When a society loses its myth, the members of that society do not lose their need for a purposeful and meaningful life that myth once provided. Therefore we find ourselves in a precarious position. For without a belief to help us derive a meaningful life and unite the culture in which we live, many people will latch onto new false faiths, like consumer and capitalist culture, and the worship of idols which lack virtue.
For fame, in our day, is held primarily by celebrities and politicians, two classes of individuals for whom the word heroic rarely applies. And so, if as the Ancient Greeks believed, a people are known by the idols they worship, then it is safe to say the spirit of heroism has all but vanished from the modern world. This consumer-centered culture that has emerged has destroyed the will to create. Most people have the power to be creative, and some have it to a god-like degree…but many people – perhaps even most – are content with the passing pleasures and satisfactions of the consuming side of our nature. Indeed, many people will account their lives to be successful if they get through them with only minimal pain. Values of comfort and contentment above all! This is one of the most urgent problems for civilized man.
Is the only remaining option to descend into a passive state of nihilism? While we may be forced to accept the mythless condition into which we were born, it does not mean that we must endure a meaningless existence as a result. The need to create our own sense of meaning in our own small portion in an otherwise meaningless world is why our age, in addition to being a mythless one, can also be viewed as the age of the hero. Rather than being overcome and succumbing to the inner chaos which attacks those disconnected from an effective myth, the hero stands up to this mighty beast and discovers his or her own solutions to the existential burdens of our time. The brave few who take on this challenge return themselves to the realm of myth. In striving to impose order in their own small corner of the world, they have chosen the heroic path that is represented as the fight with the dragon. Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the “treasure hard to attain”. He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives some faith and trust in the ability of the self to sustain him, for everything that menaced him from inside he has made his own. He has acquired the right to believe that he will be able to overcome all future threats by the same means. He has arrived at an inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance.