Living Myth

This episode begins with the recognition that, what the United Nations calls “the biggest election year ever recorded,” has left most countries on Earth more divided and less free. Any issue that arises quickly becomes another example of two opposing attitudes or conflicting views of life. As increased polarization fractures any sense of civil society, people come to believe that they literally live in two different worlds that are essentially unreconcilable.   Following a line from Shakespeare, Michael Meade considers the idea that we are in “a prison of our own making” if we believe we are simply living in two different stories. Rather, it is our mutual fate to be alive at a time when the underlying tensions of life rise to the surface. We are all in the same story which can either lead to a meaningful transformation of life on earth or leads us further down the road to oblivion.   Although people commonly now feel that we live on opposite sides in a divided world, the deeper divide and the more d