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Mein Kopf

This even applies to contemporary historians. It must be realised that they are living in a meaning system where truth or reason is an absolute value, far more important than virtue or aesthetic values. Status is based on material signs of importance. Since bourgeois individualism has largely triumphed over collective identity especially within academia, modern historians’ motives in choosing which past events to emphasise etc. may be no more ambitious than to improve their chances of academic promotion or to impress fellow historians. Their roles as intellectuals in secular state institutions require this, unlike Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill who both had collective and subjective motives for writing their histories! We are all human after all.

I hope I will be forgiven for making occasional use of my own special terms to indicate aspects of the conceptual framework within which I am working. This is the cosmological synthesis I put together over forty years ago so that I could make sense of the many new insights and theoretical innovations which have not yet been successfully integrated into our contemporary rather fragmented collection of specialist scientific paradigms.

I make use of such new terms as “Ideo-dynamics” (of involving cultural identity and motivation) and “Mytho-dynamics” (of involving social identity and motivation) together with “Symbol Kinematics of evolving Values” and “Action Kinematics of evolving Roles” I chose the term kinematics since we only experience events in the form of changing patterns of symbols, role actions, neurones etc. and that experience is all we have to go by. We can never know what is “really out there”, a meaningless notion anyway. This way I hope to avoid the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. My process cosmology enabled me to better describe the inter-relations between texts and other symbols and the psycho-socio-historical events that provide us with evidence of their motivations. However I believe the points I am attempting to make in these brief essays can be appreciated without any over concern for the precise terms of my cosmological orientation. An important aim is provide a catalyst for more thorough and better informed understanding than my sketchy efforts.

I claim that what I call mytho-dynamic motivation is continually influenced by symbolic explanation from the relevant cultural institutions. Those symbolic explanations concerned with values have the greatest impact on the mytho-dynamics which produce social action. My articles are examples of cultural symbolic communication which do not place over-riding emphasis on rational, individualistic or economic values. They are aimed at explaining which mytho-dynamics still have powerful consequences on motivation for collective social action. I have a built-in bias towards re-establishing moral-intuitive values and collective solutions to contemporary problems rather than being restricted to what are often irrelevant, self-contradictory or dubious truth values. These are often best understood as “rationalisations” of unstated or “repressed” emotional bias.

True or not, many of the mytho-dynamic stories that have inspired us are great narrative works of art that have permanently altered our sense of identity. Although having many advantages in improving individual health and providing efficient adaptive technologies, the dogma of scientific materialism is proving catastrophic for the earth as a closed ecosystem and for any efficient moral integration of community life.

I am aiming here to show that the world of meaning we inhabit has been largely created by a few individuals at critical times in our cultural evolution. Some examples I have chosen are the ideo-dynamic and mytho-dynamic origins of Monotheism, Christianity, The Matter of Britain, Whigs versus Tories, and both Religious and Secular Determinism such as Original Sin, Scientific Materialism, Modernism and Utopianism.

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