In our new video, featuring a clip from the Million Dollar Extreme webshow “Theater of the Aire,” actor Donald Jolly speaks a profound truth about the (perpetual) state of our modern myths, a.k.a, our comic book superheroes:
“Superman Has to exist in the present […] and the details of Superman’s life can never actually change. All that happens, within each individual episode or issue, is the Illusion of Change.”
“I don’t know what it means to be in a society, where our myths are incapable of resolving themselves. […] They just continue to exist in this unending, Timeless Nightmare, so that they can continually be sold.”
..But what does it look like when a myth is able to resolve itself?
As opposed to our countless, modern unresolvable myths, when a myth IS able to “resolve itself,” it is no longer added to. It is laid to rest, whether through death (of the character, of the age in which the myth is set, or of the storyteller(s) themselves), or through other means / outcomes. Myths can end / be resolved in many different ways; vengeance, ascendance, death, rebirth, resurrection, even immortality – but in all cases, the story ENDS.
To be sure, the old, classic stories and myths are still told, and often. Their impact continues to ripple into the future; but no New stories are made – much less are they set in contemporary times, or are continually made, motivated purely by profit and publication schedules or movie release dates.
Only now do we constantly trot out our 80-90 year old heroes (Batman, Superman, etc, ) and force them out of their own time and into ours. We disallow them to remain within the sanctity of their own time, as we refuse to move on and create new myths of our own.
These desperate, selfish attempts to wring as much money out of them as possible have the effect of de-elevating, cheapening, and degrading them – from revered Übermenschen, to subhuman mascots.
Through our relentless commodification, we vampirically drain them bone dry of all their magic, leaving only a hollow, substance-less husk of a negative-one-dimensional archetype.
The tragedy here is not “what we have done” with our modern myths – the tragedy here is that they are still deemed suitable characters for exploration and idolization. That they are still readily offered to and accepted by children and adults, as their vacuous, price-tagged role models.
This does not have to be the fate of our myths – by playing with elements of scarcity, tact, virtue, and values, the oversaturation can be left to die down, and these empty husks can have new life breathed into them.
But that should not be our goal, nor our mission.
Our goal should be to create new myths. By dreaming, and by living. By experiencing life, and by sharing our experiences of it. Not by fabricating, but by factualizing. By embracing the void, battling the existential dread that lies within its maw, and by crafting a path beyond it.
The course is not to avoid the abyss of post-modernist ennui, existential depression, and the chasms of isolation and emptiness, but to transcend them. To escape them with enough experience and perspective to assist your fellow man in doing the same. That escape is accomplished by reframing one’s understanding of one’s self, in relation to the (inner) self (i.e, one’s soul), and in relation to the other (i.e. via the Twin Principles of Unism, Agape Love, and the Golden Rule).
All this and more is possible, when we remove the blinders that have been affixed to us, escape from Plato’s proverbial and perceptional Cave, and our eyes gradually but assuredly adjust to the vibrant reality of a modern and future landscape, which is as much in our control as it is outside of our control: that is, no more than is so for any other singular human; in fact, it even more so in our control, when multiplied by the strength achieved by our growing numbers.
Joining those numbers is easier than you might think. In fact, you may already be a Unist. There is no entrance exam, no dues, and no oath. Just our twin principles, and a perspective that refuses to let the world burn in the hands of those who have sold us on despair, neglect, apathy, and automation for a civilization that was once on the path to true greatness. While this does largely apply to swaths of European, Western, and American Civilization, by this we primarily mean Human Civilization. And for that cause, at least momentarily, it is not too late to rise and stand together.
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And, as always, we will
see you
in the
The Unists 