[mythistorian]

Yes, my dear sunbug, you are not so far afield! And you caught my hint when I wrote about the imposition of the One upon the collective, for in so doing the One turns the collective against itself, unleashing a deluge of violence and self-destruction.

“But isn’t the greater power of the one derived from an attending Collective? That it is Collective power (collective underneath the One of course) that the One often seeks and desires? And NEEDs?”

Exactly! There is a mutual dependency, a being-for-one-another that sustains the identity of both. The One stands over the Many as Sovereign, Supreme Leader, or Führer, where we are dealing with an individual that has become one with the One (not noticing that there are already two ones at work here.)

I think Stephen would also agree that it is not so much a problem with the archetypal-mythic energy called “heroism” but with a specific ideological form of the hero, the form of the One. For this is such a One containing the split within itself. This is why dualism and monism can happily co-exist as two sides of the same ideological coin, a fact which is in full evidence in Gnosticism, for instance.

The celebratory dream of the collective must be given a shape in which literal violence can be turned into mythic delight—but we are yet so far from such utopias that the more pressing matter at the moment seems to be to at least stop authoring our own self-destruction! That would be a good start.