanism.” Historian Richard Slotkin writes that our experiences lead to stories and metaphors that, amplified in literature, assumed mythic proportions. Art and myth exert reciprocal pressure on each other, shaping a people’s sense of reality. Thus, “a national mythology may come to exercise the same unconscious appeal as the archetypal myths of which they are the variants.” Myths are ambiguous, like dreams vaguely remembered. So, it is appropriate that the most common descriptive phrase (not coined until the 1930’s) for our own story is the “American Dream.”

Joseph Campbell taught that myths refer past themselves to mysterious and ineffable principles. Myth may serve four functions. The first is the mystical function: opening the mind to that which underlies all forms. The cosmological function explains how the universe works and connects the transcendent to the world of ordinary experience. The pedagogical function teaches the moral life and defines responsibility in terms of the particular culture.

The fourth – and most pervasive – is the social function: validating a specific social order and integrating the individual organically within the community. Ideally, this function would present a noble hierarchy – kings and queens – who inhabit the center of the realm, radiating blessing that flows through them from the other world. (“Noble” is related to “gnosis.” A noble is one who knows who he or she really is.)

Campbell, however, wrote that “It is this sociological function…that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date.” Even so, myth shapes our values and organizes our experience. It brings emotion to our festivals, sets the boundaries of dissent, names the children and sends them off to be sacrificed in war. It is the most compelling story we tell ourselves about who we are.

Frequently it is the story of who we are not – the Other. And because it is myth, few question it. Historian Ira Chernus writes: “To test a myth against empirical facts is to miss the point.” We view reality through the sociological level of myth. If facts disagree with strongly held beliefs, then it is the facts that must change. One purpose of sociological myths is to reconcile the contrasts of ideals with realities and to allow us to live with them. “Myth,” writes Chernus, “appeals to us because it lifts us out of history.”

We’ve been telling ourselves these stories about ourselves all our lives, and they glide through our consciousness so smoothly that even progressives are rarely aware of how deeply they hold us. The metaphors of national mythology gloss over the troubling aspects of history and provide illusory solutions. Political myths describe the belief systems that we internalize as members of a nation; a simple starting point is “myth = ideology + narrative.” If the story is convincing, we take the ideological assumptions for granted. Such myths are basic components of common perception, like the lenses of a pair of glasses. They are not what we see; they are what we see with. We give our attention to one set of possibilities rather than another, and our intentions follow. So, myth creates fact, rather than the reverse.

I suggest, however, that a living myth supplies infinite levels of meaning. We return to great stories – The Odyssey, for example – throughout life because they continually nourish us.

Each level of meaning provides an imaginative opening to other levels. In other words, it is not simple political indoctrination that prevents people from questioning their narratives. There must be something else, some profound truths that compel their attention and point vaguely toward the cosmic and mystical levels, to what could be trying to be born.

We need to study the myth of American innocence to imagine whether America has a real purpose in the world. “Innocence” has two primary definitions. First, it means uncorrupted by evil, and it often precedes another word: victim. Perpetrators of oppression often construct – and believe – forms of innocence that present themselves as the victims. An example: following the September 2025 murder of Charlie Kirk, as Chris Hedges writes, far right MAGA enthusiasts in and out of government quickly elevated this racist firebrand to the status of martyr, for whom future violence will be justified.

Second, to be innocent is to be inexperienced: childlike clarity preserved in adulthood. It also has a darker side: the uninitiated man, childish rather than childlike.

The myth of innocence is a story told by the winners, or those who hope to emulate them. It justifies the conquest of a continent and centuries of exploitation. However, to see it only as expressing racist colonialism is reductionistic; it is to miss the fact that millions of people from every country still admire America and are willing to sacrifice everything to come here. It is to ignore the mystical interpretation of the myth, as well as the imagination necessary to transform it. It is to miss the themes underlying our entire history: the New Start, and the Search for the Other.

Part Two: Two Ways of Imagining

Two opposing personality styles conquered North America and bifurcated our myth at the very beginning. In the north, the Puritans profoundly influenced the literature, the theology and the judgments about work, the body and the Other that still underlie our national character.

The Puritan had a bottomless longing to prove himself, yet he was tightly controlled. He was obsessive-compulsive, orderly, thrifty, prudent and distant. His only earthly reward was moral perfection because his theology prevented him from enjoying what he had gained. To use Greek mythological terms, he was a literalized version of Apollo who lacked any Dionysian balance. “Puritanical” prudishness set the tone for a reserved, middle-class decorum that still endures, leading H.L. Mencken to define Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

The great mystery of the Puritan was that his extreme asceticism eventually produced an extremely materialistic society. The tendency toward uniformity that underlies the capitalist standardization of production had its ideal foundation, wrote sociologist Max Weber, “in the repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh.” In time the northern cities – and to a great extent all American values – came to be dominated by the making of money as the ultimate purpose of life, because success in business was a sign of spiritual grace, often the only sign.

The Protestant ethic sublimated the sensual and sexual energies into unceasing work. In exchange for unprecedented wealth, it gave us neurotic obsession based ultimately upon fear of moral failure. It judges us by how hard we work and by what we’ve accumulated; and it carries a hatred of the body that lies just below the surface of our modern hedonism.

The Puritan was the ultimate spiritual individualist, yet he zealously demanded conformity. He denied knowledge of salvation, yet his doctrines justified his wealth and the suffering of others. He longed for the spirit, yet he was aggressively pragmatic. He worked unceasingly, yet he couldn’t enjoy himself. Dedicating everything to God, he hated his own body. Hoping to convert the Indians, he destroyed them. And his religious retreat, his “city on a hill,” became the greatest empire in history.

The Puritan – and that part of our psyche that we inherited from him – was consumed with a multitude of fears. Because he could never be sure of redemption, he feared for his eternal soul. And he hated and feared (and unconsciously desired) the Native Americans because he saw his own Dionysian soul displayed in their sensuality and playfulness. His paranoid imagination became the basis of the fear (of black people, immigrants, child molesters, communists, alien invaders and terrorists) that elites quickly learned to manipulate and have continued to do so for four centuries.

Descendants of the Pilgrims amassed the first great mercantile and industrial fortunes. The founders of the southern colonies, however, had less lofty motivations: getting rich as quickly and as easily as possible. Most were cavalier aristocrats closely aligned with the King, with no interest in parceling out the land equitably. They openly boasted of their desire for personal aggrandizement.

Their model was not St. Augustine’s City of God, but El Dorado – the golden city that Spain had been chasing for decades. “In that sense,” writes Michael Ventura, “America had Las Vegas a century before it had Plymouth Rock.”

These oligarchs were, of course, few in number. They left their mark, however, on the South’s entire population. Their descendants brought African slaves and built huge plantations. But even before the slave trade expanded, these opportunists motivated tens of thousands to emigrate as indentured servants. Vast numbers of criminals, political prisoners – 100,000 of them Irish – and children were captured, sold into de facto slavery, and sent to America. Only then did the word kidnapping (“kid-nabbing”) enter the language.

Prior to 1800, perhaps two-thirds of white colonists came as slaves. There were also large numbers of free Scotts-Irish, many of whom who had assisted in Cromwell’s genocide of Ireland.

Born in abuse, these whites carried a repressed violence that constantly sought outlets. A minority of them became economically insecure small landholders who passed their rage onto the black slaves (even if few could afford to own any) just below them in the hierarchy. Eventually they identified with their former masters, as the myth of white supremacy developed. They showed little mercy for the natives. Whereas the northern myth grew out of Puritan fears of pollution by the Other, the southerners saw themselves in the myth of the lone hunter, who entered the wilderness and took what he wanted. Responding in great numbers to a series of religious awakenings, their optimistic energy drove the westward expansion. Later, they formed the backbone of the Revolutionary and Confederate armies. Even today most military officers are southerners.

In the extreme – and these people really were extremists – colonial America was formed of two hungry groups: grim, fanatic northerners and aggressively violent, bigoted southerners. Both shared a restless zeal that resulted from what Joel Kovel calls “that singular transformation of body into spirit and spirit into action that is the hallmark of our civilization.” Both shared the same impression of the land – an unparalleled opportunity for enrichment.

And both groups, like no population before them in world history, were composed of individuals. Geography, economics and religion made them into solitary, isolated figures. Together, they created an entirely new mythological story: a radical individualism that promised two possibilities. The first is what Carl Jung would later describe as individuation: the potential to fully become who and what one has entered this world to be, and to offer it as a gift to the world. The second is a potential loneliness so terrifying that it can only be relieved, and only temporarily, in fundamentalist religion or by genocidal violence – or both.

American history has been caught between the nightmares of the Puritans – the Paranoid Imagination – and the conquering dreams of the opportunists – the Predatory Imagination – ever since.

Part Three: The New Start

Different as they were, both Puritans and Opportunists shared the need to demonize others. To escape from the oppressive weight of original sin and abuse, they constructed narratives of innocence and projected their guilt onto the natives, and later, onto African slaves.

Some initially wavered between the “noble savage” projection (naïve and generous natives) and its opposite (the idea that they were sub-human). Quickly, the latter won out: the natives were shameless savages, fornicators and idolaters. “They are fit to be ruled,” wrote Columbus.

Spaniards perpetrated the New World’s first genocides, justifying them by utilizing some of their oldest myths. Historian Regina Schwartz traces the concept of othering to the very foundations of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Old Testament “encodes Western culture’s central myth of collective identity.” Large sections amount to nothing more than narratives that forge the identity of the Hebrews, of boundary-making between the people and everyone else, “the most frequent and fundamental act of violence we commit.”

Hebrew exiles wrote much of the Bible during their exile in Babylon in the 6th century B.C.E. This fact suggests another origin of othering. If a people have always lived in a particular place, they may define themselves by what they are, but if they live on someone else’s land (whether as exiles or as settler colonialists) they define themselves by what they are not.

This simple observation, in my opinion, goes a long way toward explaining both our myth of American innocence as well as what I have called the myth of Israeli innocence.

Biblical metaphor underlay the entire adventure. As escape from Egypt is intertwined with the original invasion of Palestine, the exodus story was and is still used for both liberating and oppresssive purposes. The logic is simple: we were oppressed, God saved us, but since we were homeless, it was our sacred responsibility to seize the land. Ever since, we’ve told ourselves stories of domination that use the rhetoric of liberation. Anglo-Saxons from across the ocean (easily reframed as the Red Sea) were the new chosen people, and America was the Promised Land.

This new story described a land that was empty, having only potential, the stuff of dreams. Not being used productively, it was “virgin” land. Giving philosophical justification to land-grabbing, John Locke wrote, “…land that is left wholly to nature is…waste.” As early as the 1570s, allegorical personifications of America as a female nude appeared in European art. Such land is implicitly available for defloration and fertilization. Sir Walter Raleigh made the analogy of land, woman and rape quite explicit: Guiana “hath yet her maydenhead.”

This is the creation myth of the American people, innocently arriving from diverse lands, charged with a holy mission to destroy evil, save souls and carve civilization out of a dark wilderness. R.W.B. Lewis (The American Adam) wrote that this story saw the world:

…starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race…(Americans were) emancipated from history...bereft of ancestry…Adam before the Fall.

Many Europeans, exhausted and disenchanted from centuries of war, crusades and inquisition, fervently believed that America would be the place for the second coming and the return of a golden age. Colonial Americans extended this imagination of radical individualism, and their descendants built it up over four centuries of storytelling, preaching, oration, fiction, poetry, textbooks, advertisements, films and TV. Its essence was pure potential; anything was possible. America, wrote philosopher Jacob Needleman, “…was not ethnic. To be an American was not to be born anything at all.”

In this new narrative of the land of opportunity, one’s greatness was limited only by his own desire. Americans have always been attracted to the old idea of the tabula rasa, the “clean slate” that we can fill with anything. We willingly consume TV commercials for the military that encourage us to “be all you can be.” The cliché moves us because it implies the universal notion of human purpose. But the belief that we can be anything we want to be is a characteristically American misunderstanding of the universal indigenous teaching that we were born to be one thing only, that the task of soul making is to discover that one thing.

As northerners eventually engaged with southerners, mostly through the slave trade, a curious philosophical mix – some might call this a contradiction – of traditional religious and modern Enlightenment values developed. Individuals were fallen and sinful; yet one could make of oneself whatever one might want. Indeed, in 1776, for the first time in history, a nation (ignoring its millions of Black slaves), proclaimed the “pursuit of happiness” as its primary reason for existence.

This led to new meanings of the word liberty. On the one hand, liberty (from the Latin liber, a name for Dionysus) implies release, pointing toward liberation, in both its Marxist and Buddhist meanings. Liberty, however, actually has a continuum of meanings, including permission to do what one wants, the power to do what one likes and the privilege to “take liberties” with others. Historian John Hope Franklin noted that the Renaissance and the Commercial Revolution gave men this new sense of freedom, but the passionate pursuit of liberty by some resulted in the “destruction of the rights of others…the freedom to destroy freedom.” Freedom without responsibility became license.

The mix of the puritan’s need to prove his salvation and the opportunist’s infinite hunger for riches led to other changes. For three centuries free land in the west served as a safety valve for the discontented and made abject poverty relatively uncommon. Large numbers of (white) Americans, to an extent unimaginable in Europe, became landowners. But when extremes of wealth and poverty quickly appeared, the rich felt little obligation to the poor. After all, declared Puritanism, poverty was proof of sin. Belief in predestination has survived – as Social Darwinsim – into modern times. But belief in opportunity meant that to be an American was to have the right and the ability to “make something of oneself.” If one failed, however, he had no one to blame but himself and no right to expect help from the collective.

This was and is the unsurmountable contradiction at the basis of the American Dream, for which an entire mythology had to be created. And another massive contradiction – let’s be kind and call it a mystery – soon appeared when Americans pushed beyond their frontiers. They formed a nation of purposeless, “self-made men,” each individually making his own destiny. But curiously, those same men commonly agreed that the nation itself had a unique purpose. The new myth proclaimed that God had chosen this people at this time to spread freedom and opportunity. Eventually, Americans would extrapolate this idea onto world affairs. The nation of individualists would become an individual among nations, shaping other societies to its image of the good life (with or without their consent).

All empires invent ideologies that rationalize conquest; but only Americans justified enslavement and genocide with myths of freedom, good intentions and “manifest destiny.” The G.W. Bush administration and its successors eventually carried this magical notion to its extreme, but it has always been at the expansionist core of American foreign policy.

The myth, which came to maturity during the Enlightenment, predicted inevitable progress toward the best of all possible worlds. Thus, mobility became a major value, and in narratives history moved from east to west, allowing one to forget its lessons and continually exist in a “new” America.

The ideal American was always moving towards something better; and he tended to look condescendingly upon those who held to the values of place. For the upwardly mobile, said psychologist James Hillman, “to be is to be stuck.” Alexis De Tocqueville observed that in America,

…a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on…he will travel fifteen hundred miles to shake off his happiness.

Mobility evokes one of our most enduring themes: the New Start. By 1800, one could always pull up stakes, move on, start a new church, change one’s name and start over. Mobility implies expansion: geographic, economic and spiritual. This characteristically American assumption of the need to constantly expand and grow leads to wildly divergent yet similar ideals – both the infinitely expanding consumer economy and the idea of personal growth. In this sense, “New Age” spirituality could not be more American. But always it meant movement and improvement.

“New Start” also reminds us of older ideas: baptism, and long before that, the universal notion of initiation, but with major differences. For centuries in the indigenous world, tribal initiation took youths out of their community for a relatively short time before returning them with their sense of purpose revitalized. It was a point in time rooted within space. For an extended discussion of initiation, see Chapter Five of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence.

But Americans inverted this ancient relationship; since one could simply leave his community to acquire a new, risk-free identity, their version of initiation became a point in space rooted in time. By 1600 America had already become known as the place of the New Start for the entire western world. Four hundred years later, this aspect of the myth remains nearly as strong.

Radical individualism: America (with the strong exception of our periodic moral crusades) valued the individual over the community more than any society in history. The opportunist argued for individual responsibility against the suffocating presence of “Big Government.” Determined on success, he was in a perpetual state of rebellion against authority, except of course when he became one himself. And the vestiges of his Puritan past clearly indicated that his wealth was proof that he lived in God’s grace – and his neighbor’s poverty indicated the opposite. But there was a price, writes Historian Greil Marcus:

To be an American is to feel the promise as a birthright, and to feel alone and haunted when the promise fails. No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal.

Whether in the relentless drive for wealth or in his obsession to know God’s plan, the American, like no one before him, strove for self-improvement. Inside the word “improve,” however, lies the anxiety of one whose religion has cruelly determined that he can never really know if he is saved. Thus, he must continually “prove” his worth.

Part Four – Dualities

All societies must confront the perennial conflict between individual and community. I’ve been describing America’s unique obsession with radical individualism. But anyone familiar with Depth Psychology will understand that the more we – as persons or as a culture – focus on any psychic characteristic, the deeper we push its opposite into the shadows, and the more intensely that opposite expresses itself when it finally emerges.

American individualism has always had a grim, puritanical shadow that periodically attempts to enforce a strict conformism upon everyone. The regular conflict between the two has produced a bewildering series of dualities that express, temporarily resolve and unsuccessfully cover up this tension.

Early white attitudes toward the Other, rooted in the original divergence between the predatory and paranoid imaginations, created mythic opposites: the hero and the captive (later imagined as winners and losers). Both our history and our psychology waver between the viewpoints of the helpless, innocent victim of the evil Other and the selfless redeemer/hunter/hero, who vanquishes evil and saves innocent Eden.

By 1700, America’s first coherent myth-literature appeared: potent tales of several women who’d survived capture by the Indians. Since the settlers were increasingly dependent on an identity that distinguished them from the Other, the threat (or fantasy) of capture enforced conformism.

They had “alien abduction” nightmares, as their descendants would two centuries later. These apprehesions formed the basis of the paranoid imagination.

How relevant is the captivity theme to modern America? Southerners manipulated fear of sexual abduction by Blacks to restore segregation after the Civil War. It was still alive during the “white slavery” panic of 1909. It remains absolutely basic to westerns, science fiction movies and romance novels. In the 1970’s, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by black radicals contributed to the conservative backlash. “Innocent” captives who engaged our emotions included Vietnam POW’s and the Iran hostages whose release helped elect Ronald Reagan. The 1990’s saw near-hysteria over childhood abuse, alien abductions and satanic cults. In 1994, California enacted the “Three Strikes” law after a blonde child was kidnapped and murdered. Several states copied this law, resulting in the incarceration of tens of thousands. Three centuries after the first captivity narrative, America thrilled to its newest version during the invasion of Iraq. An American female soldier (also blonde) was captured by Iraqi forces and “liberated” by Americans. The mythic necessity of demonizing the Other has lost none of its potency; the paranoid imagination is still stirred by captivity narratives, especially when they involve a young, white woman, the symbol of American innocence.

By 1750 America had its second – and opposite – theme. The heroes of the western expansion became the stock characters of American myth. The greatest of them all, Daniel Boone, continually moved further west as civilization encroached, complaining, “I had not been two years at the licks before a d—d Yankee came, and settled down within an hundred miles of me!”

Whether Boone said that is irrelevant; what matters is that white Americans needed him to. The myth of the Frontier posited dirty, crowded Apollonian cities opposed by free men in the Dionysian wilderness. The frontier was a safety valve of free western land (for white people) when urban conditions became unmanageable, linking militarism and anti-Indian violence with civilization’s moral progress. Its central tenet was that society (like the corporations of the near future) must grow or perish. Thus, it insisted on the racial basis of class difference and taught that such progress could occur only by the subjugation or extermination of wild nature and savage races.

These themes had deep resonance, because they superficially resembled ancient hero myths. Both the hunter (willingly) and the captive (unwillingly) entered a primal world. If they could maintain their racial/cultural integrity there, they might incorporate its power, defeat its demons and return to morally renew their community. It was a form of initiation expressed as regeneration through violence.

The opposition of Puritan obsessions and the opportunists’ predatory mania led to a division in the psyche that remains with us today. We regularly confront the opposing values of freedom and equality, or individualism and conformism. To modern Puritans, all are equally sinful, and all require eternal vigilance to prevent infection. But descendants of the opportunists, from robber barons to anti-tax libertarians and sexual hedonists, venerate the sacred right to utterly ignore community standards. And, having studied both American myth and marketing, Republican politicians have masterfully convinced both extremes to ignore the contradictions in their rhetoric.

The pendulum has always swung back and forth. When religious repression relaxed, freedom “rang.” A narrow interpretation of equality (excluding Blacks, Latinos, Indians and women) prevailed from the Revolution through the mid-nineteenth century. The Civil War was followed by the Gilded Age of unrestrained capitalism and conspicuous consumption.

In the 1930’s the emphasis shifted back toward equality.

With the decline of the liberal consensus (and voting) in the 1970’s an emphasis on lifestyle and economic freedom prevailed, despite a homogenized conformism just below the surface. In the last 35 years, resurgent evangelicals who would enforce the legislation of morality have formed coalitions with anti-government libertarians and white supremacists to bring on our recent madness. These groups have almost nothing in common beyond their contempt for people of color, their need for a dictator and their fondness for police and military violence.

Only myth can resolve such contradictions.

Usually, whenever one of these values predominates, its shadow soon arrives. The conflict emerges in the tension between libertarianism and wartime conformism. Another example is the fiction of equal opportunity vs. the meritocratic values of our institutions – and the old-boy networks that ensure the continuation of WASP dominance.

Our myth teaches that since theoretically all have equal access to jobs, education and housing, he who tries hardest wins. We proclaim, “May the best man win,” assuming that we all start on a “level playing field.” The legal system is based on this notion: if each side retains adequate counsel, then the objective truth – justice – will emerge.

Conflicts in the myth can emerge as fairness vs. cheating. The ideal of fairness promises that all who play by the rules will prosper. While cheating breaks the rules, it also reveals our core, capitalist values. This explains our moral indignation about steroid abuse and rule violation in sports. Eldridge Cleaver saw that when all secretly subscribe to the notion of “...every man for himself,”

…the weak are seen as the…prey of the strong. But since this dark principle violates our democratic ideals…we force it underground…sports are geared to disguise, while affording expression to, the acting out in elaborate pageantry of the myth of the fittest in the process of surviving.

American heroes, with justice always on their side, are more than fair. In countless Westerns they offer the first blow or shot to the villains. The U.S. military empire maintains the same fiction. Striking first would violate the rules; so it traditionally creates the illusion that the enemy (Mexicans, Germans, Japanese, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Russians, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Iraqis, Iranians, terrorists, etc.) has struck, or might strike first, in order to justify American aggression.

Ours is also a political myth not necessarily because it is untrue, but because its pervasiveness and its unexamined assumptions produce a consensus reality. It is a container of multiple and inconsistent meanings; its very ambiguity gives it the mythic energy that motivates us.

It allows the privileged to select either one of the two polar ideals to justify themselves. For example, segregation – the colossal lie of “separate but equal” – was legal for sixty years. Reactionaries invoke equality to attack affirmative action, calling it reverse discrimination. Since prejudice is now illegal, so they argue, it no longer exists; therefore, minorities should require no assistance (which would only encourage laziness, the ultimate sin to the Puritan). Though the argument is false, it has potency because it contains a kernel of truth: since individuals have occasionally “pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps,” then everyone should be able to. If others cannot, says the myth – puritan at its core – then it is their own fault.

Conservatives attack progressive legislation by invoking the ideal of individualism, terrorizing working-class white males with the prospect of lost jobs – and lost privilege. “Freedom” reverts to the right to accumulate and invest wealth without government regulation. Polls typically reveal pro-civil rights agreement when only egalitarian questions are at stake, but an anti-civil rights consensus when issues infringe on notions of individualism and personal, economic aggrandizement.

Marketing exploits both sides. By the 1830’s the French visitor Alexis De Tocqueville pointed out the tendency toward conformity that resulted from an ideology of equality in a materialistic society. Two centuries later, millions of us purchase identical sunglasses, cigarettes, leather jackets and motorcycles because advertising has taught us that these items symbolize rebellion against conformity. Fashion is a simultaneous declaration of freedom and membership: we present a unique self to the world while looking precisely like selected others. Most “individualists” look and think, for the most part, within surprisingly narrow parameters.

Military recruiters present romantic images of individualistic warriors while simultaneously emphasizing the satisfactions of forgetting one’s loneliness by dissolving oneself into a group identity. They seduce young men with images of noble knights in heroic, solo combat, conquering dragons in video games to entrain them in the automatic responses of large, anonymous military groups.

Each contains the seed of its shadow – especially in the controversies over lifestyle choices. Moralists display obvious and imaginative voyeurism in their crusades, while sensualists may reveal an adolescent quality behind their rebellious gestures. Throughout American history, images of completely irresponsible behavior have confronted – and mirrored – unrealistic demands for total abstinence, especially in the theme of religious conversion. The U.S., along with some Muslim majority countries, has been the only nation to attempt a total ban on alcohol, and did so, quite unsuccessfully for 14 years.

Conservatives promise to reduce government – while criminalizing abortion and other personal freedoms and increasing rates of incarceration and police, military and ICE budgets, or by criticizing government spending while taking full advantage of it.

There are countless examples. For a century Louisiana fought against federal meddling into its “local” traditions of racial discrimination while simultaneously demanding federal support to shore up the levees that protected New Orleans. Congressman Newt Gingrich, crusading for smaller government in the 1990’s, quietly secured enough federal money for his home district to make it third in the nation in subsidies per capita, trailing only Arlington, Virginia – home of the CIA – and Cape Canaveral, Florida. Mitch McConnel’s “anti-big government” Kentucky typically receives $150 Billion more from the federal government than it contributes in taxes.

Eventually, both the Puritan and the Opportunist perceived freedom in autonomy and material possessions rather than in social relatedness, and both figures became somewhat interchangeable. The grand product of this mix was the American: enthusiastic, confident, practical, optimistic, extraverted, competitive and classless. But to those Others who endured his excesses, he was arrogant, childish, narcissistic and belligerent, the “Ugly American,” innocently trampling tradition, making fine distinctions between the elect and the damned, or crushing the weak with astonishing violence. The proud, gratuitous cruelty of Trumpus and his minions (I use this term to remind my readers that Trump embodies and enacts our myths for us; Trump = us) is the logical extreme of this mythic narrative, not an aberration.

Most of the time, a unique if superficial balance has ruled; the image of the land of freedom and equality has attracted millions who had experienced neither in the rigid class hierarchies of Europe and Asia. To Jacob Needleman, this ideal touched the hearts of people everywhere “who yearned not only for wealth or safety…but also for meaning and transcendence.” He saw in the idea of rights the Jeffersonian notion that all people have the intrinsic “capacity to intuit the good...” The American ideal poses the ancient question of “what man is as opposed to what he can become.”

And yet, we have a Bill of Rights but no Bill of responsibilities.

In the last ten years, with thousands protesting police brutality and genocide in Palestine, we once again found the source of the paradox of freedom and equality in unexamined definitions of just who is a member of the polis. When only a small percentage of the population is admitted to that rarified atmosphere and all our inner Others (both politically and psychologically) are excluded, then both the contradiction in the rhetoric and the sense of denial and innocence are heightened.

During wartime, we easily forget the civil liberties that the nation was founded upon. Terrorized by the outer Other, we ignore or condone the grossest violations of the right to dissent. This is Tocqueville’s tyranny of the majority. As early as the 1820s he saw that for all their concern for individual rights, Americans had put so much emphasis on equality rather than upon diversity that they became intolerant of the very freedom to be different.

He wrote, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”

Unrestrained capitalism provokes responses such as the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt reframed freedom: of speech, of religion, from want and from fear. But after his death, Harry Truman’s speeches dropped the last two, replacing them with freedom of enterprise.

More fundamental to American myth than freedom or equality, the unrestrained quest for wealth trumps them both. And yet, it’s all relative: during the Eisenhower administration, the rich paid extremely high income taxes, because the consensus of social compassion still existed. And, of course, in reality it is corporate welfare, massive state subsidies and regressive taxation that support both big business and big agriculture; both would be horrified at the notion of a truly free market. Yet the myth retains its pervasiveness, as middle class resistance to increased taxation on the super-wealthy indicates. Most of us either expect to be wealthy someday or naively believe that those taxes would impact us now.

Studies indicate that social mobility – the opportunity to move up into a higher social class – has decreased significantly. But as recently as 2003, in a poll on the Bush tax plan, 56% of the blue-collar men who correctly perceived it as favoring the rich still supported it. The myth of the self-made man is so deeply engrained that our ignorance of the facts is equaled only by our optimism: in 2000, 19% of respondents believed that they would “soon” be in the top one percent income bracket, and another 19% thought that they already were. Similarly, 50% thought that most families must pay the estate tax (only two percent do), and two-thirds expected that they will one day have to pay it.

Consider another duality: most left-wing activism is a rational response to economic hardship, while the rich logically attempt to keep what’s theirs. But working-class, right-wing extremism (from the anti-Catholic “Know-Nothings”

to the Klan to pro-lifers to MAGA world) is usually an irrational response by those who are relatively privileged (and every American white male, regardless of his wealth, has privilege). It is a response to emotional suffering, or the perception of being victimized. It arises when unconscious mythic assumptions are undermined, and this often leads us to search for scapegoats.

This is true everywhere, but in America the conditions are extreme, because we – uniquely – have long been conditioned to confuse class with race. So, reactionaries have learned to convert legitimate anger into irrational violence in other places as well. After Vietnam, the U.S. brutally eliminated secular activists in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, thus forcing all dissent into religious extremism, which is inherently conservative and easily manipulated.

But domestically, the 1960s saw demands for both freedom and equality, or freedom defined in terms of inclusion. African Americans argued that freedom and equality are not the same, that the former is only a precondition for the latter. The Civil Rights movement evoked the mythic ideal as its founders had proclaimed it, and for a few years (as I write here) it was able to shame the nation into responding.

The pendulum continues to swing. Half a century later, Americans still respond more to myths and metaphors than to facts, and conservatives, well-versed in motivation and brain science, have taken full advantage.

Part Five: Reframing

The task it is not simply to break old habits of thinking. Outmoded, literalist mythologies retain their hold on us not merely because of constant indoctrination. They refer to profound truths, even if they have been corrupted to serve the culture of death, just as fraternity, military and gang initiations are the toxic mimics of ancient, profound mysteries. We can’t simply drop myths or the ceremonies that enact them simply by realizing what they are; we must go further into them. The method is ritual and art. This will involve a long-term “de-literalizing” of the predatory and paranoid imaginations back to their source in the creative imagination. It will involve telling the same stories but cooking the myth of innocence down to its essence. Ritual utilizes the subjunctive mode: perhaps, imagine, suppose, what if…

Americans have one advantage: our worship of progress and our assumption that something is better because it is new. Our unending quest for the new masks our anxiety about the present, our grief at how diminished our lives have become, and our fear of being erased in a demythologized future. But it also indicates an innate wisdom, an archetypal drive to slough off our old skin and be reborn. We can use our fascination with change to escape the myths of change. As ceremonies of the status quo evolve into authentic ritual, change can become transformation, and new myths may appear.

We can start by reconsidering capitalism’s basic assumption – that if everyone pursues his narrow financial interests the common good is advanced. Instead, imagine a society in which individuals enhance both their own wellbeing and the health of the community only when they give fully of themselves.

We can reframe our precious but lonely autonomy into an appreciation of the interconnectedness of all life, and thus to accountability to the larger communities of nature and spirit. We can change “dominion” to “stewardship.” Acknowledging interdependence can free us from our mad obsession with growth at all costs. We could then replace useless evaluations like the GDP with the “Gross National Happiness” index, a concept that the Asian nation of Bhutan is actually attempting to put into practice.

Below the pressure to compete lie even older assumptions of scarcity. The jealous, Old Testament God evokes hierarchy, transcendence and parental hostility. He requires sibling rivalry for severely restricted quantities of love and nurturance. A few Bible passages, however, are grounded in plenitude and a god whose gifts are infinite. The creative imagination can reframe the desperate struggle for survival into a world of original blessing and fecundity. Indeed, the word competition originally meant, “petitioning the gods together.”

Scarcity assumptions lead us back to the Puritan. The compulsion to work unceasingly can change into the drive to remember our unique purpose. With less energy invested in success, we would find less shame in failure. Personal “self-improvement” could become a communal spiritual quest.

We would reframe puritanical contempt for the body and the feminine into an inclusive, protective and expressive masculinity. If heterosexuals were to appreciate gay and transgender people as “gatekeepers,” then whites could take back some of the natural “rhythm” they have required blacks to carry for them. The paranoid imagination would lose its suffocating grip, as we reframe anxiety itself into the natural curiosity and hospitality of people who know who they are – people who appreciate “Other” values.

If we perceived abundance in spiritual terms, we’d reframe the predatory imagination as well. Entertaining the possibility that we are held in concentric spheres of concern by non-human powers, we’d lose interest in controlling others and repudiate old ideas like “every man for himself.”

As compassion and stewardship replace domination, we would re-appraise other myths. The idea of the hero won’t disappear; we need real heroes like never before. We will call those who protect the weak, “warriors for peace.” And we could drop all of the military metaphors we use in our daily speech.

As we support ritual containers for initiation of the youth, we will feel the hero’s journey within ourselves once again. Dropping our false innocence, we will no longer be fascinated by men who risk their lives crushing the Other to restore denial’s false peace.

Authentic change hinges upon replacing Rambo with Odysseus, who left home at the head of an army but returned naked and alone yet transformed by his initiations at the feet – and in the beds – of goddesses. This humbled hero died to his old self. As they say in Africa, when death finds you, let it find you alive. Reframing the hero will enable us to take back those parts of the soul we have projected onto entertainers and politicians, and the cult of celebrity will wither away.

Willing to sacrifice what we no longer need, we would reassess the culture of consumerism. We’d shift from consuming culture (both accumulating stuff and passively ingesting electronic stimulation) to making culture. Instead of releasing the burdens of our unfulfilled lives by watching them being resolved onscreen, we’d hold the mysterious and tragic union of opposites in communal ritual.

Making culture would allow us to drop the need for divertissement (being diverted), performance (providing completely) and amusement (related to the Muses). Instead of recreation, we’d “re-create” real entertainment (holding together). Entertaining possibilities, we would ritually renew the community through shared suffering and shared ecstasy. In return, the art we make would hold us all together.

Remembering the old rituals of grief, closure and initiation, we’d reframe our characteristic denial of death. Relaxing from that terror, we’d perceive that death is but the final initiatory transition we all endure. Death would become our friend, sitting (as Carlos Castaneda wrote) on our right shoulder, reminding us to pay attention to the fleeting beauty of the world.

And we could change the old question of the death-fathers, “What would you be willing to die for?” into the initiatory challenge, “What are willing to fully live for?”

Part Six: The Wounded Healer

If we can hold the tension of these opposites – the myths and the realities – perhaps we can re-articulate meaning while we descend alternately into chaos and fascism. To speculate on the deeper meaning of America is to risk falling into a morass of cliché. But we want America to be what it claims to be – we want to believe. (The word “believe” has within it the German liebe – “to love.”) What if America really does exist to spread freedom everywhere? What if our uniquely good fortune has been the container for a story that has not yet been told?

Family systems psychology suggests that many people in the helping professions were “caretakers” as children. Later, when they naïvely project their suffering onto their patients, therapeutic relationships become subtle agreements of collusion. The patient is “sick,” the helper is “well,” and each holds the other’s shadow. But who can heal the traumas of another’s soul without knowing his own wounds? Such helpers are often unconsciously searching for their own healing.

Psychology is history, via myth. Even liberals still commonly see America’s mission as “curing” underdevelopment and tyranny – elsewhere. America projects her unrecognized wounds of genocide and intolerance, or Eden in need of redemption, upon other nations so that the “healer” may avoid looking at her own wounds. This has allowed us to evade self-analysis and bury the national traumas, where they fester in the dark stream of forgetfulness.

But tribal wisdom, emphasizing wholeness rather than dysfunction, asks: “What may be struggling to be born?” Those who acknowledge and suffer their wounds can become true wounded healers. Knowing both the tragedy and mystery of one’s own story, no longer needing to locate illness in the Other, is the beginning of healing. In this imagination, America’s sense of “mission” is not merely a smug excuse for adolescent posturing and imperial conquest, but a search for its own soul. An America that lifts the veils and cleans out its wounds could become the wounded healer who really can help others.

Releasing the patronizing superiority that justifies imperial interventions, we’d learn to encourage the best in people. Crusades and charities would transform into equal sharing in privilege. As patriotism shrivels back into “matriotism,” we’d re-establish our primary allegiance to specific places and finally feel welcome on this land. We would once again consider equality as important as freedom, and justice would mediate between them. We’d replace the “melting pot” (everyone becoming white) with a new metaphor: a polychromatic “mosaic” of shining facets, each reflecting all the others.

We would not need scapegoats. We would no longer require anyone to suffer for us, because we would carry the marks of our own suffering and initiation. The world would still be a “vale of soul-making,” as Keats wrote, but it would no longer be a fallen world. Scapegoating does not create a real community but its “toxic mimic.” True communities in the indigenous sense, were composed primarily of initiated individuals who were more or less aligned with their purpose and were well aware of their own dark potentials. Such communities were generally able to consciously ritualize their conflict without literalizing it or searching for a sacrificial victim, and they can exist again.

Ultimately, Archetypal Psychology asks the same questions (What does the symptom point to? What does it want from us?) as in the African village: Can this soul – or community – remember the song it has forgotten – its purpose?

We can see American history as a series of conquests, modifications of privilege, painful expansion of freedoms and countermeasures to protect those privileges. Rich vs. poor; the predatory and paranoid imaginations vs. the return of the repressed.

Alternatively, Jacob Needleman insisted that the founding fathers were spiritual men who created a system that would “allow men and women to seek their own higher principles within themselves.” History is the evolution and perversion of sacred ideals, with meanings that have become their opposites but still exist in potential. The dream of America vs. the nightmare.

Or we can dispense with speculating about motivation and allow the imagination the freedom to wonder about what was once upon a time and is still trying to be reborn. Time/Chronos vs. Memory/Mnemosyne. From this perspective, American history is a baffling, painful birth passage in which the literal always hints at the symbolic.

If America remembered its song (“This land is your land” rather than “bombs bursting in air”) we might understand freedom as willing submission to the soul’s purpose. Liberty could be the social conditions that make that inner, spiritual listening possible. Diversity and multiculturalism would reflect the vast spaces of the polytheistic soul, and conflict would encourage holding the tension of the opposites to create something entirely new. Individualism would become individuality.

We would move backward, not toward racist and misogynist “traditional values,” but toward the world of balance between masculine and feminine that the indigenous soul still remembers. Faith in progress might evolve into the hope that rises only when a people has known true despair, as current events invite us to.

Connecting in a sacred manner to place, to the land, would naturally lead to rituals of atonement for the way we have treated her, and to a revival of the festivals that celebrate the decline of the old year and the birth of the new. New Year’s Day could become a national day of atonement and determination to make a new start, and Independence Day could become Interdependence Day.

We’d step beyond our adolescent arrogance and realize that the sacrifice of our children represents a displaced quest for initiation.

And now the Other in all its colors and genders has emerged from the darkness and responded, asking us to join the rest of suffering humanity. If we saw ourselves in this light, we’d understand our addiction to violence as a projection of the initiatory death that we secretly desire for ourselves. We could choose to withdraw those projections, putting them back where they belong: into the ritual containers of the community and the self.

Shared suffering is the great gift offered to us by otherness. We would realize that if we suffered together in that container, real democracy would invite a higher (in Christian terms, the Holy Spirit) – or deeper (in indigenous terms, the spirit of the land) – intelligence that could resolve much conflict. A metaphor for this work has already arisen out of this land: the spirit of Jazz improvisation, according to trumpeter Wynton Marsalis:

…to play Jazz, you’ve got to listen (to each other). The music forces you at all times to address what other people are thinking, and for you to interact with them with empathy…it gives us a glimpse into what America is going to be when it becomes itself.

Pulling back the projections, familiar with the nuanced complexity of the world and the vast gradations between black and white, we would notice that we had dropped our fascination with evil. We would remember that, as in the original Aramaic, a far more practical term to describe destructive behavior is unripe.

Finally, as an initiated nation, we could cook innocence down to a deeper level. Our own light would no longer blind us. We’d drop the burdensome role of grandiose, arrogant crusader, and joyfully realize that we are no different from the Other. We would no longer wonder, “Why do they hate us?” Innocence would then signify the most basic of all our mythic images: the opportunity for a new start. Then America could offer what the world has always wanted from us: not a consumer paradise or imperial policeman, but a story about opportunity. Everyone could drop an old, outdated identity, emerge from the fires of shared suffering, take on a new name that announces our purpose and dance our way home, welcomed by people who have never forgotten our song. It would make a hell of a story.