Drives Come Before Myths: On Living Your Own Story

This insight draws a sharp line between drives and myths, arguing that the distinction is not merely theoretical but has immediate consequences for how a life is lived. Myths — biblical narratives, Jungian archetypes, the Enlightenment story of rational progress — are understood here as the concretized, transmissible residue of someone else's drive. They are what remains after a singular encounter with existence has been retroactively narrativized. Jesus had his drive; Christianity came afterward. The myth is always a backward construction imposed on what was originally irreducibly singular.

The critical move is identifying a structural error shared by seemingly opposed thinkers. Jordan Peterson places biblical archetypes before individual experience, using inherited narrative as the primary container for existence. Richard Dawkins, despite his anti-religious stance, does something structurally identical by placing the myth of scientific rationality before the drive of inquiry itself. Both reverse the proper sequence: they begin with the transmissible form rather than the lived encounter that generates it.

From a Hegelian-Lacanian standpoint, drives mythify the real — not the reverse. This means that genuine commitment to one's own drive, to the abyss of one's own existence, will produce myth retroactively if that drive is socially real, meaning it generates something of authentic value to others. The story becomes transmissible because it needed to be told. But beginning from myth means inhabiting a story already written. There is comfort in that, and the comfort is not dismissed, but it forecloses the possibility of writing one's own narrative from within the singularity of one's own life.