Page 30 - The Drucker Lectures

The Myth of the State [ 11

ual. It enables our reason to direct and to determine our reaction
to experience. By making us understand what it is we know from
our experience, it makes possible action, which is our term for
movement directed by reason, when otherwise there would only
have been superstition. Without the myth, we would be slaves
to panic; the myth enables man to walk upright; it liberates his
reason from the nameless terror of the incomprehensible outside
and in.
It is because it is so real, so central, so potent, that I say, “Be-
ware of the Myth.” Because it is the basis of all ritual and of all
institutions, it is all-important that it be a true myth, truly inter-
preted. For a false myth, or one that is interpreted falsely, is the
most vicious, the most destructive thing we know. But you may
ask, how can a myth be true or false? Isn’t it an open contradic-
tion to apply such philosophical or ethical value terms to experi-
ence? But the myth is not just experience; it is the symbolical
expression of experience, which means that the myth itself is
already a product of our consciousness, of our reason, of our be-
liefs, the product of a decision as to what is relevant in our expe-
rience and what our experience actually means. And this applies
with even greater force to the interpretation of the myth—that
is, to ritual and action.
You can say that any myth is a valid myth if it has stood the
pragmatic test, the test of time. It could not have survived un-
less it expressed in a plausible symbol an experience common to
the human species. The myth always raises the right questions,
always registers the right seismic disturbances, but it does not
by necessity give the right answers. In fact, it gives no answers
at all. The answers are given by our interpretation of the myth
and of the experience it expresses; they are given, in brief, by
philosophy and theology, the two disciplines that are exclusively
concerned with the analysis, interpretation, and critique of the
basic myth. These answers may be right, but they may also be