DonAthos

Your stating things in terms like these makes me want to reply in kind. I am not "pro-cop" at all (though I believe I've encountered many "pro-cop" folks on this board), no more than I am "pro-criminal," "pro-worker" or "pro-businessman." I am pro-individual and pro-individual rights. I believe that no individual has the right to initiate the use of force against any other -- and I extend that to police officers, who I do believe are yet "individuals."
Am I pro-law enforcement in principle? No, not as such. There was law enforcement in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany -- plenty of it -- but I don't consider myself a fan. I am pro-moral law, pro-objective law, and where there is moral and objective law, then I am in favor of enforcement (in an objective, structured, procedural manner). Where the law is immoral and in-objective, I'd rather that law remain unenforced.
The system as it exists, within the culture as it exists, makes me wary of all prominent actors. Objectivists remain on the fringe for a reason: our devotion(s) to reason, reality, egoism, and liberty are not widely shared.

I don't think the idea "both people made a mistake" is appropriate here at all. That can describe how certain romantic relationships end, perhaps, or similar, but in this sort of situation there is a gross difference between the role of a police officer and a citizen. The police officer has a responsibility to remain disciplined and act in a procedural fashion in a way that may ideally be true of a given citizen, but cannot rightly be expected.
It falls upon the police officer's shoulders to remain calm in trying situations and act appropriately, even when the citizens they deal with do not (and I am not convinced that Castile fell short of reasonable expectations in this case, even if the African American community has otherwise taken to extreme measures of compliance in order to prevent zealous police officers from murdering them). That's what the training is for.

Selection is the key.  I know such a thing is impossible now, but imagine in a society with a proper government with Military, Police, and Justice systems only... even at a fraction of the taxes paid now, these institutions could select for hire only excellent people, and train them well.
Every police officer could be as well trained and as educated as an astronaut or fighter pilot of today.  Strict education requirements, psychological as well as physical testing... high pay... only the best kinds of people should be entrusted with instruments of force and its proper use.
 

So the response here is, "What was the cop supposed to do? Not shoot him!?"
Yes, the cop was not supposed to shoot the law-abiding citizen reaching for his driver's license (as instructed). If there's a problem with that -- a problem brought on by the citizen having a permitted weapon (which is supposedly one of our fundamental, Constitutional rights) -- then the entire system needs review. It should not be on citizens, acting wholly within their rights and complying with law-enforcement officers' commands, to stop from accidentally tripping across officers' apparently over-developed zeal for shooting first and asking questions later.

The part that Rand misses -- probably because of a lack of experience -- is that so many people will adopt Objectivist ideas dogmatically, just as they adopt other ideas dogmatically. And, that most will not be die-hard dogmatists, but a mix. And while one might argue that these people have rejected Objectivism, it does not mean they explicitly reject it. It's likely that they think they still accept it, and think they are right in interpreting it in whatever way they do. nothing stops these people from self-identifying as Objectivists -- since this is how they genuinely think of themselves. 

It is hard when something is mixed. Sometimes one's immediate feeling toward it comes from whatever side of it you're seeing that day. 
A couple of years ago, I was in a small mid-western resort town on July 4th and thousands of tourists (mostly from elsewhere in the state) had turned out to see the fireworks. Trucks streamed in from all the nearby little towns and farms. The atmosphere was festive. There was benevolence all around. The red-white-and blue was respected, not as a symbol of something above us on an altar, but as a symbol of who we are. Not on a pedestal to be saluted -- though that too -- but, in casual clothing, in funny head-dress, in flashing lights to be worn for the evening. 
All around was a feeling of family and of sharing a value. Very few cops in sight, and yet the thousands self-organizing in very orderly ways. If you asked those people, in that moment, if freedom was their top value, if the individual is important, if we should recognize the individual's right to his own life and happiness...you'd probably find lots of agreement. It's all good, but it is mostly emotional.
As you peel away and understand the intellectual roots, contradictions appear. I won't say the emotions are unfounded, that there is no "there there". When Hollywood makes a movie of a maverick going up against the world and winning, huge audiences love the theme. It is who they are: sometimes, on some topics, and in some emotional states.
Nationalism is dangerous when it goes beyond a general benevolent celebration of sharing good values like freedom and individualism. It usually does, and we have a good person like Robert E. Lee rejecting Lincoln's attempt to get him to lead a Union Army, even though he could "anticipate no greater calamity for the country than dissolution" and thought  "secession is nothing but revolution". Why? For "honor" -- which really translates to honoring a convention where you are loyal to your home state.
Throw in ideas about the role of government in helping people in all sorts of situations. Thrown in ideas about inequality being caused by oppression. And faulty ideas about economics. And suspicions about bankers running the world. Add back the occasional cheering of the maverick who defies authority; but also add back the desire to control other people's behavior: if they're gay, or marrying someone of another race, or smoking pot, or even having a beer when they're 20 years and 11 months! 
That is the contradiction that is America.
Still, you should feel free to choose what emotions you wish to invest in symbols like the flag. You do not have to salute a flag and think you're saluting a tortured contradiction that is eating itself from the inside out  .  You can salute it for the right reasons, or for what you think it once stood for.

If one wishes to wear a suit and tie to some event, as a matter of convention or custom, then I would agree that -- generally speaking -- there's no further need to justify it. "When in Rome" covers a great deal of action, and saves much time and thought/energy. But this is a far cry from saying that one has some moral (or... aesthetic?) duty to act in conventional manners for the sake of "society's health."
If one is sick, it makes great sense to refrain from shaking hands. If one's tie is choking, it makes sense to loosen or remove it. And if one has some qualms about the actions of the United States, or paying homage to the symbols which represent her, then one has no moral requirement to act against one's inclination for the sake of convention, or to preserve the fabric of society, or to spare other peoples' feelings.
I will add that convention changes over time, and this is in part due to individual people acting in unconventional or indecorous manners because it suits them, individually, to do so, even against the pearl clutching of conservative minds.

.
I’m pretty sure when I first learned the word “libertarian.” It was in a current issue of THE PERSONALIST at my university in around 1970. There was a debate in that issue wherein one side argued for government limited in the way I was familiar with from Rand, while the other side argued for anarchocapitalism. John Hospers was then the editor of that journal. I didn’t give the anarchocapitalist theory much thought until Nozick’s ASU came out (1974) and he made his case against that theory (especially those basing their position on individual rights) in consideration of issues of procedural justice. In 1971 Hosper’s book LIBERTARIANISM had been issued. Therein he defined libertarianism, “according to which the function of government should be limited to the protection of individuals against aggression by others or by government” (27). The last chapter of his book is titled “Is Government Necessary?” which I imagine set out the debate between limited-government libertarians and anarchocapitalist libertarians (his own side would have been the former, to be sure). Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the latter portion of that book including that chapter in my paperback fell off and is lost. In 1972 I was old enough to vote for the first time, and I wrote in the name John Hospers, who was the Presidential candidate of the newly formed Libertarian Party. I was in the Party and worked pretty hard with it until 1984, when I left it. All of our Presidential candidates to that year were limited-government libertarians as I recall.
It was at the national convention in New York in 1975 that I spotted and bought Tibor Machan’s HUMAN RIGHTS AND HUMAN LIBERTIES (1975). It was a systematic rights-based defense of limited-government libertarianism by another professional philosopher: “‘Libertarianism’ is the label that has been applied to the theory of society or political philosophy that identifies the initiation of force against others as the one form of human interaction that is impermissible in a human community under all circumstances. I have not used the label thus far because many libertarians base their acceptance of this basic prohibition on something other than a theory of human rights. Some take the principle to be self-evidently true. Others view it as an efficient device for social organization without giving it a foundation based on a moral point of view. But I will henceforth use the term ‘libertarianism’ to indicate the theory of human community proposed in this work” (147).
We never thought of our rights-based limited-government libertarianism as some sort of poor stepsister to anarchocapitalist libertarianism. We did not concede the name “libertarianism” to them as most rightly theirs. I did read Murray Rothbard’s FOR A NEW LIBERTY (1974) and THE ETHICS OF LIBERTY (1982). Nice writing, but on his theory of property rights in land and their relations to enforcement institutions, the anarchocapitalist case collapses (again). (This was my comment in the link mentioned by William upstream.)
Further, from my 1988 Right, Games, and Self-Realization.

I have very little to say about Cato, Nozick, and "ancap," because I know so little about any of them. But here's a brief anecdote about how I initially came to Objectivism:
I was dating a woman who was a libertarian -- very much in the negative sense that usually (and I argue unfairly), for Objectivists, comprises the entire meaning: she only cared about political philosophy and thought, essentially, that none of the rest mattered. Through my association with her, I encountered Henry Hazlitt, the Austrian school, and finally Ayn Rand (who did not impress her much, but shook me to my core).
As a new Objectivist, I did as most new Objectivists do (in my experience), whereby I instantly tried to divide the world into good and evil; my girlfriend did not survive the cut. She set out to work in libertarian areas, specifically in the fight to change marijuana laws, while I went to work for ARI. Was she/is she an "ally"? It's hard for me to address such a question, as such, especially since there is SO MUCH history and hard feelings within the Objectivist community over issues of "sanction" and libertarians and etc. (And then there is my own personal history with her.) Yet I will say this: all of these years later, marijuana law has generally improved. It is arguable that, in terms of politics alone, she has more to show for her efforts than I have for mine.

I don't see that. I see how one might say it represents 'tragedy", but I don't see how it shows a tragic sense of life. It really does not show any tragedy though. It shows love and grief. More abstractly, it shows a valuer.

With sculpture and painting -- unlike a novel -- one can represent only a very small snapshot of life. It is unfair say a sculpture says "this is life" in a broad sense of "this is the essence of life". It's more appropriate to think of a sculpture or painting as saying "this too is life". 

Personally, I would not want a sculpture garden filled with just happy sculptures: I could go to Disney for that.

How do you know this? I mean, this is a simplification of symbolism, such that you seem to base this on the connotations you've learned. I don't really like sunny landscapes, while I prefer dark landscapes generally. If a person hated life, and painted a sunny landscape, would they actually love life?
You would be best off saying that what you choose to paint shows something about a person. What it shows, well, depends on your knowledge of art. I can say I really like this painting:  I can attempt to give reasons, but I am not a painter or art historian. I would be making guesses. This isn't to say "there is no reason", only that it's really hard besides some really general ones, like "peculiarity is seen as important". What do the swans suggest, the clouds, the weird trees? I don't know. Delving deeper is beyond my ability.
By the way, you'd also need to consider the degree of liking when it comes to one's sense of life. Paraphrased from page 33, "one's sense of life is fully involved only when one feels a profoundly personal emotion page". 
I understand you are talking in broad strokes, so here is paraphrasing from page 43 to remind you of some ideas:
"it must be stressed that the pattern is not so gross and simple as preferring happy music to sad music according to a benevolent or malevolent view of the universe"
"it is not merely what particular emotion a composition conveys, but how it conveys the emotion"
I want to remind you that Rand didn't say any two people shared the same sense of life, so there will be many variations of even positive senses of life. Sense of life described here is her theory, so it's worth noting this point. There may be a broad category "positive sense of life" with differentia allowing for variations of individuals in their background experiences.
Why is this mildly malevolent? Sure, you describe it with these words, but it's hard to say that you aren't missing something or lack the conceptual vocabulary to say the sense of life captured. All you can do is say if you feel good or bad. Rand understood at least in RM how hard it is to judge your own sense of life, and how we can't really judge what sense of life another person has.

Does Art necessarily have to represent the entirety or the whole of a metaphysics?  Must it be THE summation?  It would seem such would imply art cannot be about i.e. depict and explore an "aspect" or "part of life" which is important and profound.  (As for the highest form of art.. I suppose some restrictions need to apply)
A work such as the fallen angel, although it is sad, might not be about sadness as such.  It might be about loss, and by implication, it might actually be about value, and specifically and more importantly about the greatest value one can have in another: Love... by seeing how devastating the loss is, one sees how great the love was and can be, and by seeing how great the love, one perchance sees how wonderful life can be... but with full knowledge and acceptance (not evasion) that neither life nor love lasts forever.  Is this a malevolent view?  I'm not so sure.  Would a sculpture of a woman smiling and dancing in the flowers with a doting husband smiling and watching her conveyed the greatness and the depth of the emotion he had for her and her importance to him?  Only so much can be captured in a sculpture of a smile...

Set backs are a part of life, and dare I say they are important challenges that test people's character and resilience and provide opportunities to grow and flourish in the face of them.  So an artwork which presents a challenge or a disaster or a loss, unless it is clearly shown that there is and can never be recovery (granted another possible interpretation of the fallen angel...) the art can present positive sense of life, one which is psychologically adjusted to the facts of reality which face man but which exalts his ability to adapt and to flourish.
I don't think art is limited to the widest presentation of metaphysics.  Specific, selected and important aspects of life, of man's relation to reality can be portrayed.  A work depicting a freak and tragic accident befalling a man and his triumph over it is NOT about the metaphysics of the randomness of reality (which is a fact), it is about the more important fact (also a fact of reality) of the resilience and strength of man, the potentialities possessed and residing inert within every man which perhaps not even the viewer would have otherwise suspected he himself possessed.
A sense of life is NOT about what the universe does to you: Life is not what "happens" to you. 
A sense of life is about man, about man's place in the universe, his ability to deal with it, no matter what part of it he faces: Life, wherever you find yourself, is what you do.
 

The following is a list of poems featured/mentioned in Poems I Like - and Why (lecture by Leonard Peikoff)
___________________________
LP's definition of poetry:
"Poetry is the form of literature whose medium is the sound of concepts"
Poems need not have events and characters Most suited to the eloquent, powerful statement of a relatively simple thought, sentiment or inspirational idea, an expression of love, a short story, a joke. Best suited to shorter works A cross between literature and music Like music scores, poems MUST be read out loud A poem must not sound like a poem - and yet it rhymes (must sound natural) Poems combine the sensory (auditory) field with the intellectual one; brain + ears, mind + body Two essential elements rhytm rhyme - "a repeated pattern of recognizable sounds at the end of the lines". Rhyming creates auditory expectations. The meaning can be a total twist - you hit the expected sound but it has a completely different meaning than what you anticipated ___________________________
METAPHYSICAL POEMS
Richard Cory (Edward Robinson) - a malevolent universe poem with a punch Invictus (William Henley) - Byronic view of existence Say not the Struggle nought Availeth (Arthur Hugh Clough) - it looks bad, but stand back, we're winning The Gods of the Copybook Headings (Kipling) - the issue underneath the benevolent/malevolent universe premise: I wish vs it is. LP's top favorite. POEMS ON EPISTEMOLOGY
Flower in the Crannied Wall (Lord Tennyson) - integration; the true is the Whole (Tennyson is LP's favorite poet) The Daffodils; The Tables Turned (William Wordsworth) - an opponent of reason and integration The Thinker (Berton Braley) - the theme of Atlas Shrugged POEMS ON MORALITY
Two favorites of Ayn Rand, found in her papers:
1. Mourn Not The Dead (Ralph Chaplin) - on moral judgement
2. Short poem by 'A Nony Mous' (1960 July-August issue of Success Magazine)
    Why should you begrudge another 
    The fortunes he does reap?
    Bless him, he's one brother 
    That you don't have to keep! 
The Westerner (C. B. Clarke) - egoism and individualism. Ayn Rand had the last two lines of this poem in a placard frame. INSPIRATIONAL POEMS
Poems that stress some virtue, such as strenght, heroism, persistence, courage.
Columbus (Joachim Miller) - the virtue of persistence, Man the Hero If (Kipling) - a description of the Ideal Man (Ayn Rand's top favorite) LOVE POEMS
To His Coy Mistress (Andrew Marvell) - what to say to a woman that won't put out... Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways (Elizabeth Browning) Love and Sleep (Algernon Charles Swinburne) POLITICAL POEMS
Retaliation (Olver Goldsmith) - a thinker wants to go into politics A song: “Men of England” (Percy Bysshe Shelley) What is a communist? (Ebenezer Elliott)  FUNNY POEMS
Ogden Nash poems; The Pig; The Germ; The Duck; The Panther; The Ostrich; The Pizza; Which the chicken which the egg; Kind of an ode to duty (moral-practical dichotomy); Lines Fraught With Naught But Thought MISC POEMS
The Lotos-eaters (Tennyson) - must be read in an increasingly sleepy way The Confessional (Robert Browning) - a tragic, compelling story Ulysses (Tennyson) - Man the Hero (white rhyme) Sometimes (Thomas S. Jones, Jr) - a man who betrayed his potential Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher (Walter Savage Landor) Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas) Beethoven And Angelo (John Bannister Tabb) An Essay on Man: Epistle I | Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton (Alexander Pope) The Arrow and the Song (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) The Song of Roland (translated by Dorothy L. Sayers) It's all a state of mind (Success Magazine, March 1963 issue) The Highwayman (Alfred Noyes) America for Me (Van Dyke) - an ode to America Drinking (Abraham Cowley) - or, as LP calls it, "The Metaphysics of Vodka" On a Girdle (Edmund Waller) Be Strong (Maltbie Davenport Babcock) Opportunity (John James Ingalls) Gunga Din (Kipling) - recommended by somebody in the audience Tennyson poems: Break, break, break; Crossing the bar; Rizpah (LP refused to read this one because it makes him cry) An ode to my mistress' breasts (mentioned during a Q&A session, LP might have referred to the girdle one by Waller)

What does intrinsicism mean to you?  Rand only applied intrinsicism in ethics in the form the trichotomy of the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective.  Here is that passage:
To accept that existence exists, and further that everything that exists must exist in a particular form which is its identity, must entail accepting intrinsic attributes because what else can it mean to have an identity than to have intrinsic attributes?  The -ISM of intrinsicism is a theory from ethics as Rand used the term, and it strikes me as bizarre that anyone would think that a perfectly ordinary use of the term 'intrinsic' in metaphysics should be forbidden or else it betrays intrinsicism in metaphysics.  What could intrinsicism in metaphysics even mean beyond Rand's "A is A" that would make it so scary?

What do you take to be Rand's definition of Art?  What is it's function? What qualifies as art (of any kind) and what does not qualify?  If according to Objectivism art is broad, some myths insofar as they fall within it, will qualify as art. Insofar as Objectivism's definition of what art is and does is narrow, much of myth because of what it is and does simply does not correspond, will simply be something that reminds one of art or appears similar but which is not and does not  serve as art. And that's ok!  Decoration IS decoration it has its own function and value, and you may find much of it beautiful!
An analysis of what art is is completely independent from an identification of myths and what they are.  You are correct that what you state is unsatisfying.  It is IMHO because the attempt at categorization has oppressed or distorted that which is being categorized.  That definition largely misses by a vast margin what myth is and does. Categorization, analysis, identification cannot change what it is attempting to categorize it can only decide what does or does not fall within well formulated categories.  If you feel through the process of categorization you've somehow distorted or ignored something about that which you are dealing with you've made an error.  
If something don't fit, don't worry the something is fine it just does not fit.  Don't try to make it be what it isn't so it does fit. Make new categories or live with having to identify something as part A or sometimes A but also part B or sometimes B.  Myth is what it is and does what it does regardless of our progress (or lack thereof) of our conceptualization or integration of it within the rest of the conceptual framework.
Depending of what art is and its function much of Myth might simply not serve as art.  You can still find something besutiful and valuable even if it doesn't serve as art. And that's perfectly OK. 
I think you might be obsessing over whether myth is art.  At this stage maybe determining for yourself first what myth is and does would be more useful.  Once confident you have identified and understood what you are dealing with on its own terms, then you can see where it fits. 
sorry for the ramble.  I hope it's helpful.

An abstraction that existed metaphysically would not be an abstraction, it would be just another concrete.  In fact abstractions are concretes, they are attributes of the brains of those abstractors who have preformed that mental action.  But as a product of human action such abstractions are not metaphysically-given, which is why they must be acknowledged as epistemological.
A metaphysically given abstraction is a contradiction in terms.

All a Myth is, at any moment in time, is a story.  In terms of its perfectly individual and personal relationship to one who contemplates it. 
Of course, it has certain contexts... family, village, religion/culture, color the delivery and interpretation of the story.  Knowing that a story has been told and retold for hundreds or thousands of years has an effect on how you experience it.  Reading something with your brothers and sisters curled up with Mom and Dad by the fire likely elicits something different from a story you pull from your pocket to read at dusk out behind the shed (because you are not supposed to be reading it...), and each of those is different from a story told at a village gathering among people you know, and a story told at the Citadel among a throng of strangers.  All of these contextual accoutrements to the reception in any one or repeated instance of a story has a psychological effect, but I believe the content is more powerful than the delivery.
Delivery is paramount for acceptance.  I think certain stories, no matter how important once absorbed, simply are impeded by a mind unwilling to hear if the context is wrong.  Of course people vary in degree of narrow or broad, closed or open mindedness, and degrees of rebelliousness.  One boy might ignore a story told by a family friend but listen when told that story by a teacher, another would gloss over with boredom should the teacher try to tell it, while listening with excited rapture if the local ruffian were to speak it.  That said, once there is a mode of reception, it all comes down to the substance of the story.
What about the substance of the story makes a story a Myth?  This is no easy question for me.  I think it comes down to function rather than the clothing in which it is enrobed.  Although Jo talks of many functions I think the most important one is how to live life, i.e. psychological health and psychological development.  But can't we simply learn directly how to live?
This is the rub.  I think it is reasonable to say that you can teach anyone anything, but to best and most directly teach something, sometimes different approaches are necessary.  Learning Math is different from learning to bake a pie, or ride a bike, or paint an oil painting.  Some subjects are more or less abstract, some are more or less concrete action based, some require thinking, others practice, almost all require experience.
Learning to ride a bike requires hours of practice, learning to live, potentially (and sometimes literally) requires a lifetime.  Your 4 year old is happy to put in the time to learn to ride a bike, but NOBODY should settle for waiting a lifetime to learn how to live the life you have already spent.
How do you teach something as broad, abstract, concrete, and experiential as what life is and how to live it to a child/adolescent/young man or woman ?  OF course we have education, parents "tell" their kids what to do, explain consequences... but this is tantamount to "telling" a 4 year old how to ride a bike, before they get on it, explaining to someone how to make dough for a pie without their ever having seen felt or kneaded dough.  Stories, and particularly Myth because of their metaphorical nature are stories which are purposefully more directly focused upon the psyche, the subconscious, the vast ground of mind which underlays and has a profound affect on all you do or attempt to do (having trouble quitting smoking, procrastinating, keeping to your diet or exercising?... you consciously "decided" to be perfect, isn't that just the end of the matter?... "perfect people" reading this notwithstanding... the rest of us know it is not that simple).
Myth and story told and retold set up in the mind the way experiences do.  Its like a direct way to teach your child how to ride his bike without ever riding it... so Myth and story can help a young person know and experience life (vicariously) to a point where they have some tools... they still have to live a real life and gain actual experience but they are ahead in the game.
How can this intersect with what we know as fact from Objectivism?
 Philosophy is not "for" intellectuals, it is for individuals, BUT children and adolescents, even some young adults are not developed enough to fully understand it, and really most people do not have time to study and to fully understand a philosophy.  There is an operating level of knowledge or intuition about the proper philosophy that will serve a person at every age of development and this usually is less than complete understanding and yet more than what can be literally conceptually conveyed at that age.  Living life requires an understanding of so many things.  Being guided by an objective morality whose standard is life long range, and living in society according to the principle of non-initiation of harm and individual rights, the system of capitalism... these are very abstract and complicated subjects which no child could grasp literally.. they simply do not have the conceptual framework built up.
Art (which likely has a close relationship to Myth) is crucial as we all know.  But its role is more enforcement of what is already implicitly known... a man sees his own metaphysics brought forth and concretized, there is resonance which reinforces his sense of life and provides fuel to live it. 
Reinforcement and resonance is not instruction and teaching... which I think myth and story can provide.  In fact I think this is already provided by children's literature and Disney movies, which serve as myth.  To some lesser degree, some pop culture attempts to teach rather than resonate as well... the lessons of these of course might be wrong.
 
So is there a place for Myth in a proper Objectivist society?
Of course there is.  The stories would teach, through metaphor, things such as the primacy of existence, consciousness is identification, a thing is itself, the standard of morality is life, the virtues of rationality, honesty, independence, etc, politics, etc.  The metaphor could be as fanciful as you like, as long as it is not taken as literal.  A story with dragons or traffic cops aliens or cow boys could be just as effective as long as the devices used are appropriate to what is being taught, i.e. if the device is best suited to directly get at the subconscious and get across the message.  Such stories would resonant in children and youngsters and to the degree possible be reinforced with literal and conceptual teaching as these kids mature.
 
In a book written by John C. Wright prior to his psychotic break with reality, the protagonist is plunged into the sea, what follows is a near death experience, a conversation with a God like intelligence, a self-assessment involving redaction of various artificial mental augmentations, a transformation back into what this character is as his essentials...  and eventually a re emergence... this IS the journey into belly of the whale, a sojourn into and return from the subconscious, the act of his going under IS the act of his introspection (metaphorically)... although here the sequence is not fully connotative not 100% metaphorical (since he actually does literally introspect while under the water) nonetheless it is still effective.
 
Conclusion:  Any story, written or told now or in future, when it is the kind of story crafted and having the right kind of effect and function, do not just serve as Myth, they ARE Myth, albeit of a specific species.  It may be there is a concept which subsumed Myth as we know it... and some would propose a new word for it... but I believe it is better to define Myth a broadly serving the function it does...
A complement to Art, Myth is a device for psychological health and development achieved through a medium primarily metaphorical. 

Hi Will_to_Know and welcome to the forum!
I see you've already received some response. Yet I hope you won't mind if I start fresh with your OP?
I'll say broadly up front that, as an Objectivist, I'm not interested in "standing up for business," as such; rather, I'm interested in standing up for individual rights. It happens that individuals do business.
As for tools that individuals can use to push back against immorality (in business or otherwise), well, they can generally do as seems reasonable, so long as they do not initiate the use of force. I know that's a very generalized answer, but perhaps we can find some specifics as we go...
I think this comes closest to my position (though the specifics of governmental transition to a Capitalist system are far beyond me): I believe we ought to govern differently because the initiation of the use of force is immoral and destructive. Accordingly, I would like to see these changes made as fast as possible, because people are suffering in the interim. (It is a little like wondering -- "what will the plantation families do if slavery is outlawed overnight?" Honestly, I consider such a consideration to be in distant second place.)
I do not expect any radical change in our current society, however, because most of the people of the United States (and world) do not support the system I endorse; there will be no immediate reduction of government. (If there were radical change in modern America, it would almost certainly be for the worse.)
The changes we're talking about would require, first, something of a philosophical revolution (or evolution). I trust that, by the time anything close to an Objectivist system were implemented politically, that a good percentage of the citizenry would have already adopted the kinds of tools that they would need to be more successful absent modern governmental oversight and support. It's the only way for such a fundamental political shift to occur in the first place.
This may be me being a bad Objectivist, but I'm not completely convinced that law/regulation is inappropriate for the handling (or documentation) of certain harmful materials, etc. I regard it as similar to arms control. If we would not permit a private individual to own his own nuclear missile (as I would not... or at least, not without regulation as to approximate a governmental entity), due to the capacity for incredible and irreparable damage that it represents, then we might be equally sensitive to activities that can, say, ruin a river serving one or several communities.
Further, when you ask how a group of citizens can stand up to a wealthy offender, I would say that the challenges we're discussing are similar to the challenges we experience today. Wealth, of its nature, confers advantages. Bribery of governmental officials (or those acting in such a capacity) ought to be illegal, and yes, we will need good criminal investigators to uncover hidden tracks.
Yet the citizens are not powerless. If they could, in theory, unite through tax and vote and governmental action, then I would expect that they could unite without those things, too -- in a voluntary, cooperative capacity. If people do not want their rivers polluted (and generally speaking, I'd say that we don't), then that suggests to me that there would be the ability to raise funds and take appropriate action.
Isn't this, again, already a bug (or feature) of the current system? I'm no expert in it, but I'm certain that the present legal system could use reform to prevent such abusive lawsuits, as already exist.
I don't see how there was anything untoward in that particular situation. If Thiel funded Hogan, or Hogan funded himself, what difference does it make?
Well, what's needed to make boycotts effective, or more effective, is more education. (Isn't that what's always needed?)
I'm not convinced that the notion that "because dumping happened in Alabama, not here, so what do I care?" is particularly "legitimate." It reminds me of the old "first they came for the Socialists" poem. We would defend against other intrusions against liberty (free speech, property, etc.) in Alabama, because we understand the implication for liberty everywhere; I expect such a sort of reasoning might provide the impetus for Californians to take events in Alabama personally. (And if you investigate, I believe you'll find that many already do.)
I don't know how to rectify the death of hundreds, either in contemporary society or any utopia we might imagine.
I will say that a company that poisons people, and the individuals responsible within that company, ought to be held accountable for their actions (with reasonable distinctions made between accident and intention, as in other applications of proper law, and etc).
That doesn't sound much like justice to me.
Knowing that these toxins may cause these problems (if indeed we do), we would need to be extra-vigilant against them. Whether through regulation (if we can agree that any are appropriate) or economic/internal pressures (such as boycott, and the kind of industry-created groups New Buddha mentioned), if people have an interest in protecting our children -- and we do -- we will find a way to ensure that our children are protected. It remains to do so morally and rationally. But Objectivism carries with it no call for us to stand back and allow our rivers and children to be poisoned.
There is no Big Objectivist Book of Answers, unfortunately. Objectivism advocates for the use of reason and logic and evidence, which I think is a good way to approach questions such as these, and morally/politically it insists that we do not violate the rights of others through the initiation of the use of force.
Some of the scenarios you're presenting, where companies poison rivers and give people cancer, are, I would argue, an example of the initiation of the use of force. That is to say, they are a violation of individual rights. Per Objectivism, and if I am correct, they ought to be stopped. How best to do this, how best for people to organize, how best to administer the court system, and etc., are all worthy and difficult questions that we struggle to answer today, just as I would struggle to answer them in any theoretical future.

Take everything literally and surely it will not help.  Take some of it literally some of it metaphorically while politely and judiciously ignoring some of it and you will  pleasantly get value from it (imho).

Hi Will_to_Know and welcome to the forum!
I see you've already received some response. Yet I hope you won't mind if I start fresh with your OP?
I'll say broadly up front that, as an Objectivist, I'm not interested in "standing up for business," as such; rather, I'm interested in standing up for individual rights. It happens that individuals do business.
As for tools that individuals can use to push back against immorality (in business or otherwise), well, they can generally do as seems reasonable, so long as they do not initiate the use of force. I know that's a very generalized answer, but perhaps we can find some specifics as we go...
I think this comes closest to my position (though the specifics of governmental transition to a Capitalist system are far beyond me): I believe we ought to govern differently because the initiation of the use of force is immoral and destructive. Accordingly, I would like to see these changes made as fast as possible, because people are suffering in the interim. (It is a little like wondering -- "what will the plantation families do if slavery is outlawed overnight?" Honestly, I consider such a consideration to be in distant second place.)
I do not expect any radical change in our current society, however, because most of the people of the United States (and world) do not support the system I endorse; there will be no immediate reduction of government. (If there were radical change in modern America, it would almost certainly be for the worse.)
The changes we're talking about would require, first, something of a philosophical revolution (or evolution). I trust that, by the time anything close to an Objectivist system were implemented politically, that a good percentage of the citizenry would have already adopted the kinds of tools that they would need to be more successful absent modern governmental oversight and support. It's the only way for such a fundamental political shift to occur in the first place.
This may be me being a bad Objectivist, but I'm not completely convinced that law/regulation is inappropriate for the handling (or documentation) of certain harmful materials, etc. I regard it as similar to arms control. If we would not permit a private individual to own his own nuclear missile (as I would not... or at least, not without regulation as to approximate a governmental entity), due to the capacity for incredible and irreparable damage that it represents, then we might be equally sensitive to activities that can, say, ruin a river serving one or several communities.
Further, when you ask how a group of citizens can stand up to a wealthy offender, I would say that the challenges we're discussing are similar to the challenges we experience today. Wealth, of its nature, confers advantages. Bribery of governmental officials (or those acting in such a capacity) ought to be illegal, and yes, we will need good criminal investigators to uncover hidden tracks.
Yet the citizens are not powerless. If they could, in theory, unite through tax and vote and governmental action, then I would expect that they could unite without those things, too -- in a voluntary, cooperative capacity. If people do not want their rivers polluted (and generally speaking, I'd say that we don't), then that suggests to me that there would be the ability to raise funds and take appropriate action.
Isn't this, again, already a bug (or feature) of the current system? I'm no expert in it, but I'm certain that the present legal system could use reform to prevent such abusive lawsuits, as already exist.
I don't see how there was anything untoward in that particular situation. If Thiel funded Hogan, or Hogan funded himself, what difference does it make?
Well, what's needed to make boycotts effective, or more effective, is more education. (Isn't that what's always needed?)
I'm not convinced that the notion that "because dumping happened in Alabama, not here, so what do I care?" is particularly "legitimate." It reminds me of the old "first they came for the Socialists" poem. We would defend against other intrusions against liberty (free speech, property, etc.) in Alabama, because we understand the implication for liberty everywhere; I expect such a sort of reasoning might provide the impetus for Californians to take events in Alabama personally. (And if you investigate, I believe you'll find that many already do.)
I don't know how to rectify the death of hundreds, either in contemporary society or any utopia we might imagine.
I will say that a company that poisons people, and the individuals responsible within that company, ought to be held accountable for their actions (with reasonable distinctions made between accident and intention, as in other applications of proper law, and etc).
That doesn't sound much like justice to me.
Knowing that these toxins may cause these problems (if indeed we do), we would need to be extra-vigilant against them. Whether through regulation (if we can agree that any are appropriate) or economic/internal pressures (such as boycott, and the kind of industry-created groups New Buddha mentioned), if people have an interest in protecting our children -- and we do -- we will find a way to ensure that our children are protected. It remains to do so morally and rationally. But Objectivism carries with it no call for us to stand back and allow our rivers and children to be poisoned.
There is no Big Objectivist Book of Answers, unfortunately. Objectivism advocates for the use of reason and logic and evidence, which I think is a good way to approach questions such as these, and morally/politically it insists that we do not violate the rights of others through the initiation of the use of force.
Some of the scenarios you're presenting, where companies poison rivers and give people cancer, are, I would argue, an example of the initiation of the use of force. That is to say, they are a violation of individual rights. Per Objectivism, and if I am correct, they ought to be stopped. How best to do this, how best for people to organize, how best to administer the court system, and etc., are all worthy and difficult questions that we struggle to answer today, just as I would struggle to answer them in any theoretical future.

This is a good point (though perhaps not applicable to the OP)... it's really pathological to question whether something is rational *just because you are interested in it*. If you like something, that is positive evidence that it *is* rational, all other things being equal. Pleasure is not the result of sin, it is a result of virtue. It's not a cost, it's an end in itself. If you like something, that is not a signal that you should stop and carefully think about it. The natural inclinations and innate desires in human nature are not rigged against your rational self-interest. There is no original sin in Objectivism.
If you have some reason to question whether something is rational or right, then by all means stop and be careful. But *just being interested in something*, just *liking* something, is *not* a reason to question whether it's rational or right.

I agree that animals have no rights and no inherent moral status. Also that an animal's suffering is not of equal worth to a human's suffering. But that does not mean that, in the treatment of animals, "the only issue is economic viability."
You yourself make the case here:
It should change your answer. If you like animals in general and enjoy treating them well, then your enjoyment of treating them well is another issue to take into account when deciding on how you're going to treat them. Not simply how much money you'll make based on your treatment of them.

Jennifer Burns of the Hoover Institution has written an interesting op-ed titled, "Ayn Rand Is Dead. Liberals Are Going to Miss Her." Along with several other things in the piece, I dispute the premature obituary -- and can almost hear Rand say, "It's earlier than you think." That said, Burns ends with a very good point:

This sentiment echoes a point Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute made a few years ago, when he asked of liberals, "Why let conservatives monopolize her?"
Each piece provides evidence that neither "side" of today's political "divide" consistently stands up for what it claims to uphold, be it prosperity (by the right) or personal freedom (by the left). But each also indicates why: an unmet need for the philosophical ideas that these goals depend on. It's only more obvious that the left never gave Rand a serious look, but the alleged adoption of Rand by the right sketched by Burns wasn't exactly deep. Someone who happens to want to spout off about some position that happens to align with one espoused by Rand will find eloquence and polemical material in abundance to lift, but so what? Can anyone who does this, and yet so plainly continues embracing contradictory ideas (e.g., Paul "Ayn" Ryan's professed desire to save the unsavable Social Security system) really be said to have taken a serious look at Rand, either?

As a long-time student of Ayn Rand, who was initially attracted to her in part for the ability I thought she would confer on me to eviscerate opponents, I can say this: Any fool can be a critic. Building a positive case for freedom is much harder, and requires a mode of thought that differs in kind from simply tearing down opponents (which just about sums up what most people do these days when discussing politics). If you truly value economic freedom, don't yield to the temptation to simply take easy (and easy-to-ignore) pot-shots at leftists. And if you truly value personal freedom, consider the idea that government "social" programs rob individuals, like yourself and people you care about. The fact that no one was able to rise above the palpably toxic level of "discourse" during the last election raises the question of why the GOP's alleged fans of Ayn Rand didn't display the certainty and serenity that comes with conviction.

Ayn Rand is too powerful a voice to ignore, but she is also too subtle a thinker to win instant converts. Whether Rand truly becomes a strong-enough cultural force to turn the political tide of history remains to be seen, and it is a mistake take abandonment by people who never really accepted her as a sign that the force of her ideas is spent.

-- CAV Link to Original

.
The Status of the Law of Contradiction in Classical Logical Ontologism

Leonard Peikoff – Ph.D. Dissertation (NYU 1964)
Leonard Peikoff first met Ayn Rand when he was seventeen. That was in 1951. His cousin Barbara Wiedman (later Branden) had become a friend of Rand’s in the preceding year. The young friends of Rand had read and been greatly moved by her novel The Fountainhead, and they were greatly impressed with Rand and her philosophical ideas as conveyed to them in conversation with her. In 1953 Peikoff moved to New York from his native Canada (where he had completed a pre-med program) and entered New York University to study philosophy, which was his passion. He was able to read Atlas Shrugged in manuscript form prior to its publication and to converse with its author. He continued at NYU for his Ph.D. in Philosophy, which he completed in 1964. That was the year Allan Gotthelf entered graduate school in Philosophy.
Ayn Rand and her distinctive ideas on metaphysics and logic, as published in 1957 in Atlas Shrugged, do not appear in Peikoff’s dissertation. Except for one modest point, his treatment of his topic is consistent with Rand’s views on metaphysics and logic, as well as with her thought on universals (ITOE 1966–67) and her broad-brush arc of the history of philosophy. His dissertation is worthy of study, certainly by me, for what have been many of the positions and arguments concerning the ontological status and epistemological origin of the Principle of Noncontradiction (PNC) in Western philosophy from Plato to mid-twentieth century. It is valuable as well for a picture of what Peikoff could bring to the discussions with Rand and her close circle, as well as to their recorded lectures and published essays (including his own “Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” published by Rand as an immediate follow-on to her ITOE) in the ten years or so after 1957.
A speculative sidebar: Beyond Rand’s philosophy, I doubt that Leonard Peikoff ever had anything to learn from Nathaniel Branden in philosophy. The flow of learning in philosophy not Objectivism was likely entirely the other way. That goes for the flow of reliable information in that domain as well between Peikoff and Rand. By the late ‘60’s, Peikoff, and Rand too, could of course learn from the studies of Gotthelf in Greek philosophy.
I’ll sketch and comment on the course of the intellectual adventure that is Peikoff’s dissertation in a separate thread in Books to Mind. I’ll do that shortly. In the present thread, I want to just state his broad thesis (i–viii, 239–49), then turn (i) to the Kant resources Peikoff had available and relied upon in his story and (ii) to setting out from my own available resources, these decades later, what were Kant’s views and teachings on logic, what was always available in German, and what now in English.
Under the term classical in his title, Peikoff includes not only the ancient, but the medieval and early modern. By logical ontologism, he means the view that laws of logic and other necessary truths are expressive of facts, expressive of relationships existing in Being as such. Peikoff delineates the alternative ways in which that general view of PNC has been elaborated in various classical accounts of how one can come to know PNC as a necessary truth and what the various positions on that issue imply in an affirmation that PNC is a law issuing from reality. The alternative positions within the ontology-based logical tradition stand on alternative views on how we can come to know self-evident truths and on the relation of PNC to the empirical world, which latter implicates alternative views on the status of essences and universals.
Opposed to the classical logical ontologists are contemporary conventionalist approaches to logical truth. Peikoff argues that infirmities in all the varieties of classical logical ontologism open the option of conventionalism. He mentions that his own sympathies are with logical ontologism. Alas, repair of its failures lies beyond the inquiry of his dissertation.

I think we've reached a stopping point, then, for neither can I explain myself at present any better than I already have.
But to this formulation, I will only say this: to whatever degree one's right to life is hindered, it is moral to act in order to remove or avoid said hindrance.