Myth Of Prior Unity

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The presence of origin myths in language, such as that of the myth of the Babylonian split, implies that there is a unity prior to the division that exists in our current world. This orientation towards the myth of unity is what drives the creation of particular identifications, worldviews, and ideologies. We identify, adopt worldviews and ideologies, and create our own myths in the hopes that they will draw us towards that prior unity. “Identification is compensatory to division,” and it inherently lies within symbol systems (A Rhetoric of Motives, 22). Myths are, by their nature, not true. For these reasons, prior unity does not and cannot exist. All human beings use and misuse symbol systems, so there is no way to separate ourselves from …show more content…
He states

“you will understand war much better if you think of it, not simply as strife come to a head, but rather as a disease, or perversion of communion. Modern war characteristically requires a myriad of constructive acts for each destructive one: before each culminating blast there must be a vast network of interlocking operations, directed communally” (RM, 22).

Worldview, as O’Gorman presents it, is an example of war as a “perversion of communion.” Worldviews, at least in the sense that O’Gorman uses the term in Spirits of the Cold War, “are embedded in ways of speaking and being. Indeed, once solidified in speech, worldviews can become objects exterior to the self: objects of commitment, discipline, devotion, and aspiration (O’Gorman, xii). The image of worldview that O’Gorman provides is one in which ways of being in the world aspire to a myth of unity. Containment, massive retaliation, liberation, and deterrence all have as their goal a certain mythic image of a type of unity. In a world in which division is so deeply ingrained, especially the world at the time of the Cold War where division drove foreign policy in both America and the Soviet Union, leaders’ worldviews did not aspire all the way to the myth of perfect unity. They did, however, reach towards that
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