A recent piece in The Economist noted that some prognosticators are predicting AI, specifically Artificial General Intelligence, could drive annual GDP growth to 20% to 30%+ per year. Moreover, because AI can accomplish this without the need for more people—unlike the agrarian and industrial societies of generations past—GDP per capita should also balloon. What’s not to like? AI, the panacea for our times, here to usher in a utopian society where everyone is healthy and wealthy.

Such Pollyannish sentiments closely parallel the rhetoric from the dot com boom. New millionaires were being minted daily. Fundamentals didn’t matter. Stratospheric valuations still seemed underpriced. The internet and its growing number of websites would usher in a new era of prosperity, redefining the Good Life and changing forever how we live it. And it did. The advent of the Information Age and the proliferation of software have fundamentally improved life for everyone, everywhere, forever.

Or, so the Great Digital Myth goes.

Such sentiments constitute myths, not necessarily because they are false, but because they represent a cultural premise that shapes what we believe and how we behave. Unfortunately for the Great Digital Myth, there is an increasingly obvious body of evidence suggesting that information technology as we know it today has actually contributed to the deterioration of wealth and health in America. Now, this statement is bound to be controversial to many policymakers, investors, technologists, tech entrepreneurs, and believers in American Exceptionalism in general. I admit that this is a largely non-consensus view, but hear me out.

Some commentators have argued that AI is already having a positive impact on economic data. AI investments are essentially propping up a sluggish private capital market, with valuation levels teetering on “unhinged.” AI has also been the primary driver of public equity performance recently and will likely boost GDP in the coming quarters. But metrics like corporate earnings, stock performance, GDP, and GDP per capita can be terribly misleading. These measures are indicators of overall economic health, but say nothing about the social, economic, and physical health and wealth of individuals and households.

Indeed, I would argue that increasing investment in digital technologies and software since the advent of personal computing in the 1970s has crowded out investment in infrastructure and fixed assets that enable physical productivity, socioeconomic mobility, and a more connected culture. It should go without saying that infrastructure is essential to a healthy economy and a vibrant society. Our built environment literally shapes our world and how we experience it. While infrastructure is often seen as static, infrastructure and fixed asset innovation (think next generation energy and transportation technologies and 3D printing and additive manufacturing, for example), have the potential to transform the world we inhabit, for everyone.

In their new book, Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson blame bureaucracy for constraining supply dynamics that would otherwise made building physical systems like infrastructure and housing more affordable. While there is some truth to this, I also believe that the fixation on software has had a catastrophic opportunity cost: investment in tangible technologies, hardware systems, and critical infrastructure that could have transformed how we produce and distribute energy, build houses, create access to essential resources like food and healthcare, manufacture and move goods, and connect people to healthcare, employment, and other people.

Yet, U.S. public infrastructure spending as a share of GDP continues to fall and is nearly the lowest it’s been in 50 years. U.S. Gross Fixed Capital Formation, a measure of the amount invested in fixed assets, has long been in decline and has lagged significantly behind China since the 1970s. As is widely known, domestic manufacturing productivity has slowed over the last 15 years after decades of significant growth. The reasons for this slowdown are complex and involve not only global competition but also capital equipment investment levels and financial asset allocation. I believe one reason is that we stopped investing in hardware innovation. While it’s true that manufacturing R&D is up, much of this spending has been focused on digital transformation rather than hardware innovation. Using software to make processes more efficient can only get you so far. At some point, the entire method has to change. But you can’t truly transform how you make a physical product without physical transformation.

Theoretically, private spending should have filled these critical gaps, as is often necessary and occasionally observed in less developed nations. Yet, the opposite has happened. Private investment in infrastructure and fixed assets has declined precipitously decade over decade as investment in software and intangible assets have soared, along with wealth inequality.

Figure 1 below shows private investments in structures and equipment as a share of GDP (purple and blue), private investment in intangible IP assets such as software as a share of GDP (red), the consumption rate of fixed capital (yellow), and the share of net worth held by the top 1% (green).

We can see that in the late 1970s, private investment as a share of GDP starts a multi-generational decline while investment in IP starts to accelerate. The same Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) dataset demonstrates that the expansion of investment into IP is primarily driven by software. This decline in fixed asset investment is exacerbated by rising Consumption of Fixed Capital (CFC), which measures the decline in the value of fixed assets from things like wear and tear and obsolescence. The higher the CFC rate, the more fixed assets are being devalued. What’s interesting is that the U.S. GINI index, a popular measure of economic inequality, rises commensurately with increasing software investment. The parallelism between these two lines here should be interpreted cautiously as the GINI coefficient is measured on an entirely different index than these other metrics. Nevertheless, despite fluctuations related to macroeconomic booms and busts, inequality continues to rise as software investment increases and investment in infrastructure and fixed assets declines.

In Figure 2 below, chart A shows private software and IT equipment investment as a share of GDP relative to the GINI index. Chart B shows private software and IT investment relative to real individual income as a share of GDP. Chart C represents public (government) investment in fixed assets as a share of GDP relative to the GINI index. When the Y and Z axes are roughly leveled, we can see some interesting—but not necessarily causal—correlations. As private investment in software goes up, so does inequality. As private investment in software goes up, incomes go down. As public investment in fixed assets goes down, inequality goes up. Again, as with Figure 1, there seems to be a decoupling in the late 1970s that establishes a new correlation that largely holds to the present day.

Let’s assume, as a thought experiment, that there are causal correlations here. The most obvious conclusion would be that the increase in the share of economic resources being allocated to software investment, which started as the benefits of the Information Age became publicly available, depresses incomes and drives up inequality, particularly in the absence of public investment in infrastructure to support socioeconomic opportunity and wellbeing.

There is no doubt a confluence of political and economic factors impacted these trends. Frequently cited culprits include high inflation in the 1970s, a renormalization of the post-WWII economic boom period, increasing globalization, the end of the gold standard, de-unionization and deregulation, as well as others. It is largely acknowledged that something happens in the 1970s that begins hollowing out the American middle class and results in a host of negative long-term trends. Less frequently discussed, however, is the role that the Information Age, the advent of personal computing, and growth of the software sector may have had in causing or accelerating these trends, even if that role was to reduce or redirect investment that would have otherwise went into infrastructure and hard tech.

At the same time information technologies were making their way from the lab to the market, another industry was on the rise: private risk capital. Although the early iterations of venture capital arose after the Second World War, it wasn’t until the 1960s when the fund model we know today was devised. Tom Nicholas does an excellent job of chronicling the emergence of private risk capital models in VC: An American History. 10/10 highly recommend. Historical VC data tells the story well.

What we see in the four charts that comprise Figure 3 is information technology related patents surpassing patents for other forms of innovation by 1960 and then accelerating more aggressively in the late 1970s (upper left), when the value of digital investments started skyrocketing as demonstrated by the net asset value of American Research and Development Corporation, which is largely considered the first VC firm. We see the performance, size, and number of Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins (both major longstanding VC groups) funds grow through this period, leading to the late 1980s when digital technology patents start soaring into the dot com boom. Public equity market capitalization by sector also demonstrates the rise of digitally-focused investment patterns starting roughly around this period, but VC is typically the asset class that is most interested in funding higher-risk innovations with transformative potential.

Venture capitalists love software for its scalability characteristics. Rapid revenue growth can fuel superlinear margin expansion, generating capital efficient companies with high IRR yielding potential. Hypothetically, investments in digital technologies past and present should have yielded tremendous and broadly distributed benefits for businesses, individuals, and society. In some cases, this is undoubtedly true. The internet, for instance, is inarguably a General Purpose Technology (GPT; not to be confused with Generative Pre-trained Transformer), or technologies that have an infrastructure-level impact on an entire economy. But the internet wasn’t funded by visionary venture capitalists, but by the U.S. government. While the private sector occasionally innovates a GPT, such as the combustion engine and the transistor (although Bell Labs was founded with a government grant), most of the technologies that can be validly considered GPTs are largely government funded. This stands to reason given these technologies are typically far more complex than your average iPhone app—and, interestingly, they are most often NOT software.

While the internet leverages software to function, it is principally a network of physical devices supported by physical hardware such as servers, switches, routers, and internet exchange points. Think of history’s greatest GPTs: gunpowder, the steam engine, the printing press, the automobile, telephony, the airplane—all hardware. Many technologists and VCs are arguing that AI is a GPT. Some historians and economists, including some at the Federal Reserve, have their doubts.

Even if AI is a General Purpose Technology the current flavor of generative AI is unlikely to be able to repair the generations of damage we’ve done by ignoring physical GPTs in favor of software-based applications. Additive manufacturing is a prime example. Had we continued to invest in 3D printing technology, we may have been able to provide the abundant affordable housing that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson talk about in their book.

Additionally, even if AI unlocks heretofore unseen economic growth, who will benefit from such growth? If the thought experiment posed based on the data above is any indication, it is likely that only a well-positioned few will see any material benefit from AI. Sure, like all software, AI may make our lives more convenient, a little easier, a little more entertaining, but are they making our lives better?

Despite what some highly self-interested companies and CEOs have said, AI is more likely to be a net job destroyer than net job creator. I have long been frustrated with executives who, in public, say that AI is not going to take anyone’s job while, in private, they identify the cost reductions they can achieve by replacing employees with AI and automation. Fortunately, the truth is finally coming out as an increasing number of execs come clean and the data starts cutting through the delusional and deceptive Pollyannish rhetoric.

At the same time, loneliness is on the rise. We’re more connected to people, information, and ideas than at any prior point in history and yet we’re more lonely than we’ve ever been. Some recent studies have suggested anywhere from 40% to 50% of Americans suffer from frequent loneliness, with more than 20% reporting serious loneliness. Unsurprisingly, studies have found digital media play a role in exacerbating loneliness. You don’t say.

Relatedly, new research reveals that levels of conscientiousness have fallen significantly over the last decade among those aged 16-40. This group has become materially less extroverted, more neurotic, and less agreeable. This doesn’t seem surprising when you consider most people today experience the world through their phones. They travel through social media. Solve their problems through ChatGPT. Meet people over Zoom. Find love on OnlyFans. Are we even human any more?

Despite these maladies, the investor class responsible for fomenting innovation continues to support digital apps designed to trap us in this paradigm, where we can be tracked and sold to, where we can lose ourselves while losing our humanity. And the general purpose innovations and fixed asset investments that would help truly connect us in the physical world, build cheaper homes, supply more abundant energy, access healthier food and ever-better healthcare, and create jobs and opportunities that will yield a broader distribution of benefits, nobody is investing in those. They’re too hard. The holding period too long. The R&D risk too high. Risk capital is no longer interested in real risk, or isn’t willing to take risk on the things that matter.

Say what you will about Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic, but he is right to point out that the origins of modern venture capital and information technology are very much rooted in the pursuit of higher ideals, particularly the defense of our nation. Indeed, the Department of Defense was the creator, funder, and/or customer for many of the early information technologies that drove the trends seen in the charts above.

Today, we desperately need to invest in our national defense once again, not to protect ourselves from a foreign adversary, but to protect ourselves from ourselves, to rescue our citizens from the digital addictions we have created and reveal Great Digital Myth for what it is: a lie. Your life is out there, in the world. You are an embodied creature who needs an embodied experience. Instead of investing in yet another digital delusion, let us invest in new modes of transportation that will take us new places. Let us invest in new social infrastructure that will connect us with new people. Let us invest in better construction tech that will allow us to build a better world. Let us invest in new life science that will help us live longer. Let us invest in new sources of power that will power the next generation of ideas. Let us invest in the general purpose innovations that matter so that in our attempts to make artificial intelligence more human we don’t end up making humans artificial.

Interestingly, surveys have shown that while 80% of Americans believe more manufacturing jobs are good for America, only 25% think a manufacturing job would be better for them. People want America to make more things as long as they aren’t the ones making them. How very American.

Why do we want more manufacturing if nobody wants manufacturing jobs? What is it about the idea of manufacturing that holds such power over the American psyche? Why do so many continue to have a nostalgia for, even an affinity for, a generations-old industrial paradigm, a bygone era characteristic of less advanced, secondary sector economies?

People who pine for a return to a manufacturing-based economy often describe a portrait of America reminiscent of the 1950s, when the country experienced a decade of high employment, low inflation, and expanding consumer purchasing power. But when we summon mental imagery of this era, we don’t actually think of mid-20th century manufacturing, such as the black and white photos below.

Instead, what we more frequently envision when someone invokes the golden age of manufacturing is an idealized version of post-WWII life best represented not in the black and white photography of the day, but in the color ads of the period that perfectly capture the collective memory, however biased, of this belle époque.

It’s not really about manufacturing. It’s about the life people had when manufacturing dominated our economy. It’s about the sharply dressed All Americans we see above immersed a life of leisure at home and abroad, enjoying each other's company amid the marvels that modern manufacturing has minted. These are the images, and ideas that that are evoked and intended when people invoke the power and promise of American manufacturing. It is this lifestyle of stability, fulfillment, abundance, prosperity, and content that people yearn to reclaim. America was better when we made things. People’s lives were better when we made things.

The implied retrofuturist narrative here is a myth, not necessarily because it is false. It indeed contains certain historical truths. It is a myth because this narrative has, regardless of whether it is true or false, become sacred to so many, shaping what they believe and how they behave, who they vote for and what policies they support. Many, if not most, economists have rejected the notion that this manufacturing-based paradigm is retrievable. Yet, their objections are irrelevant. This narrative has attained the status of the sacred and is, therefore, irrefutable in the minds and hearts of adherents.

It is true that in the Golden Age of 1950s, the post-WWII acceleration of industry, technology, consumerism, and births sent U.S. GDP northward and set the stage for 75 years of American dominance. Yet, in adjusted dollar terms, most Americans are financially better off today and work far less today than back in the 50s.

So why the desire to return to an era where people actually worked more and had less? While there are economic reasons, such as more pronounced wealth and income inequality, that could be fomenting the myth of manufacturing, the level of fervor and devotion to this ideology seems to indicate a deeper psychological and sociological anxiety. The problem, I contend, is more social than it is economic.

Indeed, the social construct of society has changed in slight but impactful ways since the 1950s. For instance, we still have living rooms, but the family dynamic—where there is one—looks a lot different from then to now:

In the 50s, families gathered together to share experiences. Network television enabled a communal experience that was shared by everyone, regardless of your background, location, or income. Today, the proliferation of devices and content has created a household where family members experience different things separately. No longer are we sharing a common encounter, but pursuing our own journeys, which may bring us together or lead us apart, but in either case eroding the sense of community and unity that is so obviously present in many of those vibrantly colored advertisements from the 1950s.

Similarly, people in the 1950s gathered in community to exchange information and conduct commerce. Tupperware Parties, for instance, were an inherently social gathering. In fact, the socialization component was a big part of the draw. Today, conversely, such information is characteristically shared by lone influencers on their phones and received by lone individuals on their phones, not in a social setting but in a solipsistic one.

The very act of interacting with thousands or even millions through one’s phone has an opportunity cost. It sacrifices the opportunity to interact with those who are actually present. Even though the internet enables one-to-many communication, the lived reality of how information is shared is most often one-to-one. Gone is the social and communal dimension of information transfer, a shift perhaps exacerbated by the creeping normalization of pandemic era social distancing practices.

Is it possible that the Golden Age of the 1950s seems so retrospectively resplendent because people behaved more like people and less like extensions of their technology? Is it possible that the 50s represented a better balance between technological convenience and social fulfillment? Is it possible that people were more content because they were a part of a more cohesive community? Is it possible that in the decades since our country evolved beyond the manufacturing stage of its economy that people have actually become more manufactured? In the 50s, people’s livelihoods may have been predicated on the manufacture of products, but their lives were predicated on interaction with people.

Is it also possible that, in addition to these types of technology-driven social shifts, the manufacturing paradigm gave people more pride and purpose in their work? After all, the act of creating something is, according to famed 20th century psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, one of the primary ways individuals find meaning. Manufacturing gave people a sense of accomplishment. Through their labor and technique, something tangible, physical, usable, consumable, valuable was produced, something their family and friends, neighbors and colleagues could purchase and enjoy.

Fast forward to today. The value our “tertiary” service-based economy produces value that is often more ephemeral, more transitory, and less concrete than the physical goods produced through manufacturing. For instance, an electrician fixes things but doesn’t produce anything new. Manufacturing in the 50s also required some level of skill. A retail store associate, on the other hand, has very few unique skills. Even though manufacturing was often repetitive, the thing you created was often something you could use or consume. Conversely, a hair dresser can’t really use or consume their work. Is it possible that, today, our non-cognitive routine jobs feel less meaningful because they are, ultimately, less creative?

Even some STEM related careers championed by educators over the last 20 years are becoming less creative and more routine. For instance, Tech executives have warned that AI will start obsoleting some software engineer jobs as no-code development tools continue to improve. Even if these new AI tools don’t eliminate software developer jobs, they may make them more routine, less creative, and ultimately less meaningful. If we aren’t making things, if we aren’t creating things, do we sacrifice, at the altar of convenience and efficiency, a vital part of what it means to be human?

Unfortunately, many of history’s most creative and meaningful pursuits, such as art and philosophy, have been abandoned at the pre-collegiate and even collegiate level over the last 30 years in favor of more professionally oriented courses of study. We have traded the disciplines that deepen and dimensionalize human existence, that allow us to be creators and ideators, for those with more practical application. Ironically, many of the occupations, save perhaps those in the healthcare industry, that people chased out of our educational system over the last few decades are now being disrupted by AI and automation. In fact, some of the most resistant careers are those that intersect creativity, compassion, community, and culture. Given how aggressively we have exorcised the liberal arts from our educational system and our society, is it a surprise that we are so starved for creativity, so starved for community?

Maybe the golden age of the 1950s can indeed be ours again, but more domestic manufacturing is not the solution. It’s a red herring. It’s a solution to the wrong problem. The real problem isn’t that people need more manufacturing jobs (which they don’t want anyway). In fact, the average manufacturing wage is not much more than the national average for all jobs. The real problem is, it seems to me, that people are starved for the sense of purpose, meaning, and belonging that accompanied the manufacturing paradigm of the 1950s. Back then people took pride in their work. They felt a sense of creativity and accomplishment that gave their work meaning. They went home to a tighter knit community with a single, shared collective experience. Out of the ashes of the Second World War came a world that felt orderly, cohesive, and hopeful. Such a world can be ours again, but we need to demythologize and desacralize the myth of manufacturing.

The problem isn’t the lack of manufacturing, it’s the lack of creativity, community, and humanity. These are the things we need to focus on reclaiming, and they can be reclaimed without burning to the ground the world order that prior generations worked so hard to manufacture.

Interestingly, lessons from Religious Studies can help identify and illuminate the characteristics that separate top-performing immersive experiences from more pedestrian ones. Religions, after all, have been creating immersive experiences for millennia.

Take Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, for example. At over 10,000 years old, Göbekli Tepe is widely regarded as the oldest existing religious site and likely functioned as the central temple of the village. With giant pillars scraping the sky, Göbekli Tepe would have undoubtedly awed neolithic denizens, teleporting them into the heavens and bringing them closer to their gods. In its day, this structure likely represented an a level of immersion and experience surpassing anything the world had seen.

Newgrange in Ireland, an over 5,000 years old monument-tomb, represents an even more sophisticated approach to building immersive religious experiences, using architecture to create time-based light effects. On the Winter Solstice, sunlight enters a small opening on the roof of the Newgrange mound at a precise angle such that the light is guided down the mound’s passageway and into the burial chamber. As the sun continues to rise, the sunbeam expands to illuminate the entire chamber.

Far from being a clever lighting gimmick, the entrance of light into the tomb on the Winter Solstice held spiritual significance for Newgrange’s builders and was intertwined with their religious mythology. In ancient Irish mythology, Newgrange is described as a passage into another world and the tracing of light through the darkness on the Solstice is reminiscent of the myth of the chief god, Dagda, coming into the world and suspending the sun to lengthen the day (in pursuit of a woman, no less). At Newgrange, light, darkness, space, and time all intermix to create a unique immersive experience enhanced by the deeper spiritual meaning imparted through its mythological connections.

Like Göbekli Tepe and Newgrange, many modern immersive experiences rely heavily on the design of the built environment to influence what we see, hear, think, and feel. One common tactic is the use of the “cathedral effect,” in which high ceilings are employed to evoke a sense of awe and wonder. This effect is often accentuated by moving people from a more confined space with lower ceilings into an area with more volume and higher ceilings to create contrast and amplify the effect. Beyond actual cathedrals and places of worship, a lot of structures use this tactic to enhance the experience of their spaces.

But, the emotional impact of the cathedral effect is typically more pronounced in environments that have cultural or mythological significance. Take the examples below. The Burj al Arab hotel lobby (top left) and Singapore’s Changi Airport (top middle) are architecturally striking structures and undoubtedly inspire a moment of awe. Similarly, Meow Wolf in Denver (top right) uses a literal cathedral of color set in a cavernous room as the centerpiece of its immersive experience. Entering the room for the first time, one can not help but pause in surprise, arrested for an instant by the vividness of the cathedral at Convergence Station. Yet, all of these are purely visual delights. They are spectacle for the senses, but do not evoke a strong, enduring emotional or cognitive reaction. As such, none of these experiences is likely to be as memorable or impactful as the bottom three.

For the Star Wars fan, entering the star destroyer hangar in the Galaxy’s Edge Rise of the Resistance ride (bottom left) pulls fans into a place that they’ve only seen on screen, a reality they’ve dreamt of since they were kids and longed to be a part of. Walking into Foundation Hall in the 9/11 Museum (bottom middle), the din of the other visitors is diminished by the cavernous space, their voices reduced to distant echoes as silent reverence takes hold, the enormous hall reflecting the enormity of the most scarring tragedy in our collective memory. Still globally unmatched is the scale and grandeur of St. Peter’s Basilica (bottom right), which has for centuries made believers and non-believers alike feel both small—as miniscule as we must be in the eyes of God—and in the same instant deeply connected to those around us and the heavens beyond us.

The places on the bottom row have more experiential gravity, more felt power because they draw on familiar narratives to connect us to a bigger mythology, to our beliefs, our memories, ourselves. They are not just sensually striking. They are inherently meaningful. They use immersive techniques to manifest a myth, a story, a past, a future, the here and now, and the hereafter. They are not spectacle for the sake of spectacle. They are spectacle in the service of something deeper, something more profound, something that we and those around us care intensely about.

The lesson here for immersive experiences is to create concepts that go beyond the sensory and incorporate intellectual, emotional, and cultural elements that can tap into accepted myths and narratives to deepen and dimensionalize the experience. Alternatively, if you’re creating a self-contained experience from scratch, creating a companion mythology can help make an experience more dynamic, immersing people not only in a space, but a story.

Myth’s close relative, ritual, is another critical ingredient in the world’s most powerful and memorable experiences that religions have long leveraged. It’s not just about the built environment. Something has to happen in that environment. The architecture of a church can be powerful, but the space is activated through ritual, through the rites and liturgies, the scents and sounds, the motions and movements.

One reason the Roman Catholic Church has been enduringly successful is its employment of ritual, sacraments, and sacramentals as experiential tools. Worshippers dip their fingers into water. They inhale incense. They hold the cup in their hand, the wine on their lips, the bread on their tongue. They sit. They stand. Each action signifying some otherworldly meaning. These types of activations make the experience highly participatory. Worshippers do not simply observe. They partake. They are now part of the experience, part of the story, part of the myth. They are not simply onlookers or bystanders staring at a spectacle, but participants helping to power the spectacular. This type of coherent activation is necessary to create an experience that feels truly immersive. But, it’s not just about activity for the sake of activity. Each action needs to be connected to all the others and all the actions, collectively, need to strengthen the underpinning idea or point of the experience. A unified throughline of actions that tells its own part of the larger story.

For a non-religious example of this we can return to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, an impressively immersive land that includes themed dining, retail, rides, and performances. Disney’s park staff are famously called cast members, a title that is well-deserved at Galaxy’s Edge where the attire of the employees bolsters the experience. Beyond this, however, Galaxy’s Edge includes live performances featuring characters from the Star Wars movies that tie into the storyline of the rides, particularly the land’s marquee ride, Rise of the Resistance. The characters also interact with guests, further deepening the level of activation and participation. You observe the story unfolding in the park, are enrolled into the story through interaction with the characters, and then become a character yourself on the rides.

Other themed experiences, such as ride-based theme parks (as opposed to experience-based parks) and art-driven experiences such as Meow Wolf, lack this level of activation. Participation is limited to interaction with the environment, but there are no interpersonal elements or recurring ritual-like activities. The lack of activation and participation, however, reduces the immersive realism of such “experiences.”

Charting the variety of the experiences mentioned above on a spectrum might yield something approximating the scale below, where experiences often labeled as immersive can range from quasi-immersive to completely immersive and have varying levels of reality distortion, with reality replacing being a complete subversion and substitution of known reality with an alternative one.

Legacy theme parks such as Six Flags are merely quasi-immersive, only enhancing reality but at no point do guests in these experiences feel as if they have stepped out of their own reality. Such theme parks leverage physical thrills to enhance reality, but are not surrounding guests with a new one. Meow Wolf and similar experiences suspend reality by surrounding guests with a high-spectacle, high-stimulation environment that is largely enclosed (i.e. once you’re in the environment, you can’t detect the external environment). The use of space, light, sound, contrast, and anachronistic detail helps suspend reality while in the environment. However, such experiences lack activation and a strong narrative throughline (although there is typically some basic tangential and unessential storyline). As we’ve seen, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge allows you, to some degree, escape reality by making you a participant in a highly activated and interactive largely closed environment. For many, this is the ideal level of immersion. It transports you to another world, one you know and have an affinity for, surrounds you with activity that makes you feel like you are part of that world, but never to a degree that is uncomfortable, threatening, or awkward.

This is perhaps the magic of religious experiences. The best ones surround you, arouse you, engage you, and make you an actor in the drama unfolding. It’s not just about inspiring environments that embody a religion’s myths. It’s also about activation and participation that strengthen that mythology. This is ultimately the entire point of Galaxy’s Edge, to reinforce and deepen the Star Wars mythology, bringing it to life in ways that cannot be achieved on screen.

Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Hotel, however, was an example of an experience that was perhaps too immersive, warping reality to a degree that made people feel trapped and out of place. The hotel was conceived as an entirely closed, fully immersive, live action role playing experience that asked hotel guests to role play characters within the broader narrative unfolding throughout a spaceship-hotel called the Halcyon. Disney’s intent was to make people feel—and think—like they were actually in the Star Wars universe. Some observes even dubbed it Westworld for Star Wars fans, making Starcruiser arguably the most immersive experience ever devised. While the price point was a huge impediment to the hotel’s success, many reported that the experience was too regimented and too immersive, creating a rigid, participatorily claustrophobic, escape room-like experience—not necessarily how most people want to spend their Disney World vacation. Needless to say, the market for this level of immersion is significantly narrower than that of Galaxy’s Edge. Perhaps predictably, Starcruiser closed after 18 months in operation.

There is perhaps an uncanny valley of immersive experiences, where the commercially ideal level of immersion is accomplished at a reality escaping level, a level where people can participate when they want and disengage when they want. If one is using immersive experiences as a form of entertainment, an overly immersive experience such as Starcruiser might make participants feel trapped, stuck in a world not their own. No longer are they tourists in a novel universe, but permanent residents. No longer are they teleported into a spectacular environment, but held against their will. At some point, people remember that they’re still an accountant from Iowa on vacation with their family. They are not a member of the rebel resistance, as much as Disney may try to convince them they are. They still have to worry about the cost of the trip, the emails backing up, the sick family member at home, whether the neighbor remembered to walk the dog. Whereas Galaxy’s Edge captures a religion-esque level of participatory reality distortion, Starcruiser borders on a cult that you can’t escape. Immersive experiences are meant to be an escape, but they implode if they start to feel like something you need to escape from.

At the extreme of our spectrum is Westworld, a fictitious experience depicted in HBO’s television series of the same name. A Westworld-depth experience may pull participants out of the uncanny valley by achieving a level of immersion that is entirely reality replacing, where there is no awkward role playing required because the experience is so real, so complete, so perfect, so participatory that it becomes your new reality. Not even religion accomplishes this level of reality replacement. Despite its efforts, religion is not actually able to transport people out of this plane of existence and into a higher one. The sense of otherworldliness created by religion is still manifest in the world we know. Given the advance of AI and robotics, a Westworld-like experience that serves as a near-total replacement of the reality could one day exist. What impact such experiences will have on humanity’s sense of reality and sense of self is yet to be seen.

The one advantage that religion has, and may always have, over secular immersive experiences is that people believe the underlying myth to be true. Regardless of how immersive Disney makes Galaxy’s Edge, nobody believes that a long time ago in a galaxy far far away the Star Wars saga actually occurred. It is known to be fiction and, as such, its derivative experiences offer merely entertainment value. Conversely, religious experiences create profound existential value, forming the basis of people’s sense of self, meaning, and belonging. While Star Wars has a devoted community of fans, few if any would be willing to die in the name of the rebellion. Nonetheless, a Star Wars themed experience is likely to be more meaningful to people than a more recently constructed and mythologically thin experience such as Meow Wolf, underscoring the importance of having a larger, more expansive mythology to undergird and power the experience.

“I was saved by God to make America great again.”
-President Donald Trump

Anyone who doesn’t think mythology is important in the 21st century should read or watch President Trump’s Inaugural Address.

While to some extent all political speech advances a political myth (ideology in narrative form), Trump’s Inaugural was dense with allusions to American mythology. These foundational American myths were used throughout the speech to reinforce the MAGA myth, the belief that America was great, is now broken, and Trump’s vision can Make America Great Again. Interestingly, as this post will discuss, it is “again” that is perhaps the most powerful word in this phrase—a reference to some better time before that anchors the MAGA myth in our nation’s sacred history.

As is widely known, this MAGA narrative is not original. Reagan used it in 1980 to similar effect. The MAGA myth is, however, markedly different from other “Change” narratives, such as those employed by President Obama in 2008. The Change narrative proposes that things need to be different, but those things could be entirely new. They may or may not be good, but they will be different. The MAGA narrative, alternatively, suggests that things actually need to revert to how they were. Things were great and they can be again. We’re not merely changing, we’re bringing sexy back. The goal is to return to a prior state, to either go back to where we were or bring where we were forward into where we are. “There was a dream that was Rome. It shall be realized.”

Trump is quick to remind listeners that “those who wish to stop our cause” tried to take his life and that he was “saved by God to make America great again,” invoking the Divine Right of Kings that has been used for centuries to legitimize rulers the world over. All of this works to cultivate the religious fervor of the MAGA movement and strengthen the MAGA myth. God has elected Trump, has anointed Trump, has spared his life and returned him to America until his mission is accomplished. “I’ve been sent back until my task is done.”

Trump then rifles through a host of specific policy actions. These measures, he claims, will resurrect the American Dream. “The American dream will soon be back and thriving like never before,” Trump says. If we do these things, America will “reclaim its rightful place as the greatest, most powerful, most respected nation on earth, inspiring the awe and admiration of the entire world.” America was “history’s greatest nation” and it can be so again. A new “golden age” has begun.

How do we know America was history’s greatest nation? Trump tells us, summarily reciting a litany of many of America’s great foundational myths:

“Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls…Americans pushed thousands of miles through a rugged land of untamed wilderness. They crossed deserts, scaled mountains, braved untold dangers, won the Wild West, ended slavery, rescued millions from tyranny, lifted billions from poverty, harnessed electricity, split the atom, launched mankind into the heavens, and put the universe of human knowledge into the palm of the human hand. If we work together, there is nothing we cannot do and no dream we cannot achieve…our country was forged and built by the generations of patriots who gave everything they had for our rights and for our freedom. They were farmers and soldiers, cowboys and factory workers, steelworkers and coal miners, police officers and pioneers who pushed onward, marched forward, and let no obstacle defeat their spirit or their pride. Together, they laid down the railroads, raised up the skyscrapers, built great highways, won two world wars, defeated fascism and communism, and triumphed over every single challenge that they faced.

There aren’t many presidential speeches that successfully pack this much mythological kitsch into a single speech. Nearly every foundational American identity trope is crammed into a few paragraphs. I cannot think of another piece of prose or poetry that is as dense with Americana, that so flagrantly and unabashedly rehashes and re-presents the American myth.

While Trump’s vocabulary throughout the speech is quite cliché, as if assembled from dozens of different action movie scenes, it’s also quite effective. It strikes an aggressive tone that will resonate with the young men that propelled Trump back to office while simultaneously instilling fear in Trump’s enemies. It also frames the next four years as an epic struggle to reclaim what's rightfully ours, a quest for an Eden long lost, a battle for a Promised Land vaguely remembered.

Trump echoes, in what was likely a deliberate choice by his speechwriter, Herman Melville’s noted line from White-Jacket: “And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people....We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.” Indeed, when reminded of all these great deeds, what can one conclude except that ours was the greatest nation and we were the greatest people—a greatness we must rediscover, for it is rightfully ours.

These images of a bold, ambitious, and pioneering nation give our country and its accomplishments significance and meaning. These old American myths, the ones that built this nation, still strike many as impressive. Even in light of all of America’s foibles and failures, our deep myths still project greatness, they still arouse a sense of pride and passion, devotion and determination. Their legitimacy supports, strengthens, and sanctifies the MAGA myth, grounding its vision not in something new and untested but something foundational and proven.

By anchoring the MAGA movement in America’s foundational myths, Trump connects his myth to our nation’s origin stories and makes the greatness of our past present to us today. This isn’t a myth about Change or moving Forward. On the contrary, it’s what University of Chicago historian Mircea Eliade called a “myth of the eternal return.”

In his examination of ancient myths (which is not unproblematic), Eliade proposed that ancients divided existence into sacred time and profane time. Profane time is the ordinary time we know, with all its imperfections and discontents. Conversely, sacred time represents the time of origins when the world was created through the great deeds of gods or heroes, such as those enumerated by Trump. Eliade observed that these sacred origin myths often structure a society’s beliefs and behaviors, giving meaning and value to people's lives.

The significance and gravity of these origin stories motivate constant attempts to return to the sacred time of origins, where people can rediscover a sense of individual and collective value and identity. In profane time, humanity experiences what Eliade called the “terror of history,” the horror of being unable to return to the sacred time of our origins. Societies thus construct new myths and rituals in order to reconnect with their origins, to sanctify profane time and give it meaning by making the past present, to eternally return to that time when our originary purpose and value was bequeathed to us by our gods or ancestors. We aim to make time cyclical, to constantly return to our origins so that we might re-encounter the meaning of life in illo tempore, in those times, when it all began.

Ritual behavior intended to return us to the sacred time of origins can be found in many ancient cultures around the world. Eliade cited aboriginal Australian cultures that retraced ancient rock paintings to reawaken their power as well as ancient Mesopotamian cultures that reenacted their creation myths at the start of every new year to sanctify the coming year by instilling a sense of rebirth and renewal. In Hinduism, time itself is cyclical. At some point, the world always cycles back to the Krita Yuga, the golden age of the gods when truth and purity reign. In Catholicism, the Eucharistic ritual is an anamnesis, a memorial or recollection of Christ’s sacrifice. But this recollection isn’t simply symbolic, it’s efficacious. The act of recollecting makes us participants in the original act itself. It doesn’t just recall the past, but it makes the past present to us today so the power of Christ’s sacrifice can be made accessible to us today.

The MAGA myth espoused in Trump’s Inaugural Address is, in many ways, a myth of eternal return that calls forth America’s origin stories to sanctify and legitimize the MAGA movement’s beliefs and give them deeper historical meaning. For the last four years of Biden, we have been living in profane time. But now, by returning to the foundational ideals that once made America great, we can reinstate sacred time, a golden age of prelapsarian utopia.

Trump, here, bears out Eliade’s thesis. A call to return to the sacred time of our origins proves more compelling than calls for progress. Our greatness is in the past, memorialized in the stories of our nation’s pioneering heroes and their deeds. To make America great again, we must reclaim, recapture, recreate, and return to those times, those values, those stories. This eternal return makes the MAGA myth tremendously primitive and powerful.

Beyond simply being an argument from nostalgia or a form of golden age bias, Trump's message speaks to the very core of the American mythos, evoking the original principles that forged our nation. By re-presenting these originary myths, Trump gives his followers a sense of meaning, purpose, and self-worth grounded in illo tempore, in those times when America and its values were created. In illo tempore, we were bolder. In illo tempore, we were more ambitious. In illo tempore, we were more. In illo tempore, we were greater. We can make those times our time. We can make that world our world. We were great once and we can be great again, if we return to our origins. Our country was founded by pioneers, and you too can be one. You too can participate in the great deeds of the past. You too can help rebuild the world. You too can help restore our former glory. You too can help re-sanctify America. You too can Make America Great Again. God saved Donald Trump. God now calls us back to greatness. Who can say no to such a call?

Regardless of what one thinks of Trump and his policies, the mythological character of his Inaugural Address is remarkable and bears close resemblance to the myths of eternal return that have for millennia been used to provide meaning to people and exert power over them.

From this increasingly defensive posture emerged what has been called the ‘manosphere,’ the disparate assortment of content and media dedicated to the promotion of masculinity. Many politicos have noted the pivotal role the manosphere played in Trump’s win. Just as Obama used social media to outmaneuver McCain in the 2008 election, so too did Trump harness the power of the manosphere media complex to outmaneuver Harris in this one. From Andrew Tate to Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson, Trump, beyond being a man, embraced the manosphere while Harris ignored it, dismissing it as a decentralized fringe movement. Admittedly, it took the bros a little while to rally the troops, get organized, build infrastructure, anoint leadership, and find their voice—but, now that they’ve mobilized, the male resistance is proving formidable. Feminism v4, once in full advance, is now in retreat. For evidence of this retreat look no further than the trad wife trend and viral hits like “I'm looking for a man in finance,” which reinforce neo-masculine narratives. Some feminists have responded by embracing the 4B movement, but this itself seems like a form of surrender.

Commentators such as Scott Galloway have focused on the increasing economic challenges facing young men as the primary driver for the rise of the manosphere and anti-female sentiment. There is absolutely truth to this. Women in this election served as a convenient and effective scapegoat for the socioeconomic struggles of young men, just as immigrants served as a scapegoat for the economic stagnation of the working class.

Yet, viewing the rise of the pro-male/anti-female narratives as a purely economic phenomenon risks missing broader historical dialectics that reveal a disconcerting scarcity of identity and meaning granting systems and institutions. While today’s narratives of masculinity are in part a reaction to economic realities, they were not created by these realities. These narratives are not new and are deeply rooted in history. In many ways, the ‘menaissance’ is a ressourcement, a return to a set of masculine myths from earlier eras. The myths of manhood that are being proffered today are ancient and deeply ingrained in our cultural lexicon. Such narratives generally include some version of the man-as-hero myth or other forms of the masculus superior narrative. In some cases, we see these myths implied through an enantiomorphic, anti-female form, typically through one of several woman-as-subordinate narratives.

Men have long been the main characters in stories, both ancient and modern, both fact or fiction. King Arthur, Robin Hood, Beowulf, Hercules, George Washington, George Patton, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King Jr., Luke Skywalker, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Iron Man, Ant Man, Captain America. And, when they are not the main character, they are still a heroic character. See any pre-Mulan Disney movie. Moreover, in most, but certainly not all, religious myths the godhead-in-chief was most often male. Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, Ahura Mazda, Enki, Ra, Marduk, Quetzalcōātl, Yahweh, et alia. Oh, and of course, Jesus.

While there are many important female deities across history’s polytheistic religions, they are frequently heavily associated with strictly feminine characteristics, such as fertility, love, marriage, and beauty. Aphrodite, Durga, Gaia, Inanna, Frigg, and Coatlicue, as examples. In several cases, female divinities also appear as goddesses of death, night, or the underworld. Hel, Hecate, and Ereshkigal, for instance. The goddess is very often either a mother or an undertaker, but rarely the god over all others, rarely the god that bids the sun rise, rarely the god that brings the world as we know it into existence. The role of the feminine divinity extends only from “womb to tomb,” notes Joseph Campbell, the progenitor of the now-ubiquitous (and highly problematic) Hero’s Journey.

Speaking of Campbell, the Hero’s Journey has profoundly shaped the evolution of masculinity narratives over the last half-century, directly or indirectly influencing countless hits, from Star Wars to The Matrix. Campbell’s journey, however, largely assumes that heroes must be male. In his original framework, which has since been adapted for more general use by the marketing industry, the hero encounters a goddess and, through his skills, woos her into a mystical marriage. “The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion, but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world,” he writes in The Hero with a Thousands Faces. While Campbell allows for the adventurer to be female, the female’s journey involves being courted by a male god, a la the Virgin Mary. The woman is the pursued, but not the pursuer. The male, however, can seduce a goddess, unlock secret knowledge, overcome cosmic challenges, and become a hero, a king, a god.

These myths of manhood are among the oldest in our cultural repository and their historical inertia makes them extremely difficult to change, much less eradicate. The fact that the manosphere’s narratives are not merely generations old, but millennia old, makes them more resilient and more powerful. They may be primitive, but they’re also proven. Philosopher Hans Blumenberg thought that myths went through a process of cultural selection, whereby they adapted or died. The ones that survived became dense with meaning. Their survivability over long periods of time allows their significance to compound, the myth becoming more potent each generation it endures. If this is the case, the myths of manhood currently shaping politics and culture are nothing short of antifragile.

While some have judged these narratives “toxic,” they ought to have been expected. It’s social physics. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Many men felt that the Me Too Movement, whether explicitly or implicitly, whether intentionally or incidentally, villainized men. While most Feminists do not identify as anti-male, how Feminists think is less important than how men feel. Men feel assailed, assaulted, demonized. They feel less, less like heroes, kings, and gods and more like second class citizens, criminals, servants, and slaves. Pro-male/anti-female rhetoric is the reaction to this sentiment. “Hostilities exist,” the man said. “There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.” And so The Menpire Strikes Back.

And, who can blame them? Men have been told for generations, for centuries, for millennia that they are the heroes of history. Every time a man opens a book, there is a man performing great deeds. Every time they turn on the TV, there is a man saving the day. In every news cycle, there is a man leading nations. In every museum, there are imposing statues of great men. In every boardroom, there are men at the head of the table. Walk into any Catholic Church and there is a man on the cross saving all of humanity. History has been by men for men. Society has been by men for men. Is this right? Perhaps not. But it is. And, so when men are told that they do not have a monopoly on heroism, that queens are just as powerful as kings, that they are not the gods they thought themselves to be, something doesn’t add up. The math doesn’t math. It does not compute, because it is not the myth men have been told.

These realities are what feminism has attempted to change, but taking man’s myth head on is a poor strategy. This long view is not intended to excuse anti-social masculine behavior or anti-female rhetoric, but it does illustrate the difficulty in changing the myth. It’s not simply about improving economic outcomes for young men, although that will certainly help. But even in times of economic prosperity, the old myths of masculinity still persist. The form that they take may change with economic factors, but their existence is thoroughly intertwined with history and seeded in sociological, psychological, and anthropological dynamics, to say nothing of biological and evolutionary ones.

What is more interesting than the path dependent and deeply historical nature of modern myths of masculinity is why men keep returning to them time and time again. These ancient masculine myths seem to serve as a source of individual and collective identity for many men, particularly young men and particularly in times of uncertainty. When you think about it, this actually makes a lot of sense.

Young people, both men and women, have fewer dimensions on which to predicate their sense of self. Most are not advanced enough in their careers to base their identity on their professional accomplishments, they are less likely to be married or have kids, they are less likely to be widely traveled, and more likely to have experienced social isolation either due to the intermediation of “social” media or the perhaps the pandemic. What else besides their inherited traits, such as sex or race, do they have as a foundation for a stable, reliable sense of self?

Similarly, in times of uncertainty, newer myths—myths that have not gone through Blumenberg’s process of natural selection—aren’t as resilient. People recourse to the proven narratives that are widely accepted by their in-group. While newer, more innovative, more contemporary myths may be more egalitarian, more optimistic, or more unifying, their novelty will typically result in lower mythological adoption. A new myth, even if compelling, will still be less known, less accepted, and therefore less resilient. For instance, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang garnered a national following in the 2020 election when he attempted to craft a unifying narrative around the dangers of technology, using automation as a scapegoat rather than any group of individuals such as women or immigrants. While Yang’s predictions were logical, they lacked sufficient narrative contagion given they were grounded in the future rather than the past. But the past is what people know. Past experience is how we learn who we are and define who we want to become. The myths of manhood are deeply grounded in the past, making them difficult to unseat and easy to return to in times of doubt.

The crisis facing young men today is not merely economic. It is also the lack of new myths capable of giving young men a sense of self that’s grounded in something beyond their biological characteristics. Many of the West’s traditional institutions of religion, community, family, etc., long responsible for providing people with meaning and identity, have not fared well in the secular, digital age. In the absence of other options, old stalwarts such as nationalism and sexism have stepped back in. When threatened, people have a tendency to revert to primitive behaviors, primitive beliefs, their basest biological and cultural coding. Feminism, rather than try to fight the male myth, should focus on fostering and nurturing pro-social systems of meaning that offer both men and women an identity based on something beyond their sex. That isn't to say sex is not an important aspect of one’s identity, but it is to suggest that it need not be the foundation of it or the totality of it.

To predicate one’s identity on their sex is to ground who you are in something you have not chosen, something that has been received rather than seized, given rather than taken, inherited rather than elected. According to the myth of manhood, this seems entirely unmasculine. A man’s identity should be fought for, his hero myth forged by fire and validated by victory. It should be be determined, not by one’s parents, but by one’s accomplishments, by what the hero does, not what sex the hero is. The true man is measured by his deeds, by what he accomplishes, by the demons he defeats, by the worlds he saves. One could argue that basing one’s identity on the myth of their sex (or other inherited traits) assumes that you can’t create your own identity, that you are not god the demiurge, creator of the cosmos, that you are forever a prisoner, a captive, a slave to what others bequeathed to you. Nothing seems more unmasculine.

As a society, we need to find something else besides our inherited traits to anchor on. We need to coalesce around new institutions, new myths that tell a new story about who we are and why we, as individuals, have value and worth. We need to embrace more constructive narratives that motivate us to build something better together, a narrative that doesn't pit people against each other but people against a problem, a narrative that focuses on who we can become not who we were. What myths of personal and collective identity might have such gravity in the digital age I leave for another discussion.

This is the final of three posts on myths that influenced the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. See the other two on the Myth of Democracy and the Myth of the Migrant. All observations are intended to be apolitical. I take no normative stance on the outcome of the election.

The election produced a host of competing and at times sensational narratives about immigrants and immigration. Despite what some would describe as vitriolic rhetoric about immigrants, Trump effectively ran away with the Latino vote, to the shock of many Harris supporters. The plot twist here is instructive, underscoring the power of scapegoating, the importance of understanding your audience’s desires not just their demographics, and the difference between myth and messaging.

Trump portrayed undocumented immigrants as dangerous criminals and animals that were poisoning our country. Then there was that whole Haitian migrants eating pets thing. These are not well-meaning individuals looking for a fresh start in the land of the free. These are threatening, nefarious creatures entering our country to exploit our system, take our jobs, break our laws, and prey on our people. Vice President Harris would open the gates for these savages, letting them flood in by the millions until our communities are overrun with drugs, death, depravity, and destitution. President Trump, conversely, would aggressively deport these barbarians and harden our borders to prevent further invasion.

Harris, despite taking a firm stance on the importance of border control, offered up softer, more balanced rhetoric that celebrated the contributions of immigrants and encouraged compassion for families being torn apart by the border crisis. Her policy proposals were also relatively nuanced, focusing on additional border security and higher asylum thresholds while also expanding pathways for legal immigration.

Given the tenor and tone of each candidate’s vision of immigrants and immigration, it came as a surprise to many that immigrant demographics gravitated towards Trump.

This apparent plot twist provides a few important mythopoeic lessons for storytelling, narrative construction, vision casting, and world-building. These lessons seem obvious in hindsight, but are nonetheless frequently overlooked when those responsible for the narrative of a campaign or a company are in the trenches manufacturing one-liners.

1) Focus on Who versus What
When engaging audiences, campaigns and companies often look to demographics, the characterization of a group of people based on statistically quantifiable qualities such as age, race, sex, location, education, income, and the like. But demographics are always a lagging indicator and almost never tell the whole story. While demographic data can be useful in identifying correlations and trends, the causes behind these trends are already in motion by the time they’re detected since demography analyzes people’s situations but not their motivations. The latter, however, is critical to understanding who people, why they do what they do, and what they may do in the future. A lot of sources claim demographics describe who people are, but a collection of statistical factors is not who you are. These attributes do not constitute your identity. They are things that describe what attributes a person has, but the they are not the foundational beliefs, values, and desires that make people who they are.

The Harris campaign largely missed this distinction in their immigration narrative. The campaign assumed that because their position took a more compassionate stance towards undocumented immigrants that everyone who shared those immigrants’ demography would lean Harris. But this is the danger of demography. Just because people look (statistically speaking) like other people does not mean they share the same motivations and values. Rather than support Harris, many communities that share immigrant demographics voted for Trump. This isn’t surprising when you think about it. If I waited in line for years to get into the U.S., why would I support a candidate who seems sympathetic to line cutters? If I’m an immigrant—even an undocumented one—earning an honest living, why would I support a candidate who wants to open the floodgates to people who will either compete with me for work or take advantage of the system I work hard to pay for? If I’m a law-abiding immigrant, why should I support a candidate who wants to let more criminals in—the very same people I came to the U.S. to escape? The answer: I wouldn’t. They didn’t.

Psychographics—who we are—are more important than demographics—what we are. Demography is valuable and preferable to many because it’s more quantifiable. People’s beliefs, values, and motivations are scary and confusing, but you change behavior by doing the hard ethnographic work of understanding your audience, not by lazily lumping them into monolithic categories. The former respects them as people. One could argue the latter is just another form of stereotyping.

2) Focus on Enmity versus Empathy
Some people assume that the better angels of our nature can be called forth by a unifying and empathetic approach to the Other, that people, when faced with the opportunity to ruin or reconcile with their opponents will choose reconciliation. While this is a noble sentiment, it has very seldom been the case in human history. People need the Other to define their own identities. They need enemies to be against so they can demarcate what they’re for. They need scapegoats to blame so they can maintain their own sense of self worth. It’s classic in-group/out-group bias, textbook Girard. One might say it’s just human nature. The word ‘identity’ even comes from the Latin word idem, meaning ‘same.’ But how do you know what is similar if you have nothing to compare it to? Things are judged to be the same through contrast with that which is different.

But, with difference comes disagreement and with disagreement comes conflict. The Harris campaign maintained that immigration is a problem, but they did not go to the lengths the Trump campaign did to demonize and Otherify immigrants themselves. Yet, clearly identifying a palpable and corporeal enemy is of vital importance for concretizing the identity of a group and motivating that group to take coordinated action. A diffuse, systemic problem such as immigration policy is as unrelatable as it is ethereal. Blaming individual people, however, is far more tangible. I can point at the problem and feel that I can do something about it. Harris’ immigration narrative blamed a nameless foe, but naming your enemy is the first step in making people feel like they are in control, like they can overcome what Hans Blumenberg called the “absolutism of reality.” It’s hard to suppress an amorphous self-organizing movement like QAnon because there is no one to target. But a named enemy is an enemy that can be defeated. If it bleeds, it can be killed.

Knowing the name of your enemy reveals them. In many religious traditions, names hold tremendous power. In Judaic tradition, God uses names to bring the named into creation. They are not just ways of identifying things. They create the thing. In Hinduism, a person’s name can influence their destiny. What you are named informs who you become. In Roman Catholicism as in Kabbalistic traditions, knowing the name of a demon or spirit gives you a degree of control over that entity. Unlike Harris, Trump named the enemy and in so doing made the problem real and returned a sense of control and self-determination to his supporters.

Harris perhaps tried to make Trump her scapegoat, but you can’t make a scapegoat of the guy who ~50% of the country favors. He is already familiar to us. He is not Other enough. The fact that most people have not had extremely negative encounters with immigrants is precisely what makes them an excellent foil. It’s an argument from absence. I have no way of disproving the claims Trump is making of immigrants, so they may very well be true. I have never seen God, thus God may indeed exist. Harris needed to have named one or more enemies who were sufficiently Other as to serve as an effective scapegoat. Trump had immigrants and China. Harris had only her opponent. If you’re running a narrowly focused political campaign, your enemy is your opponent, but if you’re trying to build a worldview, build a myth, your enemy needs to be something more existential, something more alien.

Trump engendered enmity for the Immigrant while the Left espoused empathy. But there can be no empathy for the scapegoat. To be effective, the scapegoat must absorb all of the blame, all of the hatred, all of the enmity of a group or society, leaving no room for empathy. An Other for whom we have empathy cannot be an effective scapegoat. “In moments of extreme turbulence,” Girard writes, “we aren’t interested in truth, but a grand lie and founding murder that can grant us catharsis.” Someone needs to get thrown under the bus in order for a group to maintain its collective identity. Trump identified an effective scapegoat, an enemy, an Other that could absorb all of the blame for our problems. The immigrant, having already shouldered so much of our society’s burdens, having already played the scapegoat time and time again, has been once more called upon to serve as the devil of our age, sacrificed at the altar of the great American myth, sent out into the wilderness so that myth might endure.

3) Focus on Myth versus Messaging
A lot of effort goes into the “messaging” of a campaign, the process of determining the specific words and phrases that a candidate and their surrogates say in order to ensure clear, consistent, and compelling communication. The Harris campaign had a consistent (albeit thin) set of immigration messages that clearly articulated her positions on the issue. Trump, on the other hand, deployed a wide assortment of at times inconsistent messages on immigration. Despite their variety, however, these messages worked to paint a dystopian, quasi-apocalyptic vision of a nation under attack, a nation under invasion, a nation that would be overwhelmed by crime and cost if illegal immigrants were not stopped and deported. Nobody remembers the specific talking points of either candidate, but they do remember the overarching narrative vision that Trump told about an America overrun by migrants.

In creating this worldview, this imagined depiction of the future, Trump created a what amounts to a political myth, or an ideology in narrative form. This myth is not a message in itself, but is a platform for a panoply of messages, serving as a roadmap for a system of beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world around us. Trump’s immigration myth (and, again, the term myth here is agnostic of a narrative’s truth or falsehood) cast those in the U.S. as the victims, citizens under attack by a hostile foreign force. It depicted illegal immigrants as the Other, invaders from far off lands intent on doing us harm. It portrayed a world where all the things we love about America are destroyed by the barbarians now at our gates. It is easy to see how this myth, if believed, can elicit justifiably defensive, even hostile, reactions.

While messaging is important to support and proliferate the myth, messaging without an undergirding political myth is just noise, random unrelatable irrelevant factoids. It doesn’t land and it doesn’t stick because it doesn’t inform, support, or relate to people’s belief systems. It doesn’t help us figure out who we are and how we interact with those around us, which is ultimately what politics is all about, structuring social behavior to foster the level of cooperation necessary to build, maintain, and grow a civilization. Messaging does not have the power, the depth and breadth of meaning, required to form and carry an ideology. “Remember the Alamo” became a rallying cry, but it was the idea of independence, the myth that Texas could and should determine its own destiny, that motivated people to arms. The rallying cry serves as a symbolic synopsis of the idea, but the myth is its full expression.

Donald Trump constructed a myth, an ideologically infused vision of America and its problems. While Trump focused on mythmaking, the Harris campaign focused on campaigning. The polity, however, is built on myth. Myth holds all of it together.

This is the second of three posts on myths that influenced the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. The first was on the Myth of Democracy and the next will be on the Myth of Manhood. All observations are intended to be apolitical. I take no normative stance on the outcome of the election.

Trump Skeptic: “What about January 6th? Wasn’t that an un-democratic attempt to steal the election?”

Trump Supporter: “That was people exercising their First Amendment right. That was the people speaking out. That is democracy.”

Ronald Reagan once said, “Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised.” Indeed, for over a century, democracy stood as the antidote to oppression and human suffering. It represented freedom, equality, justice, and opportunity. It promised a better life, one in which your destiny is decided not by a king, emperor, dictator, or supreme leader, but by you and those around you. It meant that your voice mattered, would be heard, and could make a difference. This lofty fantasy has required defending from time to time, and legion is the number who gave their lives so that government of, by, and for the people might not perish from the earth.

Throughout the 20th century, democracy repeatedly proved itself the world’s most powerful political myth. Political myths, which Bruce Lincoln describes as ideologies in narrative form, inform how we see ourselves, our society, and our role in it. They express an ideological perspective and propagate that perspective through powerful narratives that serve as the story of a nation’s past, present, and future. In the United States, democracy has long been the central pillar in the story of our success. It defeated fascism in Nazi Germany. It outlasted the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It proved resilient in the face of tensions over race and suffrage, multiple armed conflicts, and the rise of consumerism and new media. It was able to accomplish all of this because only democracy, willed into existence by the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God, results in prosperity for all.

Or so the myth goes.

Vice President Kamala Harris made saving democracy a tentpole of her campaign, characterizing President-elect Trump as a threat to our system of government. In the end, most of the country didn’t care. Defending a highfalutin set of esoteric democratic principles was less important for most Americans than paying rent and putting food on the table. James Carville’s oft-quoted 1992 quip that “It’s the economy stupid" has been frequently repeated in the last couple of weeks. After all, a free, just, and equal land of opportunity seems a compelling proposition, but not if you and your family are struggling or starving, not if you feel like the perennially ephemeral promises of democracy are always beyond your reach.

While democracy’s champions would argue that democratic forms of government still produce the best outcomes for the most people, many Americans don’t feel like they’re seeing those outcomes. To be sure, by several important metrics, the economy is worse now than it was when President Trump left office 4 years ago

Inarguably, democracy has benefited some more than others. This is partly why older Americans (particularly those 65+ among whom Harris gained ground versus Democrats in prior elections), who have profited greatly under democracy since the end of the Cold War and control most of the nation’s wealth, found the appeal to democratic ideals more compelling than younger voters who have not seen the same return on their ideological investment. It’s also partially why Harris outperformed among educated white voters, one of her few demographics of strength. These are groups for whom democracy has worked. But, unfortunately for Harris, these groups alone weren’t enough. Interestingly, democratic ideals frequently wax and wane with the economy. Most people aren’t trying to crusade for democracy; they’re just trying to make it in America. Democracy has value, but only inasmuch as it creates value for people.

The periods in history when the democratic myth has been the strongest are those in which rival systems of government (think Communism) have threatened American identity and security. Democracy, frequently the most visible and venerable ideology in these times, becomes emblematic of all American identity myths. It is in these times that people fight for democracy. But are they really fighting for democracy or just against the existential threat of the Other? Enemies provide contrast for a community’s identity, fostering in-group bias and inspiring groups to double down on their own myths.

The Harris campaign attempted to make Donald Trump the enemy, but enemies are only frightening when accompanied by a sense of uncertainty and dread. But we have all lived through a Trump presidency previously and, while it was tumultuous in many ways, it did not result in the same widespread sense of impending doom evoked by Communism during the Cold War. If Trump is such a threat to democracy, then why did many voters feel like they were better off under his administration? Of course, there are a lot of potential socioeconomic answers to this question, but none that are strong enough or clear enough to counter the lived experience of hundreds of millions of Americans who feel they are worse off now than during Trump’s first term.

To hold democracy up as good in and of itself, irrespective of the value it has created for people, is tantamount to humanist idolatry. It worships the wrong thing, placing democracy over people, a system of government over the governed. Democracy is a means to an end, not the end itself. Assuming that democracy is intrinsically valuable for everyone in every case, risks divinizing democracy. But it is not a divine institution handed down from god, despite the frequent appeals to a higher power scattered throughout our nation’s historical documents. No. Democracy was conceived of by the people to serve the people, not the other way around. The myth forgets itself.

If the pollyannish democratic narrative does not correspond to people’s lived experience, those same people can and will ignore it, abandon it, or destroy it—and democracy as an institution allows them to do so. As a system of governance that is determined by input from its citizens, democracy provides an internal mechanism for self-destruction. Add to this the economic VUCA created by political business cycles and you have a democratic institution that seems to invite its own destabilization every chance it gets.

All of this makes the democratic myth extremely fragile.

Evangelists of the democratic myth must acknowledge, particularly in light of the election, that democracy no longer imparts the same gravity of meaning, identity, and purpose that it once did. In the last decade, the democratic myth has been entirely unable to provide sufficient explanation for people’s struggles, sufficient meaning to people’s lives, and sufficient common purpose to the nation’s disparate factions. Today, the democratic myth seems weaker than ever, subordinated by a panoply of seemingly more urgent social and economic narratives. If it ever hopes to reclaim its place as the centerpiece of the American collective consciousness, it will have to find a way of conquering or perhaps co-opting the new myths that have emerged in the 21st century, myths that speak more directly, more palpably, and more profoundly to the aspirations and anxieties of our times.

This is the first of three posts on myths that influenced the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. The next two will be on the Myth of Manhood and the Myth of the Migrant. All observations are intended to be apolitical. I take no normative stance on the outcome of the election.