This thread seems to have gone quite off track since the original post. That being said, I've seen a handful of youtube videos from this guy and they all seem to be meandering, stream of consciousness word salads that throw in a heaping helping meaningless phrases like "high levels of disagreeableness." In the end they all lack any coherent narrative or actionable advice, much less an organized and structured philosophy. How this dude evidently became some kind of viral internet guru is utterly beyond me.
So, Moonbeam? Or at least how Moonbeam used to be til he had to become coherent because of the political state of the world.
I don't get it either. I don't even get where the hell his academic accolades came from, as he seems to have just repackaged ideas that were scarcely new and I don't even see that he did anything special in packaging them in some new original way. Carl Sagan summed up this guy's academic work in a single book, tackling the concepts, why they work or seem to work and how they can have positive and negative impacts on society.
Hell its not like awareness of myth making and the like was unknown or rare in like most of human history (people writing the Bible were actively aware of what they were doing; many societies were actively aware and I'd guess that there's been people smart enough to see that its not real but by going through the motions as though it were, creates behavior that they arguably would want). I think most could see it as the inherent basis of creativity of storytellers. And that it wasn't inherently interesting (after all, just being actively aware of how to make a story doesn't mean you'll make a good story, and so the actual worthwhile endeavor was to make something meaningful).
I think Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (and others, but highlithing those two as I think they actually literally sat around discussing this and then kinda had a bit of a game with each other on trying to see if they could create myths and the like (decades before this guy even existed). Tolkien created the basis of modern fantasy (although that might be a bit too much credit, as plenty of that wasn't new, he just packaged it in a certain way that kinda established just general themes and ways to apply such to do mythological world building) and C.S. Lewis created a Bible allegory that is much more readable to kids.
This guy basically went from going "myths, like are real in that they're often based on real things but deliberately manipulated into exaggeration, and we can make them and are actively making them right now both consciously and subconsciously and it like causes us to view things in certain ways that affect the real world" to writing lullabies for angsty (predominantly white) teenaged boys to justify their rage brought on by puberty testosterone. Frankly the way he posits himself makes me think more of the nanny from Muppet Babies, where he's saying that we need to give these poor persecuted boys a safe space to release their hateboners free of any criticism (which totally has never ever caused problems at all), and that if we don't well apparently it will lead to Marxists murdering most of the world's population, because women, amirite? Which how he gets to there (its not like he even views these boys as the Marxists, in fact he's essentially arguing that they're need to combat some coming Marxist Apocalypse; which he should fucking know better, and know that it'd be more like the Crusades where its just extremist ideologues trying to kill each other while most people just wanna live happy lives, or is some asshole leveraging advantages to build some empire in their own name).
I have a bad hunch this guy has pretty much turned into L Ron Hubbard (thinks he's stumbled onto some secret knowledge and is intentionally seeding it for his own benefit), and actively knows that he's gaslighting the fuck out of impressionable and easily duped group at a particularly vulnerable point of their lives.