"Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble." — Joseph Campbell.
What Campbell wrote about religions can be applied to every human system or configuration. They all carry significant value and help us, individually or collectively, to deal with reality. We need a configuration of some sort if we want to impact this world.
And that configuration depends on the metaphor we use to explain reality.
Orson Scott Card said that "metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space."
They allow us to pack something elusive and complex as our experience of reality in a package that can be understood, shared and communicated.
The troubles arise when we get stuck in our own metaphors. When we fall in love with it and the configuration that comes with it. When that happens, the metaphor, instead of carrying our truth, conceals it from us. We become detached from our very own essence.
Our configuration becomes an empty shell, depleted of its essence. And, in doing so, unable to respond to the ever-evolving, elusive, complex and unknowable reality.