Mythology

Almost everyone past forty knows the type. The man still operating, in some quiet operative sense, as if he were twenty-four. The woman whose romantic life consists of the same three patterns it consisted of in 2009. The friend whose career has had the right surface motion — promotions, titles, perfectly photographed dinners — but whose inner question, who am I when no one is watching, has not seriously been asked since adolescence. They are not failures. Some of them are extraordinarily successful. They are simply, in the part that matters, not yet adults. ...

Rereading Cien años de soledad after many years, I found myself less drawn to the Buendía dynasty’s epic sweep than to two characters at opposite poles of the novel: Remedios la Bella, who ascends bodily into the sky while folding sheets, and José Arcadio Buendía, the patriarch who dies tied to a chestnut tree, speaking Latin to the ghosts only he can see. Both escape Macondo. Both leave ordinary reality behind. But they do so from diametrically opposite directions — one upward into serenity, the other downward into madness. The more I thought about it, the more this looked like a question Buddhism has wrestled with for centuries: what separates enlightenment from craziness, and are they really opposites at all? ...

The book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis got me into thinking about the Minotaur, but at the same time I couldn’t help but think about Kirtimukha. I decided to write a piece comparing the two myths and how they relate to capitalism. Capitalism: A Labyrinthine Monster or an Eternal Hunger? Throughout history, economic systems have been compared to great forces of nature, war machines, or living organisms. But if we turn to mythology, two figures stand out as powerful metaphors for modern capitalism: the Minotaur, a monster lurking in an inescapable labyrinth, and Kirtimukha, a self-consuming face that never disappears. ...