Beyond the Hero’s Journey (Part III)
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To some extent, the hero’s journey reflects and perpetuates a colonizer mindset, leading to the subjugation of entire cultures. Simpson (2011) noted that the current generation of Indigenous people “has been repeatedly told that individually we are stupid, and that collectively our nations were and are devoid of higher thought” (p. 32).
Time and Cultural Perspectives
Moreover, the linear nature of time, often central to hero narratives, is not a given for many cultures (Yunkaporta, 2021). The traditional hero myth may also not resonate with people of color, including Black women. Stein (1984) cited Black author Toni Morrison as one example:
Unlike the stock epic tale, in which the hero, driven by inner compulsion to leave society in search of knowledge and power, undertakes a dangerous but successful journey and returns in triumph to transform a fallen world, Sula presents a tale of courage in the face of limitation and powerlessness, of self-knowledge wrested from loss and suffering, of social amelioration eked out of hatred and fear. (Stein, 1984, p. 146)
Postmodern Critiques and Western Thought
The limitations of the hero’s journey are more evident in a postmodern world. Schieffer and Lessem (2016) note that many myths no longer carry their initial power to interpret the world and the cosmos or provide us with guidance.
In these complex times, a new hero must consider nature, humanity, and the more-than-human world in context. Analyzing complex phenomena out of context exemplifies disjunction, a conceptual pillar of Western thought. Morin (2014) defined disjunction as an investigatory principle whereby objects are divided into basic components without regard for their connections.
This thinking style is apparent in the Western focus on individual parts of nature (or humanity) over which control can be exercised. Westerners are not trained to think systemically, or use context, in their interpretations of the world.
Nisbett et al. (2001) note that “inferences rest in part on the practice of decontextualizing structure from content, the use of formal logic, and avoidance of contradiction” (p. 159). We cannot, however, avoid contradictions in today’s world, which calls into question the usefulness of the hero’s journey and its framing of problems in linear ways.
Besides its limitations for overcoming complex crises, the hero’s journey is inadequate given advances in our understanding of consciousness and its connection to transformation.
Rethinking Transformation and Consciousness
According to Mezirow (1978), transformation is a permanent change in an individual’s worldview.
However, the hero myth tends to reinforce a prior worldview and what is already suspected as truth. The boons of success referenced by Campbell (2008) could be seen as a false truth leading to a false self, especially when humans, particularly in the European-American world, separate their identities from the natural world (Canty, 2014).
This ability to separate one’s identity from the natural world is endemic to a larger European-American worldview. In popular mythology, the habitats, creatures, and processes of the natural world are ancillary characters in the story of humanity, as humans are unable (or unwilling) to see beyond their perspective.
Shorb (2012) suggested that humans harbor an innate need to affiliate with the natural world. Called biophilia, this need is “the genetic legacy that is a portal between the psychic landscape that inhabits us and the physical landscape that we inhabit” (p. 3). However, this may not be a portal through which the archetypal hero is inclined (or equipped) to walk.
In future files, I will explore alternatives to the hero’s journey as a metaphor for transformation.
References
Canty, J. M. (2014). Walking between worlds: Holding multiple worldviews as a key for ecological transformation. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 33(1), 15–26, Article 4. http://dx.doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2014.33.1.15
Mezirow, J. (1978). Perspective transformation. Adult Education Quarterly, 28(2), 100–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/074171367802800202
Morin, E. (2014). Complex thinking for a complex world—About reductionism, disjunction and systemism. Systema: Connecting Matter, Life, Culture and Technology, 2(1), 14–22.
Nisbett, R. E., Peng, K., Choi, I., & Norenzayan, A. (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic versus analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 108(2), 291–310. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295x.108.2.291
Schieffer, A., & Lessem, R. (2016). Integral development: Realising the transformative potential of individuals, organisations and societies. Routledge.
Shorb, T. L. (2012, Summer). Exploring the twin landscapes of biophilic learning. Green Teacher, No. 96, 3–7. https://www.proquest.com/openview/dbeb7979afbe3b91f57e4601da9e3709/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=33544
Simpson, L. B. (2011). Dancing on our turtle’s back: Stories of Nishnaabeg re-creation, resurgence and a new emergence. Arbeiter Ring.
Stein, K. F. (1984, December). Toni Morrison’s Sula: A Black woman’s epic. Black American Literature Forum, 18(4), 146–150. https://doi.org/10.2307/2904289
Yunkaporta, T. (2021). Sand talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world (Illustrated ed.). HarperOne.
About Spaciology
Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.
- Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
- Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
- Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.
Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.
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Membership gives you free access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Field Guide.
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Beyond the Hero’s Journey (Part II)
Technology, profit, productivity—these are hallmarks of what is often construed as progress within the Western worldview? Progress for whom?
These thirsts are fueled by a belief shared by many in the Western world that nature is little more than a machine. According to Rout and Reid (2020), the machine metaphor “delineates nature as predictable, controllable, mindless matter that is separate from and does not matter as much as culture” (p. 948).
Seen through this metaphor, the ecological crisis is little more than a structural problem, a proverbial chink in the system that is nature that can be “fixed” by the hero.
Humanity’s “Needs”
In framing any aspect of the ecological crisis through the lens of its impact on humanity’s needs and wants, the Western world supports the importance of humanity over nature.
Extending this worldview, the machine metaphor lauds progress versus balance and the primary of globalization compared to local phenomena, all of which have helped turn nature into a commodity, a machine built for human use (Sullivan, 2010).
Metaphors such as “steward” are equally problematic. Whereas “steward” implies a moral obligation to care for the Earth, this term also suggests the Earth is inanimate with humans somehow its master (Flint et al., 2013).
Ubiquity of the Hero’s Journey
One way to better understand the machine metaphor (and ecological crisis) is to look at the rationale that supports the narrative structure and sequence of hero’s journey myths. Within these myths, presented similarly throughout the world, “a hero ventures forth from the common day world into a region of supernatural wonder” (Campbell, 2008, p. 28).
Campbell described the universality of the classic hero narrative as a monomyth, a single hero story with which all humans resonate (Allison & Goethals, 2016). According to Campbell (2008), this story follows a trajectory with three primary sequential stages: “A separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return” (p. 33).
Humans have always been drawn to hero stories, the evidence of which “can be found in the earliest known narratives that describe stirring accounts of the exploits of heroes and heroic leaders” (Kerényi, 1978, as cited in Allison & Goethals, 2016, pp. 188–189).
Rank (1952) said these heroes, found in different nations and “widely separated by space and entirely independent of each other,” present “a baffling similarity, or in part a literal correspondence” (p. 1). Homer’s Odyssey, written 2,700 years ago, is widely regarded as one of the first and best examples of the hero’s journey in the Western world (Allison & Goethals, 2016).
Hero’s Journey Examples
Examples of other ancient hero stories from across the world include “Hesiod, Vishnu, Gilgamesh, Etana, Sundiata, Beowulf, Samson, Thor, Leonidas, Guan Yu, among others” (Durant, 2002, as cited in Allison & Goethals, 2016, p. 189). The hero’s journey is also found in today’s movies, including “Harry Potter, Superman, James Bond, Luke Skywalker, and The Lion King’s Simba” (Singh, 2021, p. 183).
The hero’s journey is not simply a metaphor experienced as entertainment. Rather, it is explicitly used in numerous professional domains: counseling (Lawson, 2005), education (Brown & Moffett, 1999), transformational tourism (Robledo & Batle, 2017), and leadership (Goethals & Allison, 2019) among others.
Despite its ubiquity, tales of a single (usually male) hero armed with superior intelligence do not resonate with all people—a concept that will be explored at great length in the next file in this series.
References
Allison, S. T., & Goethals, G. R. (2016). Hero worship: The elevation of the human spirit. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 46(2), 187–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12094
Brown, J. L., & Moffett, C. A. (1999). Hero’s journey: How educators can transform schools and improve learning. Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development.
Campbell, J. (2008). The hero with a thousand faces (Vol. 17). New World Library.
Flint, C. G., Kunze, I., Muhar, A., Yoshida, Y., & Penker, M. (2013). Exploring empirical typologies of human–nature relationships and linkages to the ecosystem services concept. Landscape and Urban Planning, 120, 208–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2013.09.002
Goethals, G. R., & Allison, S. T. (2019). The romance of heroism and heroic leadership. Emerald.
Lawson, G. (2005). The hero’s journey as a developmental metaphor in counseling. The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development, 44(2), 134–144. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2164-490X.2005.tb00026.x
Rank, O. (1952). The myth of the birth of the hero: A psychological interpretation of mythology (F. Robbins & S. E. Jelliffe, Trans.). R. Brunner.
Robledo, M. A., & Batle, J. (2017). Transformational tourism as a hero’s journey. Current Issues in Tourism, 20(16), 1736–1748. https://doi.org/10.1080/13683500.2015.1054270
Rout, M., & Reid, J. (2020). Embracing Indigenous metaphors: A new/old way of thinking about sustainability. Sustainability Science, 15(3), 945–954. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-020-00783-0
Singh, M. (2021). The sympathetic plot, its psychological origins, and implications for the evolution of fiction. Emotion Review, 13(3), 183–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739211022824
Sullivan, S. (2010, Summer). “Ecosystem service commodities”-a new imperial ecology? Implications for animist immanent ecologies, with Deleuze and Guattari. New Formations, 69, 111–128. https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/lwish/nf/2010/00000069/00000069/art00009
About Spaciology
Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.
- Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
- Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
- Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.
Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.
Spaciology Learning Commons
Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.
Membership gives you free access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Field Guide.
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Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.
Membership gives you free access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Field Guide.
Beyond the Hero’s Journey (Part I)
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Floods, wildfires, drought, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, pollution, mass riots, war—this is the world right now in active ecological crisis. There is very little recognition, though—much less discussion—about the interrelatedness of these issues, which underscores the urgent need for a transformation in our collective worldview that allows for sanctity of diverse perspectives across cultures.
Deconstructing the Hero’s Journey: The Western Worldview’s Role in Our Crisis
However, a prevailing model for personal and societal transformations is the hero’s journey that, although pervasive, offers a version of reality that feeds the Western worldview within which humans are centered (and in command). The current crises we face as a species demand that Westerners, especially Anglo-American, cisgendered White males (like me), consider their worldview as a primary cause. This worldview is characterized by what Robinson-Morris (2019) said is “the West’s misguided understanding of self, our interconnectedness and interdependence” (p. 3).
Western society, however, does not appear ready to collectively question its worldview. Instead, Westerners individually look outward. Nature and various social issues are objectified as characters in a story. Climate change is characterized as the foe (or monster) within this story, which humans (as heroes) can defeat with the tools (also heroes) of science, technology, or legislation. Simultaneously, these same tools are wielded in an (often separate) attempt to address the complex array of social issues faced by governments and other institutions worldwide.
Questioning Western Tools
What if European American (Western) culture’s very use of its tools—science, technology, and/or legislation—is creating the issues that must be solved? The Western (European American) belief in technology reflects a kind of addiction where many people embrace technological fixes as “the answer to social, psychological, and medical problems caused by previous technological fixes” (Glendinning, 1995, p. 49).
Capitalism’s Role: Profit, Exploitation, and the Ecological Crisis
This addiction is part of a larger Western worldview that has not just contributed to the ecological crisis but caused it (X. Chen, 2017). Fueled by capitalism, the Western worldview has led to the exploitation of nature and (marginalized) people as objects whose value is only measured in their utility (Marx, 2005). As a species, we must not only acknowledge the Western world’s addiction to technology but also what X. Chen (2017) referred to as a thirst for profit and capitalist modes of production. The ecological crisis, then, results from the inability of the hero to satiate this thirst.
Embracing New Metaphors: Moving Beyond the Hero’s Journey
In part two of this expansive file, I will explore this proverbial thirst as well as the ubiquity of the hero’s journey, which underscores the need (opportunity) to embrace new metaphors.
References
Chen, K.-H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization . Duke University Press.
Glendinning, C. (1995). Technology, trauma, and the wild. In T. Roszak, M. E. Gomes, & A. D. Kanner (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Restoring the earth, healing the mind (pp. 41–54). Counterpoint.
Marx, K. (2005). Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (M. Nicolaus, Trans). Penguin.
Robinson-Morris, D. W. (2019). Ubuntu and Buddhism in higher education: An ontological (re)thinking. Routledge.
About Spaciology
Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.
- Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
- Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
- Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.
Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.
Spaciology Learning Commons
Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.
Membership gives you free access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Field Guide.
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Space as Metaphor: Beyond Output-Oriented Paradigms (Part II)
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Strategic plans are particularly excellent examples of a process with questionable results, especially if stakeholder collaboration is desired (Tiwari & Winters, 2017). The logic behind strategic plans, however, is indicative of the Western paradigm’s contradictory view of the individual as of primary significance, yet also replaceable.
The Western worldview rests on the Cartesian assumption that the mind is more important than the body. Though subtle, this assumption supports the ability of many Westerners to engage in disjunctive thinking (Morin, 2014) in order to break down complex problems into proverbial bottom lines that can be mapped through pure reason alone.
Strategic plans are particularly excellent examples of a process with questionable results, especially if stakeholder collaboration is desired (Tiwari & Winters, 2017). The logic behind strategic plans, however, is indicative of the Western paradigm’s contradictory view of the individual as of primary significance, yet also replaceable. The Western worldview rests on the Cartesian assumption that the mind is more important than the body. Though subtle, this assumption supports the ability of many Westerners to engage in disjunctive thinking (Morin, 2014) in order to break down complex problems into proverbial bottom lines that can be mapped through pure reason alone.
There is indeed vital information in our bodies, however, and even in the silence in our physical movements:
The silence is not merely golden; it is replete with meanings. Those meanings in turn testify to a corporeal semiotics, a movement-anchored corporeal semiotics that resounds within us. It resounds within the volume of our being an animate form of life, in all the so-called “systems” that functionally describe us—our respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems, for example—some of which we can and do at times directly experience. (Sheets-Johnstone, 2019, p. 37)
There can be no substitute for what we experience in our bodies—and without our bodies, there is no mind. However, our minds also create our bodies, which are cultural representations of how we view our very selves. Indeed, the implication from this study is not that the hero’s journey has no use at all. Nearly 5,000 years of history demonstrate its ubiquity, but its relevance as a mode of transformation is misplaced in a world in desperate need for humans to remember they are part of a collective whole.
Perhaps our ability to share (external and internal) space is predicated on the extent to which we are able to be free of ourselves in order to become ourselves. Imagined without time, space as metaphor enables us to participate in creating, making, cleaning, growing, shrinking, shifting, expanding, and reconfiguring the metaphorical and literal spaces within, outside, and between us.
Whereas many of our discussions as a species revolve around borders and boundaries, space as metaphor removes the implied directionality of such conceptualizations, which inadvertently exacerbate the perceived divide that separates humans from self, one another, Earth, and cosmos. Space as metaphor is empty, yet full of potential, enabling individuals with diverse viewpoints to participate—and be heard—in collective space, a place in which there is still room for the occasional hero.
References
Morin, E. (2014). Complex thinking for a complex world—About reductionism, disjunction and systemism. Systema: Connecting Matter, Life, Culture and Technology, 2(1), 14–22.
Morin, E. (2014). Complex thinking for a complex world—About reductionism, disjunction and systemism. Systema: Connecting Matter, Life, Culture and Technology, 2(1), 14–22.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2019). The silence of movement: A beginning empirical-phenomenological exposition of the powers of a corporeal semiotics. The American Journal of Semiotics, 35(1/2), 33–54. https://doi.org/10.5840/ajs20196550
Tiwari, R., & Winters, J. (2017). The death of strategic plan: Questioning the role of strategic plan in self-initiated projects relying on stakeholder collaboration. International Planning Studies, 22(2), 161–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2016.1220288
About Spaciology
Spaciology is not abstract theory; rather, it is a practice you can feel.
- Inside: Pause, breathe, notice.
- Outside: Design rooms, rituals, and agendas that slow the spin and invite care.
- Between us: Make dialogue a place where different truths can live together long enough to teach something.
Ultimately, leadership is the art of making space for what’s important (for everyone) and letting that clarity shape the next step. When we change the spaces from which we lead, our strategies change with them.
Spaciology Learning Commons
Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.
Membership gives you free access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Field Guide.
Stay in Touch
Spaciology Learning Commons
Want to go further? Join the Spaciology Learning Commons.
Membership gives you free access to community conversations, courses, introductory resources, and the complete Field Guide.