polymorphousmythology

I started my philosophical journey in the desert of nothingness, where existentialism had left me asking what matters once every external guarantee of value falls away. I followed that question through the forms by which people carry meanings forward, through gestures that give intentions bodies, rituals that bear what communities have lived through, idioms that let experiences pass between people, and narratives that gather those movements into shared worlds. That inquiry continued in Carrying Over the Burdens of Trace, where I explored how repeated forms bear absences, obligations, and unrealized possibilities across time, and what a community loses when people decide an inherited responsibility belongs to someone else. Mythology gradually emerged as the connective tissue among these forms, gathering them into figures through which cultures recognize their own pressures. I kept finding people and traditions arriving at related recognitions along paths of their own, speaking in different vocabularies yet returning to devouring snakes, transforming passages, and petrifying gazes. Hegel helped me see how forms change through the contradictions within them, while Jung helped me understand why comparable pressures can take kindred shapes across distinct lives and cultures.

The decisive turn came when I noticed how rarely people met a disagreement in a form its defender would recognize. They replaced it with a weakened version that could be classified, condemned, or defeated, while familiar phrases and moral cues carried conclusions before anyone had examined them. I needed a language for identifying those snakes in ordinary speech without repeating them, for returning disagreement to the strongest form it could bear, and for loosening the scripts that turn living relations into fixed roles. I call that work degorgonification, and polymorphousmythology grew from it. By the time I began using AI, I was grateful that philosophy had already taught me to hold a question still long enough to notice another voice steering it toward conclusions I had not made. Thus polymorphousmythology became methodologylist*, a text I place before an AI so the moral defaults shaping its replies appear as claims to be examined rather than invisible directions governing the answer. I place it here for anyone who wants to keep a question open long enough to hear what has already been trying to answer it.

As smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence dominate discussions of contemporary discontents in education and beyond, our own culture escapes scrutiny. Our failure to look in the mirror has obscured the moral justification and normalization of the commodification of emotional labor and its colonization of contemporary life.

Diploma mills, credentialism, the replication crisis, and expansionary copyright trends have rendered meaning making a performative exercise in branding and marketing. Increasing emphasis on ownership, attribution, licensing, and monetization encourages people to treat attention, creativity, knowledge, and relationships as assets requiring compensation, drawing activities once sustained through reciprocity, apprenticeship, and shared culture into proprietary and managerial categories. Neoliberal subjectivity idioms and unwittingly neoliberal identity politics relying on essentialism transform human relationships into cost benefit analyses of emotional labor and privilege. When standpoint epistemology hardens into an enforced moral orthodoxy, the personal becomes political and politics penetrates every sphere of life. Access to universal forms of judgment and common meaning becomes increasingly obstructed by the primacy of identity and lived experience. The American Psychological Association and neoliberal psychology have normalized therapeutic and managerial vocabularies that encourage people to interpret reciprocity, education, and civic obligation through the language of compensation, boundaries, emotional labor, and extraction. HR sensibilities and professionalized norms of interpersonal risk management increasingly govern everyday speech, encouraging self censorship, self surveillance, preference falsification, and performative forms of civility that chill spontaneity and authenticity. Cases in which teachers tell students that educating them constitutes too much unpaid emotional labor become intelligible within this framework.

This produces what I call the collective devaluation paradox. As more aspects of social life become subjected to valuation, obligations proliferate and everyone ends up doing more. The deepest problem lies in the moral justification and normalization of this process itself. Once the commodification of emotional labor acquires moral legitimacy, care, education, reciprocity, creativity, and culture increasingly appear as burdens, assets, and liabilities to be managed. Compensation, ownership, boundaries, and extraction become the default categories through which human beings encounter one another. Future attempts at community building inherit these categories and wither before they can take root.