American Meritocracy: The Myth of Success

Molly Crabapple

Just read something that is almost verbatim what I've been saying for years -- that didn't lessen the impact of reading it for me. As much as the myth that 'we are all created equal' seems to have a heart of gold, it has some pretty nasty repercussions in the real world.

Those with money usually think they deserve it. But most people who make the world run—who care for kids, who grow food, who would rebuild after natural disasters and societal collapse—will never be rich, no matter how hard or well they work, because society is constructed with only so much room on top.
Once, I met with a man who runs an idea festival. He was a great admirer of businessmen who became Buddhist monks. "I don't like protest," the man told me. "It's too much about ego. Ego is the problem with America."
I thought of the workers busting their backs lifting boxes at warehouses, while an electronic tracker yelled at them to work faster. Are their egos too big?

Go and read it. We'll wait.

Article, "Filthy Lucre."

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

The Myth of the Lazy Youth

As we have seen time and time again in our exploration on this site, one of the challenges of modern myths is their relative invisibility. It is the outsiders of any age, those who are alien to their own times, that make the best artist shamans, and the same goes for mythic explorers. If you are too close to a culture, you will very frequently mistake the truisms of culture, the myths, as a fact. This is true with "human nature" (as we have seen), and it is also true with our myths of labor and work.

Let's consider the example presented when one generation judges another,

"Twenge and Kasser analyzed data from the Monitoring the Future survey, which has tracked the views of a representative sample of 17- and 18-year-old Americans since 1976. They compared the answers to key questions given by high school seniors in 2005-2007 to those provided by previous generations.
To measure materialism, the youngsters were asked to rate on a one-to-four (“not important” to “extremely important”) scale how vital they felt it was to own certain expensive items: “a new car every two to three years,” “a house of my own (instead of an apartment or condominium),” “a vacation house,” and “a motor-powered recreational vehicle.” They were also asked straightforwardly how important they felt it was to “have a lot of money.”
To measure their attitudes toward work, the seniors rated on a one-to-five scale the extent to which they agreed with a series of statements, including “I expect my work to be a very central part of my life,” and “I want to do my best in my job, even if this sometimes means working overtime.”
The researchers found a couple of disturbing trends. ..."

(Full article on Salon.com.) 

It isn't particularly difficult to smell the distinct scent of bullshit in this article. This is the same gripe the elder generation has had since time began about the younger generations: they are lazy, they dress funny, they aren't concerned with the same things, they represent the end of 'the old ways,' and so on.

Furthermore, it's become quite apparent to people that the game is rigged and that it has fuck all to do with how hard you work whether you are materially successful or not. So why kill yourself to make someone else rich? Is it possible that the younger generation has just become disillusioned with the idea of breaking their back so that they can wind up on the street? "Success" has everything to do with your family or the connections you make or the people you fuck over.

Myths often emerge from anecdotes. The myth of the lazy youth does, and so does the myth of the lazy rich. For instance, Bush Jr. didn't work hard to become president, and those that did work hard to become CEOs are generally such workaholics that the rest of their lives are totally out of balance.

Even numbers lie, or at least, numbers need to be interpreted within the context of a narrative. But if we're to believe numbers, then systemic workaholism is also at an all-time high in the US and yet employers and the rich keep touting these myths of the lazy youth.

I'm personally dubious of any claims leveled toward an entire generation, much as such claims toward race, nationality, class, or gender.

However, sometimes generalizations can be applied that are more true than untrue.

If the claim posed by the "lazy youth" myth is true, it's only because these ne'er-do-wells were deluded their entire lives by parents, system, media and peers alike -- and nothing is going to easily undo that.

As we've discussed, the best way to get youth to learn things is through play. Even cats know that and they have brains the size of a walnut. Humans have an inborn creativity and ingenuity that only systemic rubber-stamp education and employment could quash.

So I would say-- work hard by playing hard. Not that everything is always pleasant, God knows. But if you're engaged with your passion, then it won't matter so much.

If anything I'd claim the real issue with "this" generation in question is not laziness so much as idleness through distraction. It isn't a lack of myths of work, but rather a lack of myths of passionate play. Our education system is failing, and that is in part because it seeks to work against our own nature, rather than with it.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

The Monomyth: An Easter Egg in the Matrix

The Video Game of Digital Life

“The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last.
Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.“
— Chuck Palahniuk

Image courtesy of artida / shutterstock

Storytelling: Programed in Your DNA, Written in Binary

Truth is far stranger than fiction.  And so, it should come as no surprise that scientists have hypothesized that our universe as we know it is a vastly complex computer simulation, not unlike the one found in the Matrix movies.  However, what is noteworthy is that for the first time there is now a way to test this hypothesis.

In addition, recent experiments have discovered a viable method of encoding digital information using DNA.  One gram of organic matter can now reliably hold more than one million CD's worth of data.  Right now, the process of encoding and decoding information like this is prohibitively expensive.  But we can do it right now.

What could an intelligence hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than us be capable of?

What if the genetic code of every living organism on Earth is far more than just a blue print for life, but is serving as a massive biological hard drive?  What if all living things are components of a biological archive of information on an ungodly scale?

From the beginning of human history, big existential questions have always lurked in our subconscious minds. Who are we really?  What purpose do our lives have?  Is there a greater meaning to existence?

She comes from the West with flowers in Her hair...

"Santa Muerte...hears prayers from dark places...She was sent to rescue the lost, society's rejects...She understands us, because she is a cabrona like us. We are hard people and we live hard lives. But she accepts us all, when we do good and bad." 

- Hayde Solís Cárdenas, a 65 year old street merchant and devotee of Santa Muerte in Mexico City (Source: On Mexico's Mean Streets, the Sinners Have a Saint, New York Times, March 26th, 2004)

A beautiful woman has come to the United States, she comes from the West with flowers in her hair, through the auspices of a growing devotional tradition spreading across the Americas. Santa Muerte, Saint or Holy Death, has made Her public debut after over two centuries of quiet mediation in matters of love and fidelity. As a previous piece on Modern Mythology mentions, word of Her emergence is roaring in from a diverse array of mediated messages and personal accounts. As elusive as ever, even in the light of social media's invasive reach, Our Lady of Shadows remains a delicate mystery.  

She comes willingly to those with no hope, who have been turned away from all official recognition, operating outside the boundaries of orthodoxy, and She is of a most practical, and efficacious nature. In the midst of sex scandals, economic upheaval, institutionalized violence, income inequality, a culture of rape, a surveillance state (whose patron, Our Lady of Perpetual Surveillance, has yet to make a true public debut,) extreme weather and increasing distrust in official organizations, devotion to Her has threaded throughout the disaffected populations of the Americas. Various numbers are offered for how many devotees She currently has, but no one knows for certain due to the nature of Her worship being on the margins, and the possibility of conflating numbers due to the shock value of Her iconography and politicized nature of the media around Her.

Ambiguous Origins

Santa Muerte is ambiguous in translation by the time She reaches the English speaking media, meaning Saint or Holy Death depending on who you are talking to. This ambiguity leads to some interesting hermenuetics on Her proper place in the Christian pantheon. 

Historically She has been associated with love magic, specifically prayers to return wandering husbands, and in broader conceptual terms, as “Holy Death,” She is the embodiment of Christ’s reconciliary death on the cross, having parallels to traditions which venerate the Good Thief.  Some have commented that she is the "dark side of Mary," but this is only true in terms of the Passion narrative, where Holy Death provides the exit from the natural world which the Holy Mother gave entrance too, in other respects Santa Muerte is quite distinct from the Marian tradition. She is called, at times, Santa Sebastiana, St. Sebastienne, and Doña Bella Sebastiana,Our Beautiful Lady Sebastienne, after the patron Saint of Holy Death, St. Sebastian.

The Internet and Counterculture (Acidexia Intro)

As all the chatter about the “2012 end of the world” dissolves back into the white noise from whence it came, we are still presented a unique vantage point. We can look at once backward and forward on cultural trends, cresting and falling so quickly that in mere decades we can see patterns emerging that may have taken hundreds of years to arise before the advent of digital communication.

Of course, there’s no way a thorough investigation of any trend is going to happen here in the length of an introduction, within the time it takes me to sip my way through a mocha. But that is telling of these times as well. As Palahniuk observed through the mouthpiece of Tyler Durden in his seminal book Fight Club, we are all “single serving size friends, here.” (And is it also a sign of counter cultural mentality that a reference to a book and movie just a decade out of the gates might be considered hackneyed or out of date?) Our observations must also be single serving size, crammed into a 140 character tweet, or a 350 word blog post.

Participants Wanted for the Transmedia Revolution!

Hello everyone!

For those of you who have been following my posts here for the last few months, you may have noticed I've been talking a lot about how technology has transformed the publishing industry, and how transmedia storytelling has broken down the barriers between a story and it's audience.

But I haven't really gone into the specifics about how this can be put into practice. There's been a lot of talk about transmedia storytelling, but very few good examples of what the medium is truly capable of.  People and publishers have folded their arms, and decided to "wait and see."

And I don't blame them.  

After all the talk about ground breaking-this, cross platform-that, and immersion-everything, not much has really happened, has it?  There's been a lot of smoke, but no one has lit a match.  

That's about to change.  It won't be long before you'll be participating in a story instead of reading it.  How do I know?

I'm going to help make it happen.

Do I have some amazing new browser plug-in?  Some sort of new transmedia authoring platform?  A storytelling social media network, perhaps?

Nope.  (People always seem to get hung up on the technology...)

The technology of the written word changed how stories were delivered, but not how they were created.  It's the same thing with e-books, film, and television...they are all different methods of delivering the same fictional drug.

It's the story that's important.

What's the difference between slapping a button on a coke machine, and visiting a barista at your local starbucks?

Puff the magic dragon by Ahnamal

A can of soda will always taste the same.  A caramel-pumpkin-spice-mocha-latte with a dash of cinnamon and whip, tastes a lot different if you have him add a splash of pickle juice.

There's only one way to have it your way: ask for it.

Here at Modern Mythology, we know that storytelling isn’t passive.

A good storyteller must actively engage their audience.  A story should be tailored to whom it’s being told to, not diluted and homogenized just to make it more appealing to a potential audience of millions.

The goal of a story should be to make people think, feel, and help them blink away their pedestrian view of the world.  A book or movie should draw you in, engage you, make you a part of it--not run you over.

Films shouldn't blind people with cinematic eye candy, and books shouldn't hypnotize them with pages of sex and violence strung together with a meaningless plot.

But they do, and they will continue to do so, because that's the easiest way for Hollywood and publishers to get your money without you noticing.

It doesn't have to be this way.  Really.

(Unless you're into that kind of thing.)

Little Steps Towards Personal Truth, pt. 1

"Kether is in Malkuth. And Malkuth is in Kether, but after another motherfucker." - William Clark

Before I explain to you what that means, I'd like to preface this deviation from my recent political meanderings with an apology. I fully realize that most people are put off by terminology like "occultism", "Hermeticism", or "magic(k)". I will try to remedy this prejudice by making all of my personal examples as clear and concise as I can. As with everything, your mileage may vary. Given that a personal foray into the murky realms of Western Esotericism, alternative psychology, and general semantics is more in keeping with the general workflow of this site than others, it isn't entirely out of place. But I am fully aware of the risk this poses to the overall sociopolitical agenda I have been working towards in the last few months. I could potentially alienate people from me by talking about this. The tendency for the overwhelming amount of humanity is to fear that which they do not understand, and that is unavoidable. There is, as the theologist Alan Watts once argued, a strong societal taboo against knowing one's self.

So be it.

I am a magician. I have been for at least a decade now. I will be coming up on my 26th birthday in 2013. I have been formally crashing my way through the harrowing, awe inspiring and sometimes frustrating world of the occult since I was 16 years old. It is a rewarding path, and I have found it to be ultimately responsible for jumpstarting much of my personal growth as an individual. When I look back on the larval state of my entire being at that tender young age, some of the stupid blunders and mistakes I have made (and often continue to make) are greatly humbling. I owe much of the progress I have made from a clueless, morbidly self-obsessed and disaffected suburban kid into a self-actualized creative person to the serious work I have done with self-integration and individuation: A four-fold process of personal evolution that is psychological, spiritual, physical and psychic in nature. In addition to this, I have come to learn that the universe itself provides the initiatory catalysts, the teachers, and the guides that we need. But only when we are ready for it. "Ask, and ye shall receive. Seek, and ye shall find." The teacher comes when the student is ready.

Project update: Words of Traitors

Collage in progress. Myself and Alexey Andreev. 

I haven't had time to focus on modern mythology pieces this summer as much, as I have focused my creative energies almost exclusively into The Words of Traitors, an illustrated book - mixed media, which ties into many other past, and I imagine future, modern myths. They at the same time stand on their own, and have plenty of sex and blood to keep things spicy.

Like Bill Hicks used to say, "don't worry. There will be dick jokes in a minute, folks."

It has been an open project to an extent - open to contribution from those who show up, or who chance brings to it as it came into being.

Where is this project at? We are now less than 2 days from the conclusion of the fundraiser. We could still really use your donations, and you could get some limited edition or even unique art as a result. I will work with whatever we raise to cover those limited print runs, and hopefully have a little bit left to put into the next phase of that project which leads to a public release, either through Mythos Media or in partnership with another publisher. I am hoping to organize a gallery show, as there are a ton of images- many of which I have created myself, or collaged from the my own work and the work of others in some cases.

I initially imaged a mostly textual book with 7 images. It has since grown into a true fusion, with over 50 images, and pretty involved page backgrounds.


As of this posting we've raised $1600 (of a hoped $8000, but like I said we will work with whatever I can), and there are 32 hours remaining. Donate.

This book is a ritual. If you don't know what that means I can't speak to it in any way that isn't long-winded. This is no purely intellectual exercise. It is a book, and to literalize that, some of the art is literally made of flesh. The flesh of animals, the flesh and pulp of plants. It has been good to work with my hands again, with material, three dimensional objects that are then digitized, re-contextualized.

I will write a follow up "5 general rules of indie production" or somesuch if there is a demand for it here as a way to return to this site. If it would be helpful to some of you. Respond. Engage. This medium (the net) often seems to risk divorcing us from discourse.

We can speak, but can we listen? 

Do we pay attention, or merely browse through in a half-dream?

It needn't be passive, but it does demand a certain space and respect to accomplish the goal of truly listening, to ourselves, to one another. The creative process simply can't exist without that space, especially the one that we make within ourselves, like a womb that these (bodies) gestate within. I often say that in a way I already am a parent.

I'm not sure if my children are monsters are not, of course.

There is a lot I could say about this project, but I'd much rather you draw your own conclusions. For that, you have to meet it halfway. I'm looking forward to hearing how the limited editions are received.

Be talking to you...

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Modern Mythology and the Transmedia Revolution

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In Search of Myth and Meaning...

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"The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering."

J. Michael Straczynski

The Power of Myth was one of the most popular TV series in the history of public television.  In a series of six hour-long episodes, American mythologist Joseph Campbell peeled back the layers of mystery that had once shrouded our species ancient storytelling traditions.

Campbell blew away the accumulated funk of centuries of traditional academic inquiry, and connected the dots between mythic traditions that had once been separated by hundreds of miles, and thousands of years.  He postulated that there was a single mythic narrative, a monomyth that had been translated into many different languages, and disguised in the symbols of many different cultures--but one that essentially shared the same structure and sequence of events.

The Monomyth or "Hero's Journey" (Infographic Via The Royal Society of Account Planning)

Finding Joe

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“Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.”

Robert Johnson

 

Follow Your Bliss - Joseph Campbell from Christoph on Vimeo.