If meaning cannot be engineered, how is it stabilised, transmitted, and experienced across time and communities? The answer lies in myth: narrative patterns that compress complex relational dynamics into forms that humans can inhabit, remember, and act upon.
Compression of Relations
Myths condense vast networks of relations—temporal, causal, social, and ethical—into coherent narratives. They do not capture every detail; they simplify, highlight, and stabilise the relations that matter for coordination and comprehension.
A myth compresses relational complexity into a portable, actionable form, allowing humans to navigate possibilities without exhaustive calculation or formal specification.
Stabilising Meaning Across Scales
Myths operate at multiple scales simultaneously. Individually, they guide action and interpretation; socially, they coordinate behaviour, shared values, and norms; historically, they transmit patterns across generations.
Through relational compression, myths provide stability without rigidness: they maintain coherence while remaining adaptable to context, perspective, and cultural change.
Emotional and Experiential Anchoring
Compression alone is insufficient. Myth also engages affect, narrative tension, and symbolic resonance. These elements stabilise attention and memory, making relational patterns not just intelligible, but experientially meaningful.
A story that is logically coherent but emotionally flat may fail to establish shared meaning. Myth intertwines relational compression with experience, creating a durable substrate for significance.
Contrast With Formal Systems
Formal systems achieve local success by isolating variables, stabilising distinctions, and enforcing constraints. Myths achieve relational success differently: by compressing, narrativising, and emotionally resonating. Both stabilise, but myths do so across relational fields, allowing for ambiguity, multiplicity, and ongoing negotiation.
Preparing the Next Post
Having shown how myths compress and stabilise relational patterns, the next post, Why Explanation Always Leaves Us Cold, will contrast narrative and formal explanation. It will show why explanations illuminate but rarely satisfy, and why humans turn to myths to inhabit and navigate relational possibility rather than merely model it.
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