William de Berg In Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes how a society could rationalize the existence of different classes of society by using what has been translated as a “noble” or “royal” lie.[1] What Socrates threw out, somewhat half-seriously, was something closer to a founding myth, which like religious myths are either prehistoric (e.g., Dreamtime, Valhalla, Garden of Eden) or ahistoric (e.g., certain apocryphal stories concerning the beginnings of modern religions that are not documented in the contemporary historical record). There are advantages to such myths, of course, such as the…
