Integrated Mythology

What I focus on is why personal branding works.  It works because we are still tribal and more tribal than we are human beings evolving in the 21st Century.  We still engage the primary response of fear and flight and we still have centuries of culture in built into the way we think, that unconsciously we are unaware has been passed down via successive generations.  This is where the allegory of Plato's Cave is germane to this century.  This century will put human beings through dynamic exponential change - and that is what I am interested in - not selling, telling or yelling to others what it is I think.  It does not matter what I think, what matters is that I am capable of hearing my own voice and learn from that which emanates within me.  It is not as if I am free of the cave - but with each successive year I am emerging and evolving. Our tribalism may be very sophisticated but it is still tribal and that there is violence among tribes only simple sets the context for me as to why we will find personal branding something that comes naturally to us.  War comes naturally to us also but we do not identify with it or at least we don't think we would be willing to fight if another tribe invades.  With personal branding we achieve a similarity and conformity with each other and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.  Cultures do brand themselves and in ways that may not be beneficial to our own particular tribe and in exercising this conformity we don't notice the loss of diversity.  Diversity is very important to me, so I welcome studying a viewpoint of personal branding as Juan Imaz has laid it out.  That is a prerogative of the founders of any new tribal culture what they see is best for their growth and development.  What I absolutely acknowledge is not the primacy of brand you but that of mythology.  If I understand mythology I understand it as being the staple of what it is we have come to believe or what it is we ourselves spread - if that is people buy our brand !The mythos we create with personal branding is more important than the personal branding, because when I understand my own mythos, I understand one unit of humanity that is me and therefore am no longer a divided unit of humanity but now integrating with all the other units of humanity who are finding their own voice, their own value and how this is an integration - or in Socrates way - in the act of "know thyself" - there is a better chance to know humanity.  When I look at the younger generations they are potentially different from the tribes of prior generations whose memes co-exist today as factions, boundaries, politics and war.  By understanding our own mythos we are also understanding our personal brand and more importantly we understand the conditioning that has led to believing our branded way of life.

Just because things are more visual these days does not mean that the visual should be our predominant success.  "The ice age is coming" said Jiddu Krishnamurti, in his talk "Living with Image".  Today we move from one image to another, from one story to another, from one news piece to another - but I don't need a personal brand for this reason - that without it, I am actually free to look at personal brand as a conditioning and as a conditioning of others - and in so doing I am free to observe my own life.  When I read through Juan Imaz's expression for beBee that gives voice to those that genuinely want to pursue personal branding, I say kudos to anyone who has an affinity with that.  What I mean by affinity is much larger than an affinity with personal brand.  What is the point of championing affinity if the actual affinity is a certain way or a pattern that is best followed.  It is easy to follow a way until we become separate from humanity, another division in humanity, another tribe even if that tribe is now virtual.  Eventually, in trying to create some personal nirvana, what we find is the rise of the Law of Unintended Consequences - that which we thought we could bring into being with a particular philosophy, is imposed on the group, rather than found within us.  At that point my voice is not my voice at all and if that is the case, I cannot possibly be the voice of the 21st Century,  but merely the voice of all centuries that have been.  In this case what am I than a prisoner of another belief system that cultivates the safety of the past, rather than the safety intelligence that fosters future generations to think for themselves.