If myths hold possibility steady, they do not merely enable action.
They also limit it.
This is not a failure of myth, but an inevitable consequence of orientation itself.
Orientation always excludes
To be oriented is to inhabit a world where some things matter and others do not.
This means that orientation is necessarily selective.
Every stabilised field of possibility renders other possibilities unintelligible, marginal, or unthinkable.
This is not oppression by default.
It is the cost of having a world at all.
Constraint without coercion
Mythic constraint does not usually operate through prohibition.
More often, it works by making alternatives fail to appear as possibilities in the first place.
Certain questions do not arise.
Certain responses feel absurd, dangerous, or invisible.
Constraint, here, is structural rather than enforced.
When stability hardens
Orientation becomes problematic when stability hardens into immobility.
This occurs when the conditions that once required a particular mythic configuration no longer obtain, but the orientation persists unchanged.
Actions that once made sense begin to misfire.
Suffering increases without intelligible cause.
The myth still orients — but badly.
Misrecognising failure
When orientation fails, the failure is often misdiagnosed.
It may be attributed to moral decline, loss of belief, or external corruption.
Rarely is it recognised as a structural mismatch between inherited possibility and present conditions.
This misrecognition tends to intensify constraint rather than loosen it.
The danger of total orientation
Some myths aspire to totality.
They attempt to orient every domain of life with a single, unified configuration.
Such myths are powerful, but brittle.
When they fail, they fail catastrophically, leaving little room for partial revision or local adaptation.
Constraint and violence
When orientation becomes constraint, violence often follows.
Not necessarily physical violence, but the violence of forced intelligibility: compelling people to make sense of their experience within a frame that no longer fits.
This violence is rarely experienced as violence.
It is experienced as necessity.
Opening the question of change
Recognising constraint does not immediately tell us how to change orientation.
Myths cannot simply be discarded without disorientation.
The next post addresses this difficulty directly, asking how mythic orientations transform — and what replaces explanation when transformation is at stake.
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