A thought re Campbell (whom I love) and the hero myth. We need more stories of collectives. The ones that are fresh in my mind, Octavia Butler's prescient Parable of the Talents (1998), Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020). Confronting complexity, even at the level of myth, needs to overcome the fiction of the valiant hero.
Yes - I resile against the reduction of Campell's work to a form of "template". Collectives though a fertile soil. We've discovered so much in our own small collectives, where the effect has not been within the group outside it, in the ripples the energy of the group generates. We don't have to treat what we create as some sort of IP....
A thought re Campbell (whom I love) and the hero myth. We need more stories of collectives. The ones that are fresh in my mind, Octavia Butler's prescient Parable of the Talents (1998), Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) and Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020). Confronting complexity, even at the level of myth, needs to overcome the fiction of the valiant hero.
Yes - I resile against the reduction of Campell's work to a form of "template". Collectives though a fertile soil. We've discovered so much in our own small collectives, where the effect has not been within the group outside it, in the ripples the energy of the group generates. We don't have to treat what we create as some sort of IP....