The Myths We Don’t Call Myths: 4 Closure, Endpoints, and the Desire for Finality

Alongside progress, rationality, and necessity, another powerful but rarely named myth structures modern thought: the desire for closure. This is the longing for endpoints — final explanations, completed theories, settled accounts of reality. Closure promises rest: an end to questioning, an arrival at truth.

In science, closure appears in the hope for a final theory, a complete account of nature from which all phenomena can be derived. In philosophy, it surfaces as the search for ultimate foundations. In social and political life, it emerges as the desire for definitive solutions, resolved conflicts, and permanent settlements. Across domains, closure functions as a stabilising narrative.

Like other myths in this series, closure does not produce understanding; it constrains intelligibility. It organises inquiry by projecting an imagined endpoint, shaping which questions are worth asking and which lines of investigation appear promising. The myth of closure reassures us that uncertainty is temporary, that complexity will eventually yield to completion.

This desire has deep affinities with earlier cosmological myths. Just as creation stories stabilise meaning by positing a beginning, myths of closure stabilise meaning by positing an end. Both moves provide orientation. Both promise that the world — or our understanding of it — is ultimately bounded and knowable.

Yet, as with beginnings, endpoints are not delivered by the practices they supposedly ground. Physics does not require a final theory to function. Inquiry does not require ultimate answers to proceed. Closure is not a discovery; it is a narrative constraint that renders ongoing activity intelligible and tolerable.

When closure is mistaken for necessity, its mythic character disappears. Finality becomes an expectation rather than a desire, and unfinishedness is experienced as failure rather than condition. Recognising closure as myth allows us to inhabit uncertainty without anxiety, to engage in inquiry without the demand for completion.

In the next post, we will turn to a final and reflexive move: demythologisation itself as myth. There, the series will confront its own tools, showing how even the act of exposing myths participates in mythic structure.