Myth’s anthropomorphic heel

My post Heroes not ogregores lamented that a top-tier newspaper’s coverage of Detroit focused on celebrities rather than systems—aka individuals not ogregores. However, a mythological approach also veers perilously close to personalization.

Humans fixate on people, especially celebrities, rather than using systems to explain complex social phenomena. For example, history is often written in terms of political and military leaders rather than social forces and structural dynamics. 

The tendency to focus on prominent figures rather than systemic factors goes by several terms, each highlighting a different aspect of the bias, like personification, personalism, the personalistic fallacy (the attribution of human qualities, intentions, and actions to abstract concepts or inanimate objects), Great Man Theory, individualistic bias (attributing events to individual characteristics, choices, and actions, rather than considering the situational and systemic factors) and celebrity culture. (H/t Gemini-1.5-Pro and GPT-4 responses via Poe.) It’s simple, more engaging, and reinforced by our individualistic culture. 

Standard alternatives to personalistic views include structuralism, systems theory, and Marxist analysis. A mythical approach can also help by focusing on greater-than-human actors and using symbolic representations while retaining dramatic narrative. However, a mytho-religious method risks reverting to personification through anthropomorphism, particularly because myths often embody abstract forces and systemic factors through deities and supernatural beings who display human-like characteristics. It also risks overlooking systemic causes and reinforcing the power structures that established the myths in the first place. (H/t Gemini-1.5-Pro response via Poe.)

One can perhaps mitigate this risk by treating myths as metaphors rather than literal explanations; examining their cultural context to understand what they reveal about societal views on agency and structure; comparing myths across cultures; and combining it with the other methods like structuralism. (H/t GPT-4 and Gemini-1.5- Pro responses via Poe.)