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Good words Chris. I have been thinking about your word for a couple of days. I want to response, with entheos. Subjectivity and subjective truth is in some ways a late arrival, therefore so too is inter subjectivity, these in themselves are fictions, myths we live by. The task of the “cultural creative” (pardon the buzz word) is a sort of hermeneutical immersion into Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty call the phenomenological world from whence the subject emerges, and not cleanly but pulling the mess of the world, the other with him, into him/her.

The individual truths “integrity, sincerity and trustworthiness” and collective truth as cultural fit, mutual understanding and rightness…a shared sense of justice are born out of that “hermeneutical immersion”. What we find there may not be “me” or the collective, but the stuff around which a “me” and a collective emerge.
Wallace Stevens wrote, “the absence of the imagination has itself to be imagined”. This is a core story of poetry and maybe metaphor. Shelly in the Defense of Poetry said that ‘the secret of morality is the imagination’. If the imagination is impaired we can’t image ourselves in the life of the other, we would have no sympathy, no way of truthing neither ours or the others being in the world.

And being in the world is a creative enterprise, as you say, not gathering facts, but living at the origin of truth, i.e. inhabited experience. Again that is not the Cartesian retreat to my subjectivity, but rather the soup of the phenomenological world out of which such things as collectivity and individuality arise, for that matter the phenomenological world itself. Again turtles. Democratic truths are meaningful to the extent that we inhabit them and are inhabited by them, as a mutually creative force, mythic energy, metaphoric.

It may be that transformation and spiritual health of the nation or the individual, comes from the capacity to sustain anxiety, instability and allow new forms to emerge. And to be able to do that, we may not need a ultimate myth, but the ability to ask the ultimate questions, say the final question Einstein asked, the one he thought was the ultimate question….”Is the universe a friendly place?” and following the Jewish theme here maybe the old Yiddish saying “man thinks god laughs” is a good response, a good creative expression to live by.

Maybe the heart of democracy is a collective laugh, free of any maliciousness, the blindfolded and the scales intact, deeply personal, unlimited in its capacity to create collective cultural fit. The myth of love is always an inclusive myth. That then would be the democratic myth, that we can include, and if Wilber is right, without compromise but as mutual transcendence. That way Mounties with turbans is about Transformation and development and gay marriage is a remembering, not only of those who are societies others, but of the wager that is the constitution.