The Screening Myth

The Education Myth

That is a superstition.

The Myth of Chinese Meritocracy

There's no gap between rich and poor any longer. This is a myth.

There is a superstition that it causes blisters on the feet.

Rives tells a typographical fairy tale that's short and bittersweet )

But, having debunked the vampire myth, Western intellectuals proceeded to refashion it.

It expressed a myth according to which one of the parties only had obligations and the other only had rights.

There is my world and there is your world, and my world is always better than your world, because my world, you see, is rational and yours is superstition.

The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation.

Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, was criticizing Linux a couple of years ago, and he said, Oh, this business of thousands of programmers contributing to Linux, this is a myth.

Poland is another country in which individual initiative flourishes to the point that the apocryphal Polish plumber came to epitomize the threats posed by globalization in France.

But why do we know about Dracula and vampires at all? Why and how did a regional myth grow into one of modern Western culture's most enduring fixtures?

Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that's superstition. But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen.

In his Communist Manifesto, Marx went on to say that it is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.

If the thought of Dracula and vampires makes us shiver, then the vampire myth still fulfills its functions for us as a projection of our fears and uncertainties, sexual desires, group and personal animosities, and longing for the dissolution of the structure of society.

Superstitions arising among the locals tell of this evil spirit dwelling in watery places where it sometimes disguises itself as an old tree trunk, a beautiful lady, fishes or other animals in order to attract unassuming people into its trap.

Given such systemic debasement of merit, few Chinese citizens believe that they are governed by the best and the brightest. But astonishingly, the myth of a Chinese meritocracy remains very much alive among Westerners who have encountered impressively credentialed officials like Bo.

But, having debunked the vampire myth, Western intellectuals proceeded to refashion it. Voltaire transferred the image of bloodsucking vampires to speculators, merchants, kings, and monks.

But if you allow a financial market to spin wildly until it breaks down, it really does seem that you run the risk of years of economic malaise. That is a historical pattern.