Author’s Note
This piece is a footnote in the Tools series—but only in the way that fire is a footnote to the forge. Most entries have centered on the instruments society uses to shape behavior: money, metrics, myth. But this one steps back. It examines the tool I use to shape those very entries.
Not a hammer, not a law, not a ledger.
A method. A medium. A way of weaving metaphors into mechanisms until the system reveals its seams.
If the other articles in this series are maps, this one is the compass. Not because it leads in one direction—but because it explains how I draw the lines. Why I begin at altitude. Why I refuse compression. Why I believe that a properly wielded myth can be sharper than policy, and sometimes, just sometimes, more honest.
So no, this isn’t a detour. It’s the workstation. The blueprint. The grimoire.
Because even when you aim to dismantle the machine, you still have to choose your tools.
—Dom
Information today is conveyed in bytes—both storage and sound. Compressed. Cropped. Edited. Optimized to precise effect, each piece engineered to deliver a single, streamlined message: what the one behind the keyboard wants you to think. The fragments are so small they resist argument. They evade reflection. You’re not meant to weigh them, only to act: accept, share, comment, like, subscribe… or reject. It doesn’t matter. As the saying goes, “all press is good press.”
This is how you get headlines with no villains and economic policy with no victims.
I find this approach intellectually dishonest—and worse, profoundly disrespectful to any thinking being unfortunate enough to be caught in its Pavlovian cycle of call-and-respond obedience. I might be less hostile had I been raised on the same intellectual fast food as most new seekers. But I wasn’t. I was handed alternatives: secondhand knowledge from wandering minds, battered textbooks on rocketry and science, dense finance manuals, dusty ledgers, and novels that wouldn’t even make the performative banned-book displays of today’s sanitized shelves. And from that chaos, I inherited something indispensable: context.
Not just within a chosen field, but across dozens—bound not by curriculum but by compulsion. That kind of learning stitches things. You begin to see that disciplines aren’t separate at all—they’re seams. And once you stitch a few together, you begin to notice: the world is not just patterned, it is deliberately patterned. Aesthetics, policy, morality—all structured like code, like infrastructure, like habit. What once seemed like the frayed edge of common sense becomes the deliberate seam of design. Systems aren’t invisible. We’ve just been trained not to look directly at them.
“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought about that which everybody sees.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
Why I Scale Up Before Scaling Down
Most writing is sorted cleanly into fiction and nonfiction—the real and the imaginary. But what is myth, if not the fiction we create to account for the facts we’ve never been exposed to? Myth exists to stitch cause into consequence when our tools of reason fall short. Here, I reverse the thread: I use the mythic to bind together the unfamiliar, to create a structure the reader can grasp, turn over, and dissect without retreating.
I start most journeys at altitude. Not because it’s grand, but because it’s honest. A single life can’t hold the weight of the system crushing it—not until we see it from above.
That’s why I begin with narrative. Sometimes it’s the birth of a universe. Sometimes the quiet resignation of a man watching his town collapse. Sometimes it’s a god, ash-dusted, sculpting a soul. These aren’t flourishes. They’re foundation. If I want to combine ideas and construct a frame of meaning, I need to start with a load-bearing beam—a rope that lashes sail to mast. A metaphor that fixes the puzzle to the wall instead of tossing it back in the box.
Begin too low and every fact is noise. Start high enough, and systems resolve like terrain viewed from orbit. The narrative lifts us to that height. And from there? We trace the lines down—the rivers to their floodgates, the scaffolds to their architects.
I don’t write fables to soothe. I write myths to measure. And the measurement matters because the things I’m pointing to are that big.
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”
— Galileo Galilei
Metaphor as Method
A metaphor is a beautiful lie that tells a harder truth. It’s an intrusion—a way to bypass the brain’s habitual cynicism. Where data persuades with weight, metaphor persuades with precision. It wraps physics around faith, stitches ecology to economics, welds the neuron to the myth.
You can’t stitch a system together with footnotes. But metaphor? Metaphor binds rocket science to Genesis. It collapses distance—and with it, resistance. Done well, a single image smuggles a dozen disciplines into the bloodstream before the reader has a chance to mount a defense.
Think of the brain as a loom. Every sensation—memory, fear, ambition—is a thread moving too fast to name. Metaphor slows the loom just enough for pattern to emerge. And once you see the pattern, you start noticing it everywhere. Not just in poetry—in headlines, in zoning laws, in paycheck deductions. The mythic lens doesn’t make reality prettier. It makes the watermark visible.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Synthesis as Resistance
We live in an age of intentional fragmentation. Academia partitions truth into majors and minors. Media turns systemic rot into bite-sized trends. Corporate strategy slices time into quarters and human beings into line items. We are dismembered by design.
Synthesis, then, becomes subversion. It hops fences, pockets blueprints, and redraws the map. Not for cleverness, but because the house is on fire and the evacuation plan has been printed in sixteen incompatible languages. When I braid Mesopotamian myth with SaaS pricing models or compare school architecture to surveillance blueprints, I’m not being poetic. I’m picking a lock. Because behind that lock is power. And behind the power is the decision to leave most of us out.
The consequences are not abstract. A public that thinks housing policy and the opioid crisis and algorithmic radicalization are separate issues is a public already pacified. Stitch the lens, and you see the backend script. See the script, and the sabotage becomes obvious. Not connecting the dots isn’t objectivity. It’s complicity.
“The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.”
— Marshall McLuhan
On Style and Ethics
Why the length? Because cathedrals aren’t built with slogans. Because the same compression that makes software efficient makes politics lethal. Because nuance is a casualty in every war for attention.
Clean is bleach. Clean is the scent pumped through the air ducts of a slaughterhouse. I do not write clean. Mythic scale isn’t indulgent—it’s proportional. The systems we navigate by reflex and conditioning are megalithic, their impacts epic. The harm is operatic. To meet that with lowercase prose and a bulleted list is moral cowardice dressed as clarity.
But there is a covenant. The myth must always return. You don’t build the scaffolding just to admire the view. When the last metaphor settles, the reader should feel not just smarter or more informed, but obligated. To think. To choose. Perhaps to act.
To see, and then to do.
The machine isn’t the myth’s conclusion—it’s its ghost. And the reader must feel it hum to life when the last line lands
“We are responsible not only for what we do, but also for what we fail to do.”
— Jean-Baptiste Molière
Through the Myth, the Machine
If I’ve succeeded—truly succeeded—then the next time you read a quarterly report, you’ll look for the true costs buried beneath the margins. The next time you hear a press release where one executive is blamed for a harmful (but profitable) set of actions recently exposed, you’ll taste the copper tang of ritual sacrifice.
Once you see the seams, you can tug them. Once you recognize the stitch pattern, you can thread your own needle. The myth was never just decoration. It’s the language of systems. The operating system. The spell script.
Our task is not merely to observe the code. It is to decide: will we reinforce it, or will we jailbreak the machine?
Metaphor gave it skin. Synthesis gave it limbs. Ethics now demands it walk forward—not alone, but extending a hand to the next soul willing to pick up the thread and continue the stitch.
Because this world runs on narrative. And not seeing the narrative doesn’t make it go away—it just makes you subject to it.
Leave a comment