Northrop Frye on Democracy as Open [Source] Myth

the following quotes come from Frye. They resonated within me.

"you don't need to be Freud to see that you cycle around your childhood your whole life"

"you can only really teach by parable"

"the book is the world's most patient medium"

"the educational attitude is a militant one"

Frye then goes on to speak about freedom and responsibility, which i'll paraphrase - dipping his ideas, fondue style, into my subjective understanding.

The more freedom we have, the more we need to be responsible for what we do. This is why people crave for authority. Submitting oneself to an authority, Frye says, allows the individual to be the machine he is comfortable being. Frye says the public conception of a machine is one that says the machine is not self-defeating, it can do its thing without anxiety. Just so, the individual casts on to authority the fears of having to wrestle self-defeating anxieties of having freedom.

It is in his application of mythology to an understanding of how the world works today that Frye's concern about the machine man really bares fruit. He notes the difference between open and closed mythologies. Closed mythology is the authoritarian imposition of ideas on the individual - it is the means by which an authority governments. Open mythology, however, is fashioned democratically - formed in the individual. Words and the stories that colour the definitions for "freedom" and "liberty" come from within the individual in a democracy.

I don't know, but I think I'm starting to sense a strong and violent devotion among people to the maintainers of the status-quo, to the rule of the security state. I do not think that the security state is a positive development. A democratic closing to violent potentialities means that the individual, with his now limited freedoms, has less of himself to be responsible for.

Instead of internally being formed by the tyranny of infinite possibilities (rule of freedom), the individual in the security state is fashioned by an externally imposed limitation on being (rule of man). Certainly, I can sit here and think of what it must be like to have infinite possibilities, but it's a demotivating exercise since it is such a reminder that I am so far away from being - I feel dead and the thought of endless possibilities I know is futile.

Uh oh, it's gone. It just walked away. The Point just up and left. Don't worry, I'm sure it will return.

Erica and I are going to watch the English Patient tonight.