Education Institution

Week 2 Reading Reflections

I have particularly enjoyed the discussion on the reductionist and the organic theories of myth.  As a historian who examines the intellectual climate of institutions and societies, I find the most interesting to be the creation myth.  Organizations or societies which lose touch with them often must go into a long period of liminality where a new one emerges or  the old one is re-birthed.  As I have worked with businesses trying to reestablish a creation myth from which to draw new vigor, I've realized that my work becomes rather pragmatic and reductionist.  It may(the myth) "teach us  about ourselves, our place, and the cosmos in which we find ourselves."  Yet we need something more.  There must be an energy cementing that archetypal story or the so-called myth becomes a somewhat dead, pragmatic intervention which all the mythic activism in the world will not resurrect.  So my point goes to the core of the course:  Is there something really tangible which we can call "mythic activism."   Or is it a myth itself....part reductive, part organic... which stems from the world of academia and the need for man to create change?

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  • Hi Mark,

    We'll actually be addressing that today via the idea of transrevolution, which starts by tending the mythos that emerges from a group, business, nation, etc. I think that trying to build or impose a myth on an organization never works because the organism rejects what is foreign to it. It's indigestible. What's needed is to develop the underlying creation myth that surfaces from the history and actions of the organization, always asking: What does this myth want now? To be made concrete? A business plan? Brainstorming? Reinventing? Is it alive, or does a new guiding myth want to come through?

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