Mythology

Mythology is my first love, so I am sad when I see worlds that have low quality mythology. Many people don’t realize that mythology has a real structure—specific ways that myths actually form and are shaped.

You can make up whatever you want, of course, but just like geography has certain features that make it more or less realistic, so does mythology. Someone who knows about geography can tell the difference, and so can someone who knows about mythology.

If you don’t care about this aspect of your world, that’s fine, you’re the boss of your world and what matters in your world is what you say matters. But let me pitch you before you decide:

Mythology creates and is created by an incredibly rich process that deeply informs how groups and people live and how they view the world. If your project is about people or groups of people, then reading this guide will give you some surprisingly powerful tools for creating and understanding the people in your world. They will be deeper, more complex, more realistic, and more surprising.

If you care about any of that, this is the guide for you.

To set the stage correctly, I need to mention that this is a complex topic that has a long history of legit academic work. It’s the sort of thing you can get a degree in and still only really be in the shallow end, so this won’t and can’t be comprehensive. This is more like a basic how-to tutorial.

How to Read This Guide

If you really want a robust model of how myths work and why—including what I think are useful insights into psychology and sociology—you should just read this from beginning to end. I think it’ll be worth it for any worldbuilder, and it’ll show up in the quality of your writing later.

But.

This guide is about 10,000 words long, and if you’re not ready for that kind of commitment, you can get an overview by skipping directly to the Tying it all Together section, which will give you most of the actionable content, without the deeper background knowledge.

From the beginning, I’ll talk about:

• Evolution, how things “accidentally” come to be
• Stories, different ways to think about what a story is
• Psychology, how a mind grapples with reality
• Sociology, how groups reflect their environment and people
• Finally, Myth itself, the features a real myth has and doesn’t have

Evolution

For any of this to make sense at all, you really have to grok evolution.

Here’s what you need to grok about evolution: evolution is not intelligent. It’s not moving toward anything, it’s not making things better or more sophisticated or more complex. Evolution is just an inevitable side effect of two simple facts:

1. Things that can replicate better than other things end up with more copies around
2. Replicators don’t perfectly replicate, they make approximate replications so their copies are microscopically different than the originals, always

The rest falls out from there. The replicators have kids who are replicators, and the kids who are best at replicating have the most kids, rinse and repeat until you get Honey Booboo and Tiktok.

Accumulating Luck

All the complexity comes from the environment being complicated, which means there are lots of crazy ways a replicator might end up with an advantage. But remember, they aren’t trying to get an advantage. Everything is complicated, but the best way to think of this is that they are just getting lucky. There are a million critters around the sea vent; one has a slightly different protein structure that kills it and one has a slightly different protein structure that makes it more resistant to heat. One loses this generation, one wins, and the cycle continues.

The other thing to bear in mind about an evolved thing is that the “luck” sticks. It’s not just that one critter once was heat resistant, it’s that one critter was once heat resistant, and now all critters everywhere are that one critter’s children and they are all competing in a new world where everyone is “lucky” in basically the exact same way, and the winners in this new world are both heat resistant plus lucky in some other way that gives them an edge.

So the changes accumulate. The “luck” accumulates.

And those accumulated strokes of luck are mathematically “guaranteed” to stay as long as that particular trait is still “lucky” for that environment.

The last note I’ll make about this accumulation of lucky traits, is that it turns out that if part of your environment is successfully self replicating (like the creatures around you), that part will come to dominate and shape the environment. That means the context in which things accumulate “lucky” traits is in substantial part created by those very same lucky traits. In other words, it’s a feedback loop. Things that eat primordial goop then poop O2 eventually create an environment where it’s “lucky” to be able to eat O2 dot dot dot cellular respiration dot dot dot Honey Booboo.

Feedback cycles causing the accumulation of traits will be a theme here.

Strategies

People often talk about evolutionary “strategies” and it’s a bit confusing because strategy normally means deliberate, intelligent action. When you’re talking about how a sea sponge employs the “strategy” of floating in the ocean and absorbing whatever micronutrients bump into it, it’s obvious that you don’t mean the normal thing.

It’s less clear when you’re talking about seagulls flying high and dropping clam shells to get at the meat. Seagulls are pretty dumb, probably? Maybe they planned it, or maybe it was more like the seagulls that did flying high type motions while holding things just tended to survive more so now their instinctual behavior sort of seems like an intelligent strategy but no seagull who does it has any idea what’s going on actually.

All the way to Orcas coordinating to cause a large wave that topples a small chunk of ice in such a way that a seal is knocked off of it, so they can eat it. That seems pretty planned — strategic in the sense we normally mean.

And actually if you really look at any particular creature doing any particular thing, the line is fuzzy. From now on when I’m talking about evolution, psychology, or sociology, I mean this fuzzy, intrinsically unclear combination of happenstance and instinct and deliberate action.

Ideas also Evolve

Ideas being subject to evolution is not controversial, this is just what a “meme” is. It’s an idea that spreads, and in spreading it mutates a bit, and becomes a slightly different idea. And ideas that are good at spreading get spread more and more, and evolve more and more.

It is totally pointless to read any more of this unless you have firmly in your mind: every aspect of mythology is, at its core, utterly dominated by evolution, both physical and memetic.

Stories

Fundamentalism

Another piece of critical context to understand how mythology operates is that you, reader, are fucking bizarre, historically speaking.

We modern people have a strange sort of fundamentalist relationship with stories that people previously just didn’t really have. Like, the idea of Biblical fundamentalism didn’t even occur to anyone for almost 2000 years; then we showed up and some of us said “yes, literally, exactly these events are true.” I could wax about The Enlightenment and how it radically reorganized our relationship to our own perceptions, but instead I’ll say this:

No one in history, until our post-enlightenment culture arose, took stories literally. If you could somehow reify the personage of classical Greece, and ask: do you believe in literal Zeus sitting on a literal throne on top of literal Olympus? he would think you were an idiot or a child.  

If you’re confused by this, consider how many times you have heard that some ancient oral tradition changed over time, with the holy man who tells the stories changing them even between his own tellings.

Here’s an idiotic and culturally myopic interpretation of that fact: those holy men were saying false things that they were making up on the fly, and they were not yet very good at photo copying, so lots of mistakes were introduced to what was supposed to be a sacred, true story.

No.

Abstract Art

What was happening was master storytellers were performing abstract art.

I’ll explain what abstract art is by comparing it to representative art:

Representative art is like a painting of an apple. It is a fictional representation of an object, and in some sense you can judge the quality of the painting by how accurately it represents the concept of the physical object “apple.”

You can view and judge the painting, but you are not part of the work, as the viewer. Which brings me to:

Abstract art doesn’t represent anything, per se, but rather looks the way it does to evoke something in you, the viewer—a feeling or a sensation or a realization, or whatever.

This is part of the reason it’s hard to look at abstract art online: the physicality of it is very often essential. When you see a Jackson Pollock it’s not just some splatters, it’s an experience that is designed to engulf you:

It’s squiggles, maybe a little flowery? But Mural is 8 feet tall and 20 feet wide. It’s a monumental sensory experience that you cannot rightly experience outside of its intended context.

A couple critical things to note here about abstract art:

1. You are now a part of the work. How you react to the work is the work, to a large degree. If the artist wants to make you angry they have plenty of ways to do it, and if anger is the work, then the way they choose doesn’t matter, in some sense. They could “remix” and “retell” their Anger painting 1000 different ways, and each one would be “the same painting” insofar as it evoked the same feeling in you.
2. If the artist’s intention is to make you happy or sad or small, the artist must understand something about how you in particular see the world. When an abstract art piece captures the imagination of a culture it’s because that artist has understood something about the culture that they were able to use to invoke something shared by everyone who is part of that culture. All this to say that displaying the “same” abstract art for a different audience necessarily means changing the overt presentation of the art to the format that actually evokes the thing in that specific audience.  

So there he is, a master storyteller, with a particular tribe, at a particular place and time. When he paints a vivid picture for his tribe at that exact place and time he must paint the truth of it in a way those particular people can really see it—can really feel it. In a way he, in particular, can conjure it.

And this is why “the same” story can be told differently every time. It was never supposed to be a transcription of literal events that had taken place. It was always trying to reveal the deep truth of the human condition in the context of the world.  

And so a particular person tells it as they understand it, to a particular group of people in a particular context, and all those factors are just a bit different from the previous telling, and a bit different from the next.

To understand anything about the history of mythology, one must understand this: myths are primarily abstract art, so the particular form they take matters less than the deeper truth they are attempting to convey.

Note: real art, as real myths, are always a mixture of abstract and representative. The way an apple is portrayed, the context, the framing, the palette, all play into how you experience it, and that experience of it is also part of the art, even though it “represents” an apple. What I described above were the poles on in an abstract dichotomy, in between which reality always falls.  

Psychology

Mythology exists in a mental, social, and informational environment that I’ll try to give a tour of throughout this essay, but it originates from a primordial ooze: deep psychology, the unconscious mind.

This of course, is an entire field of study, but I’ll try to give you a useful overview of how and why ideological artifacts develop and persist.

Psychoactive

First, some things are “psychoactive.” What is psychoactive? Lots of drugs are psychoactive. The social media rage machine is psychoactive. Your mother’s opinion of you is probably psychoactive. If you had a kneejerk response to the last one like “fuck no it’s not,” then your mother’s opinion of you is definitely psychoactive.

One way to think of “psychoactive” is “anything that distorts your perspective or thought processes.”

A concept, person, or object can be said to be psychoactive if, for example:

• You can’t look away
• You can’t look toward
• You can’t handle believing it’s true
• You can’t handle believing it’s not true
• You’re engulfed by fear when you think of it
• You’re engulfed by euphoria when you think of it
• (…Infinity other effects)

And the distortions themselves are just as varied. In reacting to a psychoactive object you may:

• Inflate it
• Deflate it
• Imagine that it is central to your life
• Imagine that it is central to the world
• Imagine that it doesn’t exist at all
• Imagine that it doesn’t exist at all… AND DON’T YOU DARE SAY OTHERWISE
• Imagine that you’ll be free of it as some vaguely imagined time in the future
• Imagine that you’ll finally have it in some vaguely imagined time in the future

Psychoactivity is Relative

The next important thing to really bear in mind is that psychoactivity is relative to a particular person’s mind. It’s true that shared culture shapes minds in similar ways, so you can see patterns of what is or is not psychoactive across people who share a culture. But in principle, which objects cause psychological distortions completely depends on the psychology of that particular person.

I’m sure you can think of examples from your life of all kinds of different people having various reactions to food, sex, foreigners, family, gender, children, parenthood, friendship, belonging, insects, physical characteristics of themselves or others, etc. All of the examples you thought of in response to that list are examples of specific thought distortions caused by “objects” that are psychoactive for those people in particular.

Which reactions to which psychoactive objects show up in any given person is largely a matter of evolution. That is to say, they are strategies somewhere in the awkward intersection between unconscious/physics-based accidents and deliberate responses to the game board of the world+the mind.

Psychology is Developmental

In writing this section more than others, I run the risk of bloviating forever, because developmental psychology is my primary field. I’ll try not to run amok.

Way back not too long ago in the scheme of things people thought that humans, young and old, were essentially just more or less educated adults. A 5 year old boy was bad at things only because he had not yet had time to learn all the things he eventually would know simply by living.

But then people like Binet, and his grad student Piaget had a different idea: what if our capacity for cognition changes qualitatively over time as our brain physically grows and develops? What if a 5 year old actually doesn’t have the same physical machinery available as he will when he is 25, and it’s not just a matter of learning many facts about the world?

And so developmental psychology is born: exactly what sorts of cognition are possible at what times, and why?

For a long time developmental psychology was exactly and only “childhood developmental psychology.” It was the study of how brains changed as those brains physically developed into adulthood. The scales would end somewhere in the mid teens with all the adult faculties like:

• Sensorimotor 0 - 2 yo
• Preoperational 2-7 yo
• Concrete operational 7-12 yo
• Formal operational - 12 - YOU STAY LIKE THIS FOREVER UNTIL YOU DIE

But then later people thought this seemed wrong. Maybe adults, even though their brains mostly were not physically changing, could still grow and change psychologically. So adult developmental psychology was born.

Developmental Frameworks

There are many frameworks for understanding adult developmental psychology. First thing to know about them is that they are all dumb and wrong, which basically everyone including the creators of the frameworks agree with. They are “fake frameworks.”

Second, my favorite framework is Constructive Developmental Theory (CDT), a framework created by Robert Kegan at Harvard. It’s commonly called “Kegan levels.” There are 5 Kegan levels that I’ll summarize because it’ll be useful to refer to them later:

Each level is arranged in terms of what a person “is” and what they “have.” In the lingo, that is “what is subject” and “what is object.” What is part of their identity (what they believe and are incapable of not seeing as fundamentally true about them) vs. what is part of the world (what they can see and control).

Levels 1 and 2 are generally kids, and don’t get much airtime in the literature because childhood frameworks cover these years in more detail.

Level 3 is the main one you want to know about because virtually everyone reaches it when they are young adults, and virtually everyone stays in it forever. When Kegan did some empirical work on this question, he found that something like 90% of adults were stage 3. I have seen numbers from about 60% to about 90%.

Level 3 is called “The Socialized Mind.”

A Kegan 3 “has” needs, interests, and desires. So like, they can feel a desire for <something>, and say “Huh, I notice I feel a desire for <something>. Should I try to get it? How should I try to get it?” It’s an object in their awareness that they can think about and make choices about directly. They can “take it as object.” (This is distinct from a Kegan 2, who cannot really see that her desires are something separate from who she is at that moment.)

On the other hand a 3 “is” interpersonal relationships. Their personal identity is shaped and determined by their social reality—essentially by the consensus of their in-group. They are not fully in control of who they relate to as their in-group, but whoever it is, it collectively dictates reality. They are “subject to” the ideas, norms and beliefs of the people and systems around them.

The way to understand this isn’t that people of Stage 3 can’t have the concept of relationships in their mind (they obviously can). It’s to understand that the most psychoactive elements of a stage 3 mind are social in nature. They are the elements that a 3 can see the faint outlines of, and feel the unstoppable gravity of, but can’t quite control or understand or see clearly. The concept of what other people think or want doesn’t really occur to a stage 2, they just want some goddamn ice cream. A 3’s desire for ice cream is going to go through a fun house meat grinder of their imagination of what other people think about their desire to have ice cream, or what it means or signals or says about them, both to other people and to themselves. They can’t not think of their desire in terms of social ramifications. A stage 4 can consider all the ramifications and just make a choice about it, not feeling strongly one way or the other about the social dimension despite being perfectly aware of it.  

Teenagers, canonically, are almost all transitioning into stage 3. This is why the world of teenagers revolves around friendship, belonging, group identity and bonding, and how to define individual identity with relation to the group and to the larger world. Different people’s reactions to this psychoactivity vary, even inside the person:

• Friendships are a deep part of their identity, feeling much more relevant and true than family bolds.
• Else friendships are terrifying and or alienating, and in fact the identity coheres around the idea that they are a “loner” or don’t know how to make friends. This example is instructive for how disavowal is one of the primary tools/strategies/reactions to a deeply psychoactive object.
• Exploring, defining, naming, and cataloging individual elements of self identity is extremely important to a 3. Who they are, what they call who they are, and critically what other people say they are and call it, are overwhelmingly important.
• The same pattern of disavowal may be seen here where the method of self identity is setting oneself up in opposition to a real or imagined opponent, who we imagine is preventing or trying to prevent the expression of our true identity. It’s a little touchy to name examples here, but one innocuous example is a teenage Satanist, ie. anti-my-parents-religion-ist. Diagnosis: identity in relation to Other is developmentally central, ie. very psychoactive; idiosyncratic reaction to psychoactivity comes in the form of resistance to Big Other, ie. the social space as they experience it.

All of this should be understood as strategies (in the fuzzy, evolutionary sense) for navigating a reality too complex to actually grok. The people with good strategies prevail, in the sense that they have a life that leads to babies and/or convey their strategies to others. The people with bad strategies are ignored and forgotten. That is, in fact, the definition of “good” in this case.

Stage 4 and 5 collectively make up about 6-36% of the adult population, and historically less. They are called Self-Authoring and Self-Transforming respectively, and I’ll say no more about them for now otherwise I’ll never stop.

Here’s a chart inspired by Kegan’s book In Over Our Heads that summarizes:

Stage / Level (typical ages)	What can be seen as Object (the content of one’s knowing)	What one is Subject to (the structure of one’s knowing)	Underlying Structure of Meaning-making
1: Impulsive Mind (~2-6 years old)	Reflexes	Impulses , perceptions	Single Point
2: Instrumental Mind or Imperial Mind (~6 years old through adolescence)	impulses, perceptions	Needs, interests, desires	Categories
3: Socialized Mind (post-adolescence)	Needs, interests, desires	Relationships, mutuality	Across Categories
4: Self-Authoring Mind (variable, if achieved)	Relationships, mutuality	Self-authorship, identity, ideology	Systemic
5: Self-Transforming Mind (typical older than 40, in achieved)	Self-authorship, identity, ideology	The dialectic between ideologies	Metasystemic, ie. systems of systems

The big takeaway from all this: what is psychoactive (read: magical, important enough to distort one’s mind over) depends on a person’s psychology. A person’s psychology is hugely dependent on their stage of development. Therefore which things take on a magical, mythical level of importance for a person depends largely on their stage of psychological development. Their reactions to that psychoactivity are arbitrary (meaning they depend on too many factors to individually predict), but follow evolutionary patterns (meaning the strategies you’re likely to see are the ones that can survive and spread).

Before I let go of explaining developmental psychology, let me drive it home by saying: the reason there are predictable, structural similarities between the different stages people go through and the context in which they do so, is because of evolution. By that I mean there are certain structural facts about our reality that make some psychological or social adaptations more or less advantageous than not.  

You can often see this in tropes; eg. the spoiled, impulsive young prince. Why adapt from being totally ruled by your impulses and passions if your impulses and passions immediately produce exactly what you want, every time? Why develop something as costly and time-consuming as empathy when there is never any consequence whatsoever no matter what effect you have on the people around you? Of course there are exceptions to every rule, but tropes exist for a reason. They represent historical, statistical trends, which are never quite applicable to any given person, but strongly apply to populations.

The core idea being that people go from impulsive (Kegan 2) to social because they have to learn to get along in a world that is crushingly dominated by their social reality. And sometimes, although pretty rarely, they have to go beyond what the particular people around them think, in order to build something that is bigger than them or the particular people around them.

But that’s not all:

Sociology

Sociology is also developmental.

Which stage of development a person is at depends substantially on which stage their native culture, collectively, can be said to be in. The reason is that:

• Personal and social development, like all evolution, exists in a feedback loop with its environment.
• People at a certain level of development will create groups and structures that seem agreeable to them from that stage.
• The agreeableness will often mean that it resonates with or addresses the elements of reality that they in particular find important and psychoactive.
• So the structure of that group will specifically center around and interact with those elements in various ways
• Which means that a strong requirement for navigating that particular group context is understanding the central elements that form its structure  
• Ie. a group “environment” that requires a certain level of development to navigate successfully will end up producing people at that level, at least
• The groups that require this will only survive insofar as they have also successfully produced a culture that can teach new members how to be at that developmental level. Those groups who can’t teach that either die or regress to a lower level.

And it goes the other way as well: there is a social machine producing people mostly at a certain developmental level, which is itself a new environment, and so some portion of those people will “win,” they will become more sophisticated, and the group that produced them will be changed by them, in a feedback loop.

The idea here is that:

1. Psychology is made of parts, and when certain mental motions become possible, a mind becomes qualitatively different than before, capable of different cognition, valuing different things, finding different things psychoactive.
2. Sociology is fundamentally made of people, and what those specific people are capable of, what they care about, what they find psychoactive, makes a qualitative difference in how that social structure operates, and indeed what social structures are possible.

So in any given group, you have a bottom up pressure for how it operates: what are the people in the group actually capable of doing? Of thinking?

At the same time is a top down pressure: what are the internal and external environmental conditions in which this particular group has to survive and thrive?

Thinking of groups adapting and surviving, brings me to:

Group Organisms

Even though sociology is the study of groups of people, in this context the most useful way to think of them is as an organism themselves: depending on how they are organized and also on some facts about their environment, they will either survive or not. They will either grow or not. They will either spread or not.

And what they “decide” to do, how they “decide” to be is, again, an evolutionary strategy: some combination of people doing random things that happen to work, or trying to do something on purpose and that happens to work for reasons no one really understands even though they think they do, or even people who are right doing something on purpose and winning.

An organism can’t just be whatever molecules in whatever order. They have to be arranged in a very specific way that keeps all the functions of life going. They have to be set up to let the right things in, while preventing the wrong things from coming in. Same with things going out. They have to make sure the right stuff gets to the right place at the right time, so the whole machine can keep chugging along. Change much of this, and the whole thing falls apart. The equilibrium topples. The thing dies.

Groups are exactly like this.

They have an internal structure that keeps them together in a particular way. They have mechanisms for keeping bad stuff out, keeping good stuff in. They have mechanisms for nutrients like status, money, food, etc, to get to the right places at the right times. And if you change many of these elements without accounting for the change in the near-infinite related systems you will likely topple the equilibrium of the thing. The group will die, either because it disintegrated and all the people went somewhere else, or because all the people in it themselves died.  

This process of change is obviously fraught and dangerous, which is one of the core strengths of evolution: you don’t have to figure anything out. You just have to have 1000 groups of people and see which 5 survive. They were the ones who were doing it right. They were the lucky ones. The only people who will now exist will do so based on the example of the 5 who did it right. Iterate forever, dot dot dot Honey Booboo.

Group Evolution

Ok, so remember: evolution means that the lucky ones make babies, and those babies do the same, and after a while the environment changes in accordance with the effects of all those babies and all that luck. That is the evolutionary feedback cycle.

So if you want to have your group end up working a certain way, there are things you can do, like:

• Enforce equality under the law
• Cull the weak and infirm
• Demand expensive in-group signaling

And the people who are in your group or not in your group will change to reflect this new social environment, some by leaving or dying, some by getting stronger or signaling a lot. But there is some effect.

And if you’re not that deliberate about it, the group that happens to exist will happen to be doing some stuff, some of which is important for the group’s continued existence. And out of the 1000 groups if they are among the 5 who survive, then that stuff will keep happening.

Some examples you basically always see in long-term successful groups:

• Norms or laws encouraging or requiring extremely high fertility. Think Catholics and Mormons. Obviously, if you have 5x more kids than the outsiders, then in the next generation, you’re going to have the upper hand by sheer numbers. Even if your group sucks and half the people leave, if you’re having 5x more babies, you’re still winning.  What about 20 generations from now?
• The Concept of Apostasy. You may not know the word, but I know you’ve heard the concept: the unforgivable sin. Turning your back on God after you have seen the light. That is to say, leaving the group. It’s framed by ~every global religion as the worst possible thing you can do. I’m including “religions” like nationalism. Very convenient for group cohesion!

But also…

Tying it all Together

The Ultimate Group Survival Strategy

It turns out that one evolutionary strategy—some fuzzy collision of deliberation and bumbling—is so dominant, so overwhelmingly advantageous to a group’s continued existence, that you will find it in every major group, every minor group, everywhere, throughout history, without exception.

It’s such an overwhelmingly powerful strategy that it has colonized the minds of essentially every person alive today. It infects the very way we conceive of the world and of ourselves.

That strategy: storytelling.

The absolutely dominant strategy for stable, cohesive groups that survive and spread: tell stories that reinforce the structural aspects of your group that make it work at all.

How do you know which stories do that? You find yourself alive instead of dead. You get lucky. Actually, you find yourself at the end of a chain of a billion lucky people, and their groups, and you just add one more link to that chain.^[1]

Myths are the story you get when you let the dream logic subconscious of all the people going back to before we were even people tell a story that no one—no teller, no listener—really understands, yet all of them vibrate with the life of. Myths are when you tell that primordial story that shines with some mysterious, psychoactive lifeforce that no one really understands, and then you’re one of the 5 groups who survive, and you’re one of the 5 groups who survived a million times in a row. Someone had to be that one. Spoiler alert: it’s you. You’re the one who came out of this process. And the stories that are now a piece of you are as well. Lucky.

There are patterns and structures you can use to identify high quality myths. The following sections are mirror images of each other: first a sort of checklist of what makes a fictional myth bad, followed by the mirror image of that list, a sort of checklist of what makes a myth good.

Common Mistakes in Fictional Myths

Created by People on Purpose

Cars are created on purpose by people. The purpose is transportation, and everything about a car is obviously designed for that purpose. All the bits of a car lend themselves to the singular purpose, and there are almost zero extraneous parts, and certainly none that pull against its purpose, of transporting people relatively short distances.

Contrast with a camel. It’s an organism. It exists because its mom existed, and its child will exist because it existed. It exists because fuck you, that’s why. It’s incredibly complex, and almost every aspect of it exists either because that trait is “lucky” or because that trait used to be lucky in a different environment.

Separately from all that we can rig them up to ride. We can develop riding skills, and camel husbandry skills. Camel riding technology of various forms exist. Complex relationships between camels and people exist. We can rely on them as a means of transportation, and they serve that purpose quite well under many conditions.

But camels are not for that purpose. They aren’t for any purpose.

They were not designed for transportation, or even being around people at all really. They have some coincidental, fortunate traits that made people hitch a ride on them, and people can relate to them as if they are “for” transportation. But we barely understand them at all (see also: all other organisms). Even the traits that we care about aren’t purpose built for the thing they happen to be good for. There are extra bits and whirligigs we wouldn’t have put on there if they had been cars, designed from the ground up. We may or may not find clever uses for those whirligigs. They have some unfortunate qualities that make them worse than they could be at the thing we want them for. Future generations of them are basically random—influenced by us a little at a time, but still operating under their own internal logic. We get what we get and live with it.  

That is what a real myth is like. It’s mysterious, chaotic, confusing, multi-purposed. Real myths are vexing and often contradictory. They do some mysterious psychological and social work in certain ways, and then seem to undermine themselves in other ways.

One way to spot a stupid, made up story that’s pretending to be a myth is if it’s too on the nose. Too obviously designed for the purpose that it’s currently serving. Ocean people worshipping an ocean god that likes ocean stuff and does ocean things. Gods with a one-to-one correspondence between their traits and actions and the traits and actions of the people who supposedly worship them.

Center around concepts that people don’t care about or have already mastered

Fuck your thunder god. No one cares about thunder and lightning unless they are at Kegan Level 1, when the mind bending mystery of the world that’s so terrifying you can barely look at it is whether some natural force is going to randomly kill you at any moment. Children worry about that, and primitive people, but no one else.

Even norse people stopped caring, and they invented Thor. This is actually instructive: at some point in the past Thor was worshipped as a group’s main god, a god of thunder. Thunder is a terrifying force to people who live basically in lean tos surviving, barely, day to day at the whim of natural phenomena they barely understand. These were stage 1 people, who themselves were subject to the chaos of their own “random” impulses and passions, and so they projected that chaos out into a universe defined by chaos and passion and dangerous upswelling of emotion. Thunder, lightning, an excellent reification of the raw power of the emotions of the world.

But at some point those people went to stage 2. They still had passions and desires, but felt some mastery over them. They could look into the world and see that the world has passions and desires, but that there was a higher organizing principle as well. The organizing principle they saw was force of will, passion aided by strength toward conquering. They were warriors. They already had a god to worship with a billion tendrils into their psyches, and the “ultimate truth” became clear to them: sure he wielded the passionate and dangerous power of thunder, but his true nature was a warrior nature. He wielded thunder in battle. Battle, conflict, force of will, that skulking beast at the edge of their awareness. The dangerous and powerful force they were subject to, and driven by. They were stage 2. And their god was the warrior god of thunder, Thor. Always had been, you know. Secretly.

I don’t think I need to spell out why Thor was demoted to the son of the “real” head honcho god Odin, the god of power through insight and self-knowledge (but also a warrior god).

And so it goes until you’re in a culture where the lurking beast at the edge of your awareness is your sense of personal freedom and expression, or whether you’ll be included or excluded, whether you truly know who you really are. And the reifications of those psychoactive objects will be serious, sacred, worth fighting and dying for, even though you can barely grasp their magnitude: democracy, identity politics, community vs globalism. This is what the precursor of Thor felt like to northmen huddled under temporary shelters in a raging storm, many thousands of years ago.

Fake myths center around objects/reifications like thunder which are innocuous not only to the author, but to the people who supposedly worship them. No one worships at the feet of concepts they understand and control.

Here is a true fact: the word “taboo,” which means “forbidden,” comes from the polynesian language of the Māori, where it also primarily means “sacred.” The Māori knew, as did most people, that sacred objects are necessarily objects of terror as well. Things that are unavoidably central to life and dangerous because no one really knows how they work. Because everyone seems to go mad in contact with them, ie. they experience distorted thinking and perceptions when contemplating the divine, ie. divinity is precisely what is psychoactive to a culture.

Not About the Group

Fake myths are not about the social group, or worse, undermine the functioning of the group.

Having a group narrative of being rebellious is pretty common as a disavowal of actually being a cooperative, docile collectivist culture. That is 1950s America, for example—you have the slogan of Freedom! as a subversion of the reality that social norms were quite tightly enforced inside a narrow band of acceptability.

But having an earnest culture of constant resistance is not a stable configuration. If your story is about the disintegration of a group, then having the culture be individualist and divisive is great. If you’re trying to portray an ancient empire whose culture has been mostly unchanged, and you’re telling me they are a bunch of rebels at heart, I call bullshit. Narrative has very strong effects on the functioning and stability of groups. Narratives that don’t trend toward cooperation and enforced similarity will destroy the group.

Relatedly, it’s unlikely that a given myth simply has nothing to do with the group structure. Arthurian myth is about, for example, the mind and about virtue, but the framing narrative is about a king, and loyalty and power structures. It takes as a given that the default state of a virtuous person is to follow the lead of a king chosen by god to rule. That is not a coincidence, even though it’s an accident: it’s a bit of luck picked up in the process of evolving this story. Pick a myth and notice that it either is “about” or has the background context of who controls what and under which circumstances. Even when it’s “about” love or death or birth or any other psychoactive object, it’s also inevitably about how power in that group works.

Shallow, Straightforward Meaning

Basket gods for the basket people who love baskets. Fake bullshit.

Even a cursory look at real myths will have you saying things like “well, in this version it’s like this, in that version it’s like that,” or “at this time period this god was like this, but at that time period he was more like that, at least in this region, depending on who you ask.” Or like the god of the harvest is also the god of thresholds and clouds. Why? Basically because fuck you, but if you carefully tease it all out and lay out the networks of symbolism and meaning as it moved throughout history you might find subtle connections between these objects and concepts, or least connections between how those particular people related to them.

Another incredibly common structure is that a god rules over something and rules over its opposite as well. Shiva is the ultimate creator god. Unless you mean the version where he’s the Shiva the Destroyer. Of course most people understand him as both now. Although there’s an obvious parallel in the combination of Shiva and Vishnu in the singular personage of Brahma, who is the ultimate reality.

An old god, like an old story, is never just one thing, just like a person isn’t. Not even at a particular time and place are they just one thing. Only fake bullshit “myths” are that simple.

Follows Logical Structure

A hallmark of fake bullshit myths is that they even pretend to follow a logical, sequential structure. A special telltale sign is that the chain of events is driven by the psychologies of the characters. That is a modern storytelling convention: some character’s thoughts and feelings drive their actions through a logical sequence of events that somehow reflect on their original intentions. That is not at all how myths work.

To the degree you think they do, you think so because the myths you have framed in your head as myths are filtered by your culture and told to you by people who also don’t generally understand how myths work.

Real myths have a similar structure to dreams:

I woke up in a forest, and I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew I was a princess? Like I was important somehow, but not because of anything that I done? Something like that? And I had to get out of the forest, back home, but it was dark, I couldn’t find my way out, but then I was by a pond, and the water was dark, and suddenly there’s this huge, ugly frog just sitting there, and it’s disgusting, but it starts talking to me. And I can’t really explain it but I’m disgusted but I also feel sort of turned on, and I kissed the frog. But suddenly it wasn’t a frog, it was a prince. In the dream it made sense, like he was a frog but had always actually been a prince. And we flew home, sort of. Anyway him being there meant we could go home. And then I woke up.

A weird dream. Also the plot of The Frog Prince, a myth ancient enough that the true origin is lost to history. You can tell it in whatever style is appropriate for the audience, and add little connecting details about the particulars, but it’s still a structure primarily driven by abstract connections that are metaphorical at best; and remember, the truth is that they are barely even metaphors except insofar as they seem useful for that. Just like camels are not for riding, these stories are not for understanding, but people ride horses and understand stories all the same.

These stories are written by no one and for no purpose. They are the collective dreams of all our ancestors.

Elements of High Quality Myth

Here is the inversion of the list above: what qualities a real, powerful myth will have.  

Created by no one for no purpose

Myths are evolved. When we say that a shark has dark skin on top and light skin on bottom “for the purpose of” camouflage, we never mean that a shark genius came up with the idea to have camouflage and it caught on in shark culture. We always mean that generation after generation of shark got increasingly “lucky” with the random color of their skin. We can look at it now and make a good guess about why that particular trait is lucky, why it helps some sharks make more babies than others, but that’s a retroactive guess, and even if it’s basically right it’s not the full story. The pattern of skin that sharks rely on to survive was created by no one and for no purpose. It just happened to work out that way.

And again bringing back that awkward collision between accident and intelligence, there are examples that are less clear. Sharks know nothing about camouflage, nor do stickbugs. But do monkeys “understand” the stick they use to get bugs from the ground? Does a 2-year-old child really “understand” the learned behavior of a temper tantrum, or is it just something shaped by their behavioral tendencies without them being really aware? Does a college student posturing for his friends really “understand” what he’s doing? He’s an adult person! He did choose to do it after all, and could probably talk a bit about the action. But also did his billion ancestors in a row, one after the other, engage in the same behavior by coincidence? No, we are looking at that uneasy intersection that we call “evolutionary strategy.”

Myths are at the same uneasy intersection. Someone generated the words, had an understanding of those words even. But. Real myths have weird lumps and bizarre shapes, while following brutal logic of efficiency: every murky detail of them plays 100 different roles in the overall power it has. Just like fingernails that protect, and are useful for digging, and defending, and attacking, and looking pretty, and a million other things. Just like language, or like hair. Accidents in a kaleidoscope of shapes being used a billion different ways all at once, all adding up to the complete story.  

Resonates with Psychoactive Objects

Good myths must resonate deeply with psychoactive objects in the minds of the group’s people. That means it sticks in their mind, and they are compelled to organize their lives around it (ie. it changes their behavior), and tell other people (including each other) about it.

What stage of development are these people at? What psychoactive objects are only whispers at the edge of their fears, and must be navigated with sacred care because it’s either that or die?

One way to frame this question is: how emotionally sophisticated is this culture? Which is to say: what forces do the people know well enough that they loom overwhelmingly in their psychology, but see poorly enough that they are barely within their ability to comprehend or control? That’s what their myths will focus on.

Promotes Group Survival

The myths you get to hear, just like the people you get to know, are passed down from the groups that survived. Maybe it wasn’t always the stories, exactly, that saved the day, but the stories were always part of the package. Maybe it was superior metalwork, but where there’s superior metal work, there are stories about virtuous craftsmen and heroic weapon wielders.

Like injunctions to make lots of babies and never leave the group, evolution dictates that the effect of successful stories must trend toward maintaining and expanding the group, including and especially over long periods of time.

That means promoting personal values and identities that lead to group thriving and survival. It means vilifying the opposite.

Good myths resonate deeply, and are prone to spread, while also buttressing the collective strength of the people who tell it.

One hard thing to look at here, from our culture of individuality, self-empowerment, free expression, and open acceptance is that there are lots of group cohesion strategies that just straightforwardly work quite well, that are also horrifying given our current values. Collectivist strategies that fuck basically every individual while cohering the group have proven to work quite well. Despotism and xenophobia are hella stable if the conditions are right. The mythology will reflect all this, which means the group structures and individual psychology of the people in that group will reflect that.

Holographic

The myth must be “holographic.” That’s really just a $10 word for “it works on multiple levels,” ie. it has overlapping, overlaid layers of meaning that change depending on the listener. It’s sort of like having a “double meaning,” but with the volume turned up to 11.

To understand this, take a modern Pixar movie for example. It works on multiple levels: little kids can watch it and be enthralled by the frenetic motion and colors, older kids can follow the basic story beats, teens can see some historical or cultural parallels, adults can get the subtle jokes and references. Movie makers and critics can see the craftsmanship itself, and understand what this production means in the context of the history of similar productions.

Now imagine that instead of the well-crafted machine that is a Pixar movie, you’re hearing a tale told by a master—a piece of abstract performance art—evolved for a quarter million years to convey a wash of psychoactivity to a variety of people, such that it gets passed on again to the next generation, and so on.

Imagine someone once made up a sentence that they thought sounded good, and then we collectively tried a billion slight variations on that sentence and descendants of that sentence, until it carried a different nuanced, evocative meaning for each stage of life and each role that anyone ever found themselves in. And now imagine you have a string of such sentences whose construction and combination was under the very same pressure. That’s a myth.

In a very real sense those words are words from the mouth of our creator. The same process that created humans: evolution, survival.

A couple side notes:

1. Understanding the developmental level of the culture itself will help you understand how many levels a particular myth will have to resonate on. Take a warrior culture, ie. Kegan 2, impulsive/imperial. Their stories will have to work on the level of a child who experiences the world as magical and blended (level 1), as well as on the level of someone defined by their impulses and desires. It won’t have to work on any other levels, because the audience won’t hear it.
2. Except! In many mythological traditions there is another, hidden layer of meaning. Like the film maker/critic watching a Pixar movie, this layer is for the teller of the stories, ie. the holy people. The layer is often a literal secret, a sacred mystery only revealed to insiders of the tradition. The secret is predictably a revelation of the true nature of reality and god, and that revelation is invariably that the truth is whatever the non secret level is plus one more developmental level. A warrior shaman will tell stories that resonate with levels 1 and 2, and that contain the hidden secret of the world: the world is made of people and actually the way things go isn’t just how the strongest people force it be, but in fact the way things go is dictated by a combination of what everyone wants, and thinks, and does.

The interesting thing about this is that you can predict where a culture will go next by looking at the secrets of the priesthood. You may have noticed that the sacred truth of the universe, as told by a warrior shaman, sounds like democracy, which is to say that our culture is stage 3. I ask you: who are our holy people? What are their secrets? What is the secret seed of truth in the stories they tell us, that will be our next cultural development?

Dream Logic & Memory Palaces

A side effect of a myth being a kind of trance, or dream story where the words evolved to evoke psychoactive feelings, instead of telling a logical story, is that myths require a different sort of structure than logic to make them hang together.

Whereas normally you can remember what happens next by remembering what came before, and then using logic, with this you have to use metaphorical landmarks to move from one dream-logic set piece to the next.

This is what is called a memory palace, and it’s a mnemonic technique used to remember incredibly vast amounts of possibly disconnected information, by associating each part in sequence with a layout of some kind. One of the more popular “myth landscapes” to house myths is the monomyth—the hero’s journey—with its call to adventure, and underworld, and dragon, etc. Remember, it’s not about the logical sequence of events, it’s about which evocative metaphor comes next in the apparently random sequence. Why is the huntsman hunting? Why does Iron John eat his dog? Why is he at the bottom of a pond? Why is he captured? Why is there a golden ball? Why does the queen have the key under her pillow? The answer to all these questions is the same as the answer to“ why does that bug lay its babies inside that other bug’s brain?”

Depending on your mood the answer is either “fuck you, that’s why,” or “because that’s what its mom did to make it exist, which will also be true of the child it’s currently laying into that brain.”

Wrap Up

A high quality myth will have all these features simultaneously. It’ll resonate with all layers of a particular group’s psychology, in way that trends toward group cohesion and survival, while holding relevant meaning to listeners from every perspective, in addition to holding the seed of that culture’s “secret of reality,” and being structured with dream logic and cultural touchstones that enable the continuous retelling without the usual logical structure. I didn’t even get into how myths have to be robust to substantial changes in all-the-above in order to really stand the test of time.

You may note that that is a dizzying level of complexity, and it doesn’t seem very realistic to be able to just generate it all from scratch and have it really work. To which I say: yes. Among people who study myth, there is a truism, which is that a good myth takes at least 10,000 years to really “bake.” This is why.

At least now you know some major forces at work.

Appendices

(These are mostly not complete, I will complete them later)

Reification

“Reifiction” is taking an abstract idea and creating a concrete representation of it that you interact with in your mind as if it’s the real thing. Depending on your particular psychology a rose might be a reification of love, or a wedding ring might be the reification of a marriage.

More abstractly, you might reify a concept into a character like Justice as this lady:

MyGodPictures.com

There are recognizable features of this human form that correspond to the abstract features of the concept of justice: blindness, balance, force, grace.

Reification is the process by which the specific forms in mythology are born.

Since myths are psychoactive, they are about things that are in the periphery, that are vague and ominous in peoples’ minds, and so part of the function of the myth is to bring that vagueness into the light, in the form of a concrete object or character that can be grappled with if not understood.

The features of these reified objects and characters with some shape and form to otherwise amorphous concepts, but remember that even these are evolved: the forms and symbolism may be studied after the fact, and any scholarship done on a religion by practitioners of that religion will create a feedback loop, but fundamentally the features of a robust and realistic reification follow the same structure as a robust and realistic myth: evolved, psychoactive, echoes group structure, holographic, and driven by free association from emotions, not by logic.    

Developmental Frameworks

Before I say more about this, I can’t possibly overemphasize how fake these are. Super fake, very fake. Made up, just-so stories. I think most developmental frameworks aren’t even trying to be real, but in any case, I’m certainly not trying to pretend they are.

They are more like a taxonomy of your favorite magical beings from fiction. There are more or less clever ways to organize your collection of magical beings, and some of them could even be useful for thinking of new magical creatures or whatever, but the taxonomy isn’t “about reality.” It’s just something you made up, and you could have made up something else instead. And lots of other people can and will make up their own taxonomy that they like more.

That’s how you should think of developmental frameworks, even though some of them are a tiny bit more respectable than fake taxonomies of magical creatures.

Constructive Developmental Theory / Kegan Levels

The example of an adult developmental framework I used in the main guide was the Constructive Developmental Theory by Kegan. The use for it was to think about what “level” a given culture had achieved, and therefore what sort of stories would be active within it, what sorts of concepts they would worship and fear, and the rest.

Kegan provides some pretty rich material there, in particular because you can use the progression from level to level to understand the logic of growth. What I mean is that the stages don’t just inevitably happen by magic—they arise as solutions to problems, ie. strategies to overcome the limitations of the current stage. I alluded to that in the example of the impulsive (level 2) prince who had no reason to learn how to delicately navigate other people (a level 3 awareness).    

Here is another copy of the Kegan Level table from the guide, for reference:

Stage / Level (typical ages)	What can be seen as Object (the content of one’s knowing)	What one is Subject to (the structure of one’s knowing)	Underlying Structure of Meaning-making
1: Impulsive Mind (~2-6 years old)	Reflexes	Impulses , perceptions	Single Point
2: Instrumental Mind or Imperial Mind (~6 years old through adolescence)	impulses, perceptions	Needs, interests, desires	Categories
3: Socialized Mind (post-adolescence)	Needs, interests, desires	Relationships, mutuality	Across Categories
4: Self-Authoring Mind (variable, if achieved)	Relationships, mutuality	Self-authorship, identity, ideology	Systemic
5: Self-Transforming Mind (typical older than 40, in achieved)	Self-authorship, identity, ideology	The dialectic between ideologies	Metasystemic, ie. systems of systems

Remember that each level includes all the previous levels, so a Kegan 3 is only just able to hold their own needs, interests, and desires as object, but they can still hold their impulses, perspectives, and reflexes as object too.

What follows is a fuller account of how each level proceeds from the last. Remember that these are made up–they are just examples that illustrate the structure of how a person might be and how they might change. You can make up your own reasons and challenges that force or inspire your characters or cultures to have these insights.

Impulsive to Imperial

Impulsive minds are generally very young, like toddlers and young kids. In our culture they are constantly having their outbursts pointed out to them, and are being asked to control them. They are also constantly asked what they are seeing and what the names of colors are, what the names of animals are, what sound they make, etc.

This makes awareness of impulses and perceptions practically inevitable in our culture.

But consider what would happen in the ancestral environment if a child was never stimulated in this way. They were simply strapped to their mother’s back or front, feeding when they were hungry, until they could walk around themselves. They would pick up language ambiently, and start doing whatever they do in that culture, but they would never have to actually think about it. At the end of growing up, they would be a full-grown person at Kegan Level 1.

Consider too, what natural forces would prompt a person like that to innovate—to become aware of their own impulses and perceptions as an object they could consider. One example of such a force is when social deception becomes tricky enough that you have to have the concept that someone else might be lying to you, or said another way, the idea that what you have been shown is not real. That is a leap that requires a person to be able to notice what they perceive, and consider it separately from who they are or what they believe.  

Imperial to Socialized

(Todo)

Socialized o Self-Authoring

(Todo)

Self-Authoring to Self-Transforming

(Todo)

Integral Altitudes / Spiral Dynamics

Did I mention how super fake these frameworks are? Integral Altitudes are even super faker than most. Someone just made it up, like a magic system in a conworld. It’s the psychological equivalent of a fanfic. But it’s rich, it’s fun, and if you learn it you’ll get a lot of mileage when you think about the finer points of your characters and cultures.

This one is arranged by color instead of by number. The colors are just in a random order. In fact it’s confusing because the original version of this system was called Spiral Dynamics, then a different person took it, basically kept it exactly the same, except changed the random colors to different random colors. So if you try to google integral levels or altitudes and you try to google spiral dynamics, they will be almost identical except with different colors.

Here are the levels:

Altitude (Spiral Dynamics)	Values & Abilities	Avg. Age (individual)	Started Existing (culture)
Infrared (Beige)	Archaic. Dawning self-awareness. Survives through instinct, intuition, and banding with others.	0-2 years old	250,000 years ago
Magenta (Purple)	Magical. Sees the world as enchanted. Ritual and deep community. Individual subordinate to group.		50,000 years ago
Red (Red)	Tribal. Egocentric, vigilant, aggressive. Impulsive, ruthless. Courageous, determined, powerful		15,000 years ago
Amber (Blue)	Traditional. Ethnocentric, or nationcentric. Rules, roles, discipline. Faith in a transcendent god or order. Socially conservative.		5,000 years ago
Orange (Orange)	Modern. Rationality & science. Individualism, democracy. Capitalism, materialism. Risk-taking, self-reliance.		300 years ago
Green (Green)	Postmodern. Pluralism & equality. Relativistic & sensitive. Civil rights, environmentalism. World centric.		50 years ago
Teal (Yellow)	Integral. Sees natural hierarchy & systems of systems. Holds multiple perspectives. Flexible, creative, effective.		Very recent
Turquoise (No Equivalent)	Integral. Sees the world as alive and evolving. Holistic & cosmocentric. Lives from both individual self and transpersonal self.		Emerging now
Indigo (Coral)	Post Integral. Realizes oneness. Exhibits wisdom, joy, love.		Theoretical and aspirational

You may notice some loose parallels between Kegan levels and Integral altitudes, like Red is basically 2, and Teal/Turquoise is basically 5. It’s all fake anyway, feel free to mix and match.

Like the Kegan levels, each Integral level is supposed to “include and transcend” the previous levels. So the idea is that one becomes Orange by first attaining Amber and the rest. In practice, insofar as any of this corresponds to reality at all, that’s rarely how it works.

I’ll get into those exceptions after the following description of the “canonical” transitions from one altitude to the next:

(Todo)

Infrared to Magenta

Magenta to Red

Red to Amber

Amber to Orange

Orange to Green

Green to Teal

Teal to Turquoise

Turquoise to Indigo

(Transitions)

Cultural Assimilation

(Todo)

Explain how to recombine “story dna” when groups have to merge. Gods and creatures turn into saints, angels, and demons. The cult of Shiva collides with the cult of Kali or Vishnu or Ganesh or anyone else, and Hinduism is born. Jesus comes along and if you squint hard enough he sort of looks like the jewish messiah, and the whole thing really comes together if you add some basic threads of buddhism and the whole zoroastrian vibe.

Propaganda

Myths are evolved stories that do important psychological and sociological work.

Instead of just letting a story evolve, it’s possible to author stories that do psychological and sociological work on a similar scale, deliberately, and in such a way that it suits your personal interests. You can try to understand which social structures work, and how they are reinforced, and what stories will cause the reinforcement, and how to tell those stories.

We call these designed myths propaganda.

They are flimsy and insubstantial compared to ancient myth, but they are fast and powerful. Watch out for the hip dysplasia, and good luck in the post apocalypse, but man does it work when it works.

(This is due to be expanded later.)

Worldbuilding Prompts

• How skillful is your culture’s tradition of storytelling?
  • Which in turns necessarily relies on how skillful the tradition is at training the next generation of master storytellers
  • If it’s not good, they are probably a young people. Their storytelling is probably weak, and inapplicable a lot of the time. Probably doesn’t resonate broadly, and isn’t respectable to outsiders. This doesn’t bode well for their long term survival.
• How subject is this culture to top down propaganda? Most mythology has formed in the context of memetic natural selection, but top down propaganda is more like artificial selection.
  • Think of a fancy male bird doing a dance—he’s “trying” to dance, “trying” to win in some sense, but it’s not like he has those concepts exactly, it’s not like he made his own fancy feather costume as part of a strategy, it’s just the result of a long line of birds looking kind of (and increasingly) like him, and feeling kind of (and increasingly) like he feels at the moment he’s doing the dance.
  • Think now of dog breeds. They are incredibly varied because their features and traits were selected deliberately. This is a boon and works well. It also means that almost all pure breeds have serious genetic issues. It means most dog breeds would struggle to survive in the wild. It means that when left to their own devices, dogs become mutts within literally one generation. All of these traits are shared in common with “artificially selected” mythology, ie. propaganda.

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Cover Art Credit: Patrick Tilp & Claudya Schmidt, The Bridge