ERICKSON: The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Narcissus was a beautiful hunter in ancient Greece. He shunned all romantic advances. None were as beautiful as he knew himself to be, so there was no reason for a relationship with anyone. Eventually, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water by a stream. He stared so lovingly and longingly at himself, unmoved and unmoving, staying and staring till death. The gods turned him into a flower now bearing his name. It grows wild along the riverbanks.

All of us have mythologies we tell ourselves. Myths explain the way the world works for us when we do not know how it truly works. One of the reasons the Bible rings true for me is how counterintuitive it is and how it defies the mythologies of its time. Moses wrote Genesis 1 and claimed that there was just one God and that the sun, moon and stars were just objects in the sky. This monotheistic religion deviated from literally every religion on planet Earth at the time.

The idea of one God and the objects in the sky being objects was completely countercultural. No one else on the planet believed it. Even assuming someone later than Moses wrote Genesis, Judaism and Christianity still ran contrary to the thinking of everyone on the planet at the time — even contrary to the prevailing views of the contemporaneous native inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere.

Most of us tell ourselves elaborate stories to explain the way the world works. Today, many of those stories are conspiracy theories. But they all have the traces of mythology in them. They capture the rhythm of the seasons and the flow of life.

For two decades, Democrats have told themselves a mythology. That mythology has taken on orthodoxy. Democrats do not lose unless Republicans steal elections by rigging the system, suppressing the vote and cheating. In 2000, after former Vice President Al Gore lost the presidential election, Democrats insisted it had been stolen. In 2004, Democrats claimed Karl Rove pulled dirty tricks in Ohio. To this day, Virginia’s gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe still insists those two elections were stolen.

Last week, former Georgia State Rep. Stacey Abrams went to campaign for McAuliffe. She claimed she was not “entitled to become Governor of Georgia.” Abrams has, to this day, refused to concede she lost. In fact, Democrats and members of the media still allow Abrams to tell her