Mythic Stories: Clark Rockefeller

The NY TIMES has a story of Mr. Rockefeller on page 1 of its Sunday Styles section: Ready-Made Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller was actually Christian Gerhartsreiter and his tale is that of duplicity, impersonation, and catch him if you can. If you read it, the story shows how the angel of Power and the angel of Wealth create their own world of belief and knowledge, independent of the real world, based upon the passions of those who are duped. All of Celebrity Biz is Mythic: that is why there is nothing there, but it seems so very full! Take the story of Leda and the swan: Zeus wants Leda, gets the crazy notion to meet with her at Cliveden for a masked ball, has his valet assist him in suiting up as a pantomime swan, meets the lady in question, and more or less has his way with her. Not much there. So it is with Celebrities. Heath Ledger had a life ahead of him filled with potential: great things, great sufferings, achievements and disappointments; just like the rest of us. Cut it short, though. Not much there when you look behind the facade. Madonna...not much to the Gematria and the Kabbala when you really look at it. When everyone dips their toe into the river of Zen, it gets a bit dirty...unless there really wasn't any water there to begin with. (I sense I have lost you......)

Mythic Stories: Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

The Mythic stories often seem of another place, another time, seeming to be omni-temporal and omnipresent in the consciousness of mankind. That is indeed their nature. Observe criticism of Mahmoud Darwish, recently deceased, and a poet from Palestine, from a town destroyed in 1948...destroyed in 1948 and buried, while he yet lived until death sought him out, too.  

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7559565.stm  
Fitting farewell to Palestinian poet 
 By Heather Sharp BBC News, Ramallah

  ... But in Israel there has been mixed feeling. Many respected his abilities as a writer, but others saw some of his writing as anti-Semitic and even racist - in one poem he urged Israelis to "leave our land / Our shore, our sea / Our wheat, our salt, our wound" and "take with you your dead". However, acclaimed Israeli writer Avraham B Yehoshua said he was deeply saddened by Darwish's death. "Of course there were poems that were very much aggressive," he said, "but it's important that we know what they are thinking - you have to know your enemy because your enemy is your neighbour and future friend." 

  There is nothing particularly mythic about a cry of pain directed against an inimical force. There is, however, in the attitude that even the slightest criticism somehow infects and must be painted as "Anti-Semitism". This is the same process we have described earlier (below) by which certain forces or "deities of power" - good and evil- are set up and let free to rule consciousness; the same process we employ by calling people "nazis" or "Hitler".
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Mythic Stories

There are stories, myths, and narratives. The list could be augmented, but I am not interested in doing so. I was asked what I meant when I said 2 societies were mythically different. I meant that they have different stories in that literature of narratives that touches the life of emotion and religion and morality. A myth is a story which compels one to feels good and evil; fear of evil Darth Vader and rejoicing when the good Skywalker triumphs. I consider true Religion to be wordless; a behavior which is not dependent on words in any way, although it may be modified by words and language, being similar in thios respect to Music. Music is music, and has no need of Language, although we may talk about music and sing along with music as much as we wish. So when I say that Myth depends mightily upon Religion, I am talking about the external carapace of Religion: the words, the buildings, the paintings, the icons, the relics, and everything which stands materially bewteen God and Man. I do not mean all religion is myth. So MYTH is the fund of stories which touch on morals and faith and good and evil. An important characteristic of mythic thought is that it is not self-reflective; it does not subject its own concepts to analysis or valuation. Its library of critical concepts is usually closed to any inputs, although there may be a good deal of innovation of lower levels which do not impinge on the critical concepts; for example, consider Francis Fukuyama's notion of "the end of history" where the USSR fell and History itself was delivered into the hands of the USA. There is the critical concept of the almost divine mission of the USA, itself a very primtive religious notion, and the new twist of "end of history". But Fukuyama's new way of saying things is nothing but cosmetology for the old "chosen people" of God which imbued the American continent since the white man first set foot here. During the Cold War, it was frequently pointed out by conservative thinkers that Marxism was but another form of religion, an ideology of irrational beliefs. Of course, so was the ideology of the West an irrational, yet fervent faith in its own rectitude. Now consider: The American Conservative http://amconmag.com/article/2008/aug/25/00015/ Czechoslovakia on Their Minds Neocon news flash: Hitler invades Georgia. By Leon Hadar Neoconservatives and their useful idiots in the American media have been on overdrive this August, rewinding to their World War II analogies and applying them to the fast-forwarding world of global politics... ...no neocon narrative is complete without Czechoslovakia. Imagine your average Weekly Standard subscriber taking a free-association test and being asked to state the first words that come to his mind when he hears “Czechoslovakia.” Rest assured, he would respond with “Munich,” “appeasement,” “Chamberlain,” or “umbrella.” And let’s not forget “Hitler.” Thus can anyone clamoring for U.S. military intervention in, say, the former Yugoslavia or the Persian Gulf, mount a successful media and public-relations campaign by identifying his chosen victim (the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo, or Kuwait, or the Kurds) with Czechoslovakia and associating his preferred “aggressor” (Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein) with Hitler... This is History or Current Events as distorted through the lenses of Ideology. It is Myth; originally a news story refined by opinion to a mythical story of good and evil. Of course, Hitler is still the devil. That's why people keep calling each other "Hitler!" The Bush Idiocracy, by its profound emphasis on Ideology, came early on the view the world as Myth. At that point, good and evil became distinct, and there was no living together; war must ensue. We are lucky George W. Bush was not president during the Cold War, for his mythic ability, which in his case expressed itself as a perversely innocent childishness, was far greater than any leader on either side during the Cold War. But we are not safe even when Bush departs, for as we read further on in The American Conservative: “The details of who did what to precipitate Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important,” explained leading neocon foreign-policy ideologue Robert Kagan—who insists that he isn’t a neocon at all—in a column in the Washington Post three days after the eruption of hostilities between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway province of South Ossetia. “Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia?” he asked. Kagan, one of the chief advisers to Republican presidential candidate John McCain, wants to kick “revisionist” Russia out of the G-8 and establish a League of Democracies as part of a strategy to contain the growing threat from Moscow. Kagan’s answer to his rhetorical question in his column titled “Putin Makes his Move” (wink, wink—like you-know-who made his move 70 years ago): “Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.” Mr. Kagan seems to mix up Knowledge of the Facts with Recall of the Facts. His position is Mythic. History does offer us valuable lessons. However, intelligent human beings are guided, not compelled by History. They are compelled by Myth mixed with Power. (note: this points to the difference between Myth and Religion: when the Prophet said that there is no compulsion in Religion, he spoke of what actually is Religion, not the facade of Religion which uses the force of the State to compel obedience.) A habitat:

House of Nations

further information:

and myth:

Jesse Owens Room in the House of Nations

This takes us to the Myth ( myth does not mean "untrue"!) of America and its race relations. Now you pick up the thread.

Mythic Stories 2

Let us recall that when we speak of a mythic system of thought, we are speaking of structural characteristics of a thought system, never about truth or falsehood conditions for statements made in that system. An example of mythic thinking: When I write on Religion, I will refer to the founder of Buddhism as the Lord Buddha, the first of Islam as the Prophet, and Jesus Christ as Jesus Christ. These are acceptable to most folks of those faiths. Some people, however, have their noses slightly out of joint with this, particularly that "Lord Buddha" business. The word "lord" surely must be reserved for their own notion of God or their notion of first in religion. Some think that this also means that all religions are the same. 1) I submit to you that that type of thinking is Mythic Thinking: it demonstrates the exclusivity of religion primitively experienced in community defined by similarity in a small neighborhood, but by difference within a larger neighborhood.................. The community of believers is small and restricted to the small neighborhood where I can see people frequently and let my mirror neurons establish a reciprocal bond between us.... ...and in the larger neighborhood, we are an island in the midst of a vast ocean. 2) Inputs of critical concepts come only from the pre-established pool of concepts. 3) Conceptual structures based on the Primary or Axiomatic or Basic Concepts are not open to criticism, being effectively closed. 4) There is no self-criticism, no self-referential statements. One may easily loose control of self-referential statments. 5) If we consider a conceptual system to be similar to a Wolfram Process ( i.e., a cellular automaton), the mythic system for all its potential richness does not exhibit randomness over time.

Mythic Stories 3: The Nature Of Ideological Thinking

In Eurozine: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-08-21-abraham-en.html Samuel Abrahám The end of illusions? Czechoslovakia 1968 and after ...In the West, a whole generation of admirers of the post-Khrushchev thaw were forced to commit intellectual suicide after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Some retreated into seclusion, others transformed themselves into Euro-communists, environmentalists or feminists. Some even jumped all the way to the far-right or neo-fascism. They made a virtue out of necessity, and one can add that many became more useful than they had been during their communist past... Is this not a sight filled with the most abject pathos? Yet, this is the nature of mythic thinking, to be continually brought up short by Reality. ( A good parallel would be the Lisbon earthquake and its effect on Voltaire and his contemporaries.) An note the variety of Ideological camps mentioned here, and how easily a mythic thinker may jump from one to the next. Indeed, a socialist may become a neo-fascist, given enough jolting. Why? Because the content of the belief system does not matter as greatly as the structural nature of the belief system; i.e., it is more important that there be order and compulsion rather than freaky freedom.