If myth orients by holding possibility steady, and if that orientation can harden into constraint, then change becomes both necessary and dangerous.
The central problem is this:
How can an orientation change without collapsing into disorientation?
Why myths cannot simply be replaced
Mythic orientations are not optional overlays.
They are the background conditions under which sense is made at all.
For this reason, a myth cannot simply be rejected or swapped out like a theory.
Attempts to do so tend to produce confusion, anxiety, or compensatory rigidity.
Orientation does not vanish gracefully.
Change as reconfiguration, not negation
Mythic change does not proceed by refutation.
It proceeds by reconfiguration.
Elements are displaced, figures are reweighted, relations are altered.
Some possibilities lose prominence; others slowly emerge.
At no point is the field empty.
The role of strain and breakdown
Change is typically initiated not by argument, but by strain.
When actions repeatedly fail, when suffering accumulates without explanation, when inherited responses misfire — orientation begins to loosen.
This loosening is experienced as unease rather than insight.
It creates space, but does not yet provide direction.
Hybrid moments
Mythic change often passes through hybrid forms.
Old figures coexist with new emphases.
Contradictions are tolerated rather than resolved.
From a representational standpoint, such moments appear incoherent.
From an orientational standpoint, they are transitional necessities.
The importance of practice
Orientations change through practice before they change through articulation.
New ways of acting, gathering, marking time, or responding to danger can slowly reshape what feels possible.
Narrative follows practice, not the reverse.
Stories catch up with lived reorientation.
No outside position
There is no neutral vantage point from which mythic change can be engineered.
Every attempt at transformation proceeds from within some orientation.
This is not a defect.
It is what makes gradual, partial, and situated change possible.
Change without mastery
To understand how myths change is not to gain control over the process.
It is to recognise its fragility.
Change involves loss as well as gain.
Possibilities are opened by closing others.
The next and final post draws the arc together, asking what role myth continues to play in a world saturated with scientific explanation — and what orientation is required now.
No comments:
Post a Comment