After Living With Meaning
The previous series did not argue for meaning.
It did something more dangerous: it allowed meaning to be inhabited without being justified.
Myth Without Closure refused the familiar comforts of explanation, optimisation, and destiny. It did not tell the reader what meaning is for. It let meaning appear as a way of staying with openness — as pattern without totality, persistence without promise, relation without guarantee.
This matters, because the moment meaning is justified, it is already being recruited.
Systems love justified things.
They love what can be explained, defended, optimised, and made reliable. Meaning that cannot give an account of itself is therefore always suspect. It slows things down. It introduces ambiguity. It produces excess where efficiency is required.
Myth allowed us to feel this excess without naming it as a problem.
What follows will name it.
Not to domesticate it — but to show why systems learn to fear it.
The Turn
This series marks a change of register.
We move from inhabitation to analysis. From warmth to precision. From mythic openness to systemic constraint.
Nothing introduced here contradicts what came before. On the contrary: what comes before was necessary in order for what follows not to be misunderstood.
The claim we will now examine is simple, but unsettling:
Systems can coordinate perfectly well without meaning — and meaning, when it appears, often disrupts coordination.
This is not a lament. It is not a celebration. It is a description.
Only after myth can this description be heard without panic.
A Warning, Not a Promise
If Myth Without Closure invited you to live inside meaning without destiny, this series will ask you to watch meaning collide with systems that do not need it.
There will be no redemption arc.
There will be no synthesis.
There will be distinctions — sharp ones.
And there will be consequences.
What meaning does to coordination is not always kind.
But neither is a world without meaning.
No comments:
Post a Comment