Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts is an extensive listing of folklore and mythological stories. One of the reasons I like folklore and mythology is that you can get some insight into how other people think, or thought, about the world.

The stories people tell each other about how the world is, or how people are, help you see that the way you think just now isn't the only way to look at things. Some stories can offend us, like those on the Anti-Semitic Legends or Witchcraft Legends pages. But then, so should current folk tales like asylum seekers getting vast amounts of benefit. Or ones from the quite recent past, like the belief in widespread satanic ritual abuse (SRA).

These examples are fairly obvious ones- we all feel that we wouldn't make the same mistakes as Fay Weldon did in some of her misjudged and ill-informed comments about Islam during the Satanic Verses furore, or Bea Campbell (down the page a bit) during the SRA scares. But these are woolly liberals, who are supposed to be on the side of the downtrodden and unfortunates. Maybe using the examples of quite rich people who make a living out of talking opinionated shite isn't the most ideal, but they were the first examples that popped into my head. Possibly the Bus Station Loonies had it right with that wondrous song Kill that Nazi (in my head). We all have short hand assumptions that stay in our heads because we haven't got rid of them, and it takes effort to look at the way you think. We just need to make sure that the assumptions we give head space to have a sound basis, and aren't repetitions of shite spewed by someone with a dodgy agenda -like monetary gain in the case of Fay and Bea, or the well dodgy agenda of the example given above talking rubbish about asylum seekers.

Questioning everything is exhausting. You can't do it every day all the time. Thats why we have short hand 'lumps' of thinking so we don't need to work everything out all the time. (Here's a collection of Evolutionary Theory and Memetics links- but be warned- it can be quite a reductionist and triumphalist subject. If you don't like what you find look for something else).

So going back to the whole mythology and folklore thing- it can be useful to get an idea of how other people think, to help look at the way you see the world yourself. Surrealism also helped undermine the idea that everything always had to be the way it was. One of the reasons I always had a problem with the Trots was that they were absolutely sure they already had everything worked out.

That never made sense to me. How can you have any idea what will work when we get rid of capitalism etc/make the world better, when our thinking is so tightly bound up with living in it day to day? At best we can only have an idea of what we'll do next (apart from getting rid of it, obviously). Strategic planning is useful and necessary, for things like making sure food gets grown, people don't go hungry or untreated if they're ill. But in terms of how a society would be run, we really don't know how it might work out long term. All we can really do is say that we would keep working on it and make sure its better than it is now. Once we don't have to deal with the daily bollocks we do now, we might get all kinds of amazing possibilities opening up that we can't conceive of just now. But we'd need to make sure that we don't ossify- and again there's me coming back to the maintenance of the head and thinking.

Bugger. That was quite a long witter with not many links. Now I've gone on justifying my interest in mythology and weird shit (think Forteana to science as being analogous to mythology to assumptive thought and repeat the rant above- I'll come back to Forteana, and empiricism over explaining-away-the-not-currently-understood-with-unscientific-bullshit later), another link that might be of interest is Internet Sacred Text Archive .