For whatever reason, we seem to keep passing thought experiments - like the #Monomyth - down the telephone game, and arriving a priori at the conclusion that, given enough data (or stories), they can be proven a fait accompli. We do this in spite of Campbell's self-waiver above, an extremely safe, and conservative conclusion. We've done this before with #Hobbes and #Rousseau. The structure of conclusion is the same. Maybe there are angles we're missing.

Perhaps the most fetid and swollen elephant carcass in the room is that, even by the standards of what was politically acceptable in the 1940s, Campbell's politics were weird. Randian-weird. Hobbesian-weird. As Joel Christensen and Sarah E. Bond write in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Monomyth blends in and aligns with Ayn Rand's interpretation of ethical egoism in her Fountainhead:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-man-behind-the-myth-should-we-question-the-heros-journey

If Campbell's theories are a tuning fork, then what resonates when you strike it are the frequencies of rugged individualism, as Christensen and Bond write*; there's also harmonies with Hobbes; Great Men theories of history; it's libertarian in broad strokes. But let's be very clear: Campbell consistently repeated, time and again, that Monomythic heroes must always be male; they are destined to inherit power, supernatural or otherwise; they are born to bring order, and to rule.

You might say that "must always be" is a bit too strong, for in the eighth step of the journey ("Meeting with the Goddess"), he appends the notion that there can be heroines. For this, I would like to retell the arguments from Spencer McDaniel's "The Hero's Journey is Nonsense," as I understand them:

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journey-is-nonsense/

> "When the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth, but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no."
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 299-300

Well, OK. What about stories where the protagonists aren't white--

This, folks, is Campbell's *opening.* It is his 'dark and stormy night;' his 'best of times, worst of times;' his Greek chorus who foreshadows everything that is going to happen in the play; he might not have flat-out compared these cultures to primates in this quote*, but he makes it very clear that not only are they not Western, he finds their stories amusing, bizarre, mystical, and on the whole, "it's all the same."

This is cultural #imperialism. It is not amusing, it's wrong; and as a white, reasonably middle-class Scottish person, I strive to call it out as I see it. It doesn't matter what Campbell believed - these words have all the cadence of your extremely egalitarian Uncle Greg. He'd never speak ill of immigrants in public - met a few, 'imself - but at family gatherings, he'll regale you with patter like, "they should fuck off back to their own country and see to their own."

Then there's Campbell's influences. For instance, we know he combined Freudian psychoanalysis with Carl Jung's archetypes and collective unconscious theory. The result, applied to myths and storytelling, is the #Monomyth. Jung, likewise, was a progeny of Freud's work, and, like many conservatives post-WW2, heavily influenced by the works of Irish philosopher Edmund Burke:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke

The collective unconscious theory is, in effect, a mystical mirror-world version of #sociology. Among other things, it posits the existence of #archetypes - that is, through the unperceived connections everyone has to everyone else, we inherit common patterns of thought, or images, or symbols. If the collective unconscious is the cause of rhyming stories and history, archetypes are the effect.

(As certain historians are wont to do of societies they cannot fully understand - particularly prehistoric ones, on account of any witness who could tell us what it was like being dead.)