How Myth Can Save The World: An Interview With Pía Figueroa
The Five of Swords from the Rider-Waite tarot deck is in the public domain.
When Pía Figueroa Edwards was fifteen years old, she began to study the work of the Argentine writer Mario Rodríguez Cobos, also known as "Silo." His philosophy, which explores how to end human suffering and attain self-transformation, taps into comparative mythology as a means to better understand one’s beliefs. Figueroa took handwritten notes and became Silo’s disciple for the rest of her life.
In 2009 she co-founded Pressenza in Milan, which distributes news in nine languages about peace and human rights. Four years later, Figueroa published Silo, The Master of Our Times, in which she shares anecdotes about her own experiences “for those who don’t know what it was like to be by his side,” how he was, or what he spoke about in different situations, according to her book.
This fall Pressenza announced the release of its most recent book, Nonviolent Journalism: A Humanizing Approach to Communication, which was put together by a team of five people from the agency (the authors Figueroa, Javier Tolcachier, Juana Pérez, Nelsy Lizarazo, and editor José Gabriel Feres.) Figuerora discusses the book, as well as the ideas from Silo and mythology that guide her work, in the following interview, which was edited for clarity and translated into English from Spanish.
What is Nonviolent Journalism: A Humanizing Approach to Communication about?
The media now is producing and increasing violence -- racism, discrimination, machismo, many forms -- because of the way it treats information. I’m trying to get journalists to change the way they filter the facts. They need to show what reconciles, includes, does not discriminate, and contributes to peace.
Can you give an example?
For example, we are now covering the commemoration of the Chilean social awakening on October 18 (the day in 2019 that more than a million people protested in Santiago against inequality, systemic corruption, and economic conditions in their country). Our agency calls it a “social awakening,” but others describe it as a “social explosion.” An explosion occurs when there is a bomb, and even when there is no bomb involved, the word “explosion” has a lot more fear in it than “awakening.” Meanwhile, the word “social” is an adjective that, when paired with the word “awakening”, gives you the clear feeling that the Chilean people woke up to another situation in which they want justice, in which they want a new constitution, and in which they want to make a path toward a different social reconciliation process. The two little words with which you define a fact can change everything: the perception of the fact itself is very important.
How does your understanding of mythology and Siloism influence your work at Pressenza?
Mythology influences the agency’s view of the world and interpretation of facts, in the way I just described. We believe things that can change with the times – for example, people used to believe that the earth was flat, but now that idea makes us laugh. Although these beliefs change, they can last a long time and they build realities that mobilize us and are often very, very illusory. Journalism, which happens day by day and has a daily rhythm, tries to show this reality according to these collective beliefs: Where are we going? What are we doing? How are we going to get out of this particular moment of COVID and the destruction of the system in which we live? In this way, the Siloist view can influence journalism.
How does Siloism influence your recent book about nonviolent journalism?
Siloism has a doctrine of nonviolence. Nonviolence as a lifestyle is something very difficult, which is not simple because we live in a system full of violence -- not only physical violence, but also for example economic, racial, obviously gender, and ethnic. Being nonviolent implies a very great personal development, incorporating and overcoming violence in oneself, as well as reconciling in oneself the violence that one carries inside. Nonviolence means modifying our behaviors and trying at least to treat others as we would want to be treated. These are some of the central themes that Silo developed in his work in great depth. His ideas can be applied to a lot of areas.
Can you explain a bit about Silo’s ideas on mythology and his book Universal Root Myths?
In this book, Silo presents the myths of 10 different cultures: the Sumerian-Akkadian, Assyro-Babylonian, Egyptian, Hebrew, Chinese, Indian, Persian, Greco-Roman, Nordic and American. He does not interpret the myths, but he presents them as a way to enter into an understanding of the beliefs that determine how we live and that define us as human beings. They are root myths that have managed to pass from one culture to another – the universal ones in which gods and heroes appear, and in which people did things in the names of the gods. The stories are not secular, but they are not religion either; they are myths and in this way they can help us understand our assumptions. The reader can see behind these beliefs by looking at how the world appeared through the lens of these myths, which revealed values that operated then and still today. Thus, the root myths help us understand the process of being human.
On an individual level, I have a belief of something, and you might have other beliefs, and as we said earlier, we filter our realities through these beliefs, but they are such big and strong images that they guide our behavior. Myths orient behavior in a similar way, but for entire groups of people rather than one individual. The myths motivate societies to go to battle or to build knowledge, for example; people who feel excluded look for knowledge that will help them understand. In another example, people who occupied territories had a dream of physical paradise, so they began their colonies and agriculture in order to organize their communities into the best approximation they could make of this dream.
The nomads, on the other hand, had a myth that I like a lot known as Popol Vuh. It’s the oldest myth in America and tells how the makers -- because they were not called gods, but “makers” -- tried to form the world. The makers wanted to form human beings, so they took clay and molded a little head and some arms on it, but then the figure broke and no longer worked. So then the makers thought “What do we do now?,” and they looked for wood. They decided to make men out of sticks, but these turned out to be too rigid and hard; these figures had no meat on them or heat, and they also collapsed. So the makers finally took corn and with the flour from that they managed to make chubby, happy and fragrant human beings that could develop and evolve.
Why do you like this myth?
I like this myth because it reflects what we know about how America was formed. People came to the Americas from Asia through the northern glaciers and wandered down along the Pacific coast looking for territories where they could settle. This happened from one generation to another for many generations, and still they could not find a place where they could be happy, chubby and fragrant. They went further south, where they found forest, and finally reached the coasts of Central America, where they found corn. Although these people lost their memories of where they came from and how far they had walked as they went from clay to wood to corn, the myths saved some of the ancestral memory about this that was in their DNA.
I like this story too because it has a message of hope – the makers started off wrong but then they kept trying and finally found a better solution.
They start with something, and it is not perfect, but then it is fine. This theme of the history of people who travel and look for something is very interesting. These root myths are showing us the trajectory of human development, with its basic beliefs and most important motivations.
Why do we need to know about all this now?
Silo wrote this book because he claimed that modern beliefs have changed so fast that we no longer know where we are going or why. I would say that right now, with COVID, we have a crisis. António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, says that this is a watershed moment that will affect all areas of human endeavor. The world view that we have of the economy, politics, institutions, the environment, consumerism, and individualism is all thrown into question today. It’s very interesting to see what beliefs other cultures were based on in the past during moments of crisis like this one.
What are some examples of modern myths that we have?
Silo describes the myth of money with a lot of humor. He explains that all cultures now focus on money and it is in reality the central value of society everywhere today – in China, in Europe, and the U.S. He says that this is a very old myth, the quest for gold. Even before that the word money comes from the goddess “Juno Moneta”, whose temples were known for coining money. But the Romans cared about the goddess, and then fortune in life, more than money. This changed to the pursuit of gold, and then to the legend of the treasure rich South American city El Dorado, and then to the gold rush in California. Little by little the idea of gold became mixed up with well-being and health and everything else. Now people are willing to give up years of their lives to earn money.
Was there ever a moment in your personal life when mythology helped you see clearly what to do?
More than one moment, there are many moments when I remembered that life is a process and it can become better. It is always a process, and you have to try the clay first, and then the wood, until you finally get to the corn and are able to smell it and enjoy it. Life is a long process, and if the setbacks and difficulties and the failures in it are many, I would say that existential failure is the strongest when one does not have any sense of purpose or meaning. For me failure is when you have to calm down, reflect, and search your inner world. Failure opens the doors to the most important questions.
Failure is the moment when you have to learn and understand something new. Once you’ve succeeded, you’re already done and at the end, but if you’ve failed, then you’re still at the beginning.
And I believe that all of humanity with COVID has experienced something important. For the first time, everyone has a clear sensation that we’re a common species on this planet – that we’re all together in this and our destiny depends on what happens to everyone. It’s not about who gets the vaccine or who doesn’t; it’s important that the virus doesn’t continue in countries all over the world for us to overcome it. We are an interconnected species in this planet. This is a big change because before COVID, we were still feeling like separate countries. Now we’re one interconnected species that is fragmented; we have damaged other species irreversibly, and have damaged nature itself -- and we have only a few years left to be able to sustain the environmental situation that exists now. Our economy has marginalized millions of millions of millions of people, by concentrating more and more power in fewer and fewer hands while making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Democracy also does not work because the measures we implemented during COVID required tremendous authoritarianism. Democracy is losing the strength that it had, and it has become not a real democracy but rather one of representation that normally betrays the majority en most countries. The culture we have also doesn’t respond adequately, and there are no great or new inspirations for cultural movements – instead there is just reinforcement of the same things with the same elements. We do not have religious ideologies that are not fanatical. We are in a very terrible crisis.
On the other hand, women have a lot of strength and almost the myth of equality. We are looking for a society that is more equitable, and fighting for it, with this mythical force that we have behind us, but still we find every day that they pay us less, they are violent against us, they marginalize us, and discriminate against us. I think it’s a situation of global failure of the social and economic model that we have -- a complete failure. We were talking earlier about how personal failure is the most interesting door to arrive at an understanding of new things and to change one’s way of living. I think that on a global level, we are at the end of civilization that myths tell us about, and we need mythology in order to keep going forward and to have hope of another way of living.
For me, it’s easier to keep things on a personal level. How is it possible for one person to change all these problems?
Think of the younger generation. They are using the force of mythology and saying “we’re taking charge.” They’re beginning to take on the myth of the hero who saves the world – look at Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future (the youth led global climate strike movement that began in August 2018 after she began one at her school.) There is a new generation that lives in a lifestyle that is not individualistic or consumerist, and that distinguishes between needs and desires. They understand that desire brings suffering, and they live simply and even eat differently, as vegetarians. I think this generation, perhaps without realizing it themselves, are giving rise to a sensibility of a new mythology.
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