Speaker by Various Artists

Respectfully think you're trying too hard to mash together two interesting points.

1. The Monomyth is interesting.

2. Obama's campaign team are good at teh emails.

Those two are not necessarily linked. You can't draw any conclusions about the narrative philosophy behind Obama's comms strategy based on the email you got, because you have no way of knowing what anyone else got. You don't know if you're part of a split test or a control group. For all you know you got a message like that because your open and clickthrough rates and response times after receiving other emails shows that this is the sort of email most likely to get a response from Kirk Serpes. Or maybe it was a test of some other element to see if that would STOP you from responding.

This coincides closely with something else I read today, about the narratives we use to explain the world and how they shape the way we deal with evidence: Why would anyone believe the earth is flat. I read a lot of this sort of thing, but this stands out as one of the most vivid explanations of the relationship between knowledge and power:

...in a world in which there is so much knowledge, and in which we individually hold so little of it, it is sometimes difficult to see ourselves as significant.

What’s more, science, it turns out, is hard. So if we want to own this narrative, it might take a bit of work[...]

It is therefore tempting to find a way of thinking about the world that both dismisses the necessity of coming to grips with science, and restores us to a privileged social position.

Rejecting science and embracing an alternative view, such as the Earth being flat, moves the individual from the periphery of knowledge and understanding to a privileged position among those who know the “truth”.

A ragtag band of rebels fighting against The Man is the conspiracist version of the Monomyth, perhaps.

A ragtag band of rebels fighting against The Man

Counter: we're defending a vulnerable civilisation against barbarian incursions from people who want to destroy us.

Still haven't fitted in a viewing (gasp), so defocused my eyes for a para there.

Seeing the world as ‘us’ vs ‘them’ leads to people believing that the ends justify the means.

And the latter is one of the main things wrong with NZ's current government, as one close example. Without keeping to enduring principles, anything is OK. Whatever the latest polls says will help retain power ..

You can't draw any conclusions about the narrative philosophy behind Obama's comms strategy based on the email you got

If that were the only thing Kirk referenced, you might have a point.

If you look closely at speeches and campaign material from that time, you’ll find that he rarely talks about himself as a solution or hero. One of the most beautiful examples of this technique in action is in this campaign video from his re-election campaign.

I think I remember reading that they would send out multiple versions of the email and analyse the results they got, then take that knowledge into the next round and repeat the process.

Just look at the resistance to decent public transport and higher density housing in Auckland.

Both seem to be interlinked to rentier self-interest in the housing bubble. If it bursts, it’ll hopefully be the fatal weakness of the current orthodoxy… or it could go the other way, and those caught in the fallout could go Trump and blame all their problems on everyone below them.

And it’s a LOT easier to get funding, supporters and media coverage when we break things down to simple black and white messages.

Such as bumper-sticker rhetoric like “build the Mexican wall!” or “ban Muslim immigration”?

Perfectly reasonable people deny climate change, I suspect because they’ve been fed the lie that addressing it means forcing them to surrender their houses, cars, barbecues, and other tenets of the ‘middle NZ lifestyle’.

It all neatly ties into the ‘divide, divert & dehumanise’ propaganda of the guilty parties.

I find this interesting in the context of my own annual comms campaign: every year I try to let young people know about an overseas school/scholarship opportunity. I want to be the mysterious stranger, but actually I don't know enough Year 11/12 students to do that effectively. So I have to also encourage school teachers to be the mysterious stranger for their students.
So is that the future for heroes: to become the mysterious stranger themselves?
Of course, I'm hoping teachers already see themselves as the mysterious stranger - I suspect many do, though no doubt some see themselves as heroes instead, or as well.
Otherwise: I find comms challenging. I've read all the stuff about saying "you" and "your", or if you must, "we", and never "I". The challenge I find is writing in that way and still sounding genuine rather than saccharine and obviously manipulative. And that's just the scholarship promotion. Fundraising brings a whole new level of squeam.
I have a feeling the conversation maybe was meant to be about good vs evil rather than the trials of comms, but maybe both is possible.

The gnosis of communication lies on the continuum of NLP / magick and cooking recipes, finding the way to make an idea or concept ‘sure to rise’ needs tailoring for different frequency brains…
I think the trick is partly making people feel included, on the inside and not beyond the pale.

Fascinating and insightful. “Story’ has been a marketing buzzword for the last few years, and I too find this both attractive (of course we all love a good story) and creepy (marketing!? Who wants to be a ‘mark’!?)
I think there’s a lot more to the success of Star Wars than the ‘monomyth’. There’s something to the ‘hero’s journey’ for sure, but I don’t think you can sweep all mythology into the one structure. It’s too static – and myths do mutate.
But still. Watching the US president-making-machine grind back into gear, the race is crowded with candidates calling themselves ‘anti-establishment’ and vying for the chance to take on the Death Star.

it draws from deep unquenchable and universal human needs

Which for millennia was why we came up with “gods” Although along the way we learnt a lot about ourselves and what suits us best when it came to organizing ourselves into bigger groups like clans, societies. Lessons which are easily backgrounded now that it is obvious there is no supreme being that gives a toss about us, so a lot just think, screw being part of something bigger I want mine.

our search for identity, status and purpose in life. When the hero is told they’re special we project ourselves…

Well we’re bipedal clothes wearing apes, who thinks rather highly of itself (because of our collective insecurities) destructive to its environment in large numbers, like any creature. Our specialness is a figment of our imagination. Time we let that fiction go.
Purpose should unite people not divide them.