ACFM - ACFM Trip 32: Myth

Episode Date: March 12, 2023

From the epic of Gilgamesh to the archetypes of Carl Jung, the mysterious power of myth is at hand. Is Genesis as mythical as Oedipus? How did the fantasy of Brexit become a reality? And what stories underpin the emerging theory of Gilbertism? In this Trip, Jeremy, Nadia and Keir explore the alternate realities created […]

Hello, Hello, welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kier Milbin, and I'm joined as usual by my very good friend, Nadia. Idle. Hello. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about myth and myths, which isn't a straightforward concept, I think.

So we need to determine, firstly, what is a myth? And then secondly, why would we want to talk about myths? Why do they matter? Who wants to have a go at that? I think I'll get into the defining of a myth a little bit later. But maybe I'll start with some of the things that I'm in. interested it. So when we pick this topic, thank you, Keir. This is another great one of yours. Things that I was thinking about were, I guess I'm interested in how myths function and what

purpose they serve more generally. Things like how myths and myth making happen, how they spread, and how the quality or efficiency of a myth is related to the modes of transmission in effect. So is it, if it communicated through word of mouth or newspapers or Twitter or like what bits of culture transmit that myth, how it affects how successful the myth is and spreading in a way? Also, of course, how myths are related to power. So who gets to tell the story? And also if a myth is a weapon or a defense. I'm also particularly interested in myths and how myths represent women and how they serve patriarchy and the subjugation of women. women and our dehumanization through creation of, you know, things like the mysterious feminine

subject and, you know, an attempt to summarize women, which we'll get to and we speak about Simone de Beauvoir's work later. But this also got me thinking about where El Smith functions in this way, where perhaps, you know, there's a condemning of a person or a particular group as an unknown is used as a technology to exercise power and how that interacts with, you know, like theories around populism and stuff. And I'm also interested in how myths relate to values. So how do they speak to values? What do they reveal about values?

And whether they inform us about zeitgeist and state of the nation and how culture projects value onto myth. So those are some of the opening reasons why I'm interested in talking about myths today. Jeremy? Yeah, I'm interested in the concept of myth to some extent and the different uses of the term so the way that the term is sometimes used to refer to falsehood in general and sometimes the way it's used to refer to almost any kind of way of thinking about the world or thinking about the world as a totality and from that perspective myth becomes something you

sort of can't think without so that's an interesting tension for us to explore I think and I am yeah I am always interested in the ways in which the dream of a fully rational, fully logical society in which they would be, all mythic thought would be displaced by science and reason. It sort of, it sort of persists up until our own, maybe it persists up until the 70s in some ways, I think, has now seems to have completely gone. I don't think nobody now believes we're ever going to live in a society like that, in which something like myth doesn't perpetually circulate in all kinds of ways. And I guess the appeal of myth as well in the sense of the ancient stories, which we still know people were telling themselves and each other thousands of years ago.

I think it's also always interesting to think about why that cultural material remains so compelling for us and the different way, the different uses people have tried to make of it in thinking about theories of culture in general. That's interesting that connection to totality actually. that sort of helps me think about why I'm interested in myth because if you want to sort of define myths or move towards some sort of definition of myths I suppose we're going to do define myths over the whole episode like we can think about them as like these

these sort of these sort of repeating stories or almost like these really powerful almost like fundamental stories that keep repeating and then because they're repeated not the same they always get changed etc you know they they help people

orientate themselves, or they're the sort of stories that you sort of position, you fit your own experiences into, or you fit new information into these sort of mythological stories. So I suppose there's like, well, there's mythological stories such as like these things which we understand as myths, objectively, sort of, you know, ancient, the origin myths, you know, creation stories, etc. You know, the Greek myths and like Beowulf and Gilgamesh. And the Mabaginian is the Welsh, Welsh myth. Mabinogian. Mabinogian, is it?

You get it right. I'm sorry, I don't speak Welsh, ever. I was in the, I was in the Dunce's class at Welsh when I was at school. But the Mabinogian, what, say again? Mabinogian. The Mabinogian. In one of the, in the, one of the games, me and Jeremy play, I play a character called Gronu, the name of which I took from the Welsh myth that I am

unfortunately unable to name. Anyway, there's these sorts of myths and we sort of, you know, that people analyze those and try to think about the role that they play in society. But people also use the word myth to think about much more sort of proximate or recent sort of stories, stories which are, which, you know, get repeated all the time. And that, like, one of the things that's important about them is that they seem to sit outside, basically outside history and to some degree outside rationality. Because, you know, when we talk about something as a myth, it's something which is sort of

like given, you know, something which is unexamined, you know what I mean. And they sit outside history because like myths, myth and history are probably two different ways in which you could think about time. They don't relate to each other, you know, myths are something that sits outside history. At least I think that's true anyway. Yeah, well, it's interesting to think about the emergence of the idea of myth and mythology as a potential object of study. And that's really something that emerges in the 18th century as part of the anitement, precisely coterminously with the invention of modern history and historiography. And the idea of having a sort of science of culture, a science of society, which you start to get the people at Vico and Herder and their successes.

And, I mean, really what's happening is, on the one hand, the rising liberal bourgeoisie of Europe and its colonies has decided that it can define the difference between itself and all previous generations by the fact that it has a more or less scientific conception of the world. And it no longer believes all kinds of magical things or supernatural things about the causes of. the causes of the world and its phenomenon. And instead, it's seeking a historical and scientific understanding both of its own past and its present and its potential future. And on the other hand, people are, you know, becoming much more knowledgeable about the different set of beliefs all around, from all around the world. And so you start to get these collections of mythology published, which are quite different.

So it's quite different from the older idea that you read the classics, you read like the ancient Greeks and Romans and their stories because they're part of the great cultural and literary inheritance, which is an idea which persists right up into the present. Instead, it's this idea that you read all these different sets of stories that so-called primitive people have had and have told themselves and each other to explain the world. And you start to be able to translate things like, you know, the Sumerian tablets and the Babylonian tablets which have, you know, the oldest stories, like the story. of Gilgamesh, which are even older than the surviving Greek stories, and Egyptians, for example.

And people start to realize that, well, there do seem to be all these patterns. Yeah, they seem to be these repeated patterns and these repeated tropes in stories and so-called myths from around the world. And by some time in the 19th century, this is a real preoccupation of people. Like, how do you understand, what do we make of the fact that there are all these recurring patterns? So, you know, in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, One of the characters, Kisorban, is perpetually working on his great academic work,

which will be the key to all mythologies. So the idea that there might be some underlying structure, some underlying pattern to all of this is it's already a really strong idea by the late 19th century. And it's an idea which very much informs disciplines like anthropology, right at the start of their emergence, as academic disciplines. You know, incidentally, I was thinking the other day actually how weird it is. there's like a period of history and maybe we're still in that period of history where people think it's like really rational to believe in the story of the Gospels

but clearly totally irrational to believe in like Zeus or Thor or something and I think that's such a weird thing from a contemporary perspective but is that very common that's very common yeah loads of people still think that now yeah but since the 18th century because it's yeah I don't know I guess there are still later people who think that there are yeah there are that, you know, if you look at the leadership election for the SMPs, come to the force. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I didn't put, I didn't put, like, Genesis and Adam and Eve in my origin story myths, a little list I gave earlier. So that's, yeah, it's true. I mean, the thing that really

starts to blow people's mind in the 18th, 19th century is finding out the things like the story of the flood, like occur in all these other myths. And we still don't really know, well, is that because they were remnant, is that because they had some historical veracity, or is it just because it was a story that circulated that didn't begin in the, didn't begin with the nation of Israel. It began in Babylon. Well, that's interesting. That's interesting because also you can think about it the other way around. So how does religion incorporate the concept of myth?

So, for example, there are several religions which will say that dinosaurs are a myth. They're like, they're a test from God because, you know, it doesn't fit in to like the teachings of that religion. So when dinosaurs, when dinosaur fossils were discovered, it's like, well, that's a myth, that's a test. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. That's true. Yeah. I mean, that's totally, I mean, that idea emerges as part of the process that I'm talking about. Because am I supposed to clarify, to what I'm saying quickly, like really early on in the history of Christianity. And I think it's also true of Islam. People aren't saying like, oh, there's no such thing as Zeus. Like, that would seem like a mad thing to say. It's just like, oh, Zeus isn't like the creator of the world, a great god, he's like a demon.

So you shouldn't worship him. There's this other god who's the one you should be really worshipping. The idea that actually Zeus just never existed at all, that that comes much later in that history. And it's the idea that, so yeah, so that clear different, and it only really emerges as part of the process of separating out. The need for binary. I know that in Christianity and Judaism, like it's very, very, very low. that you get to the point of saying, actually, all the other gods don't even exist, not just that they're rubbish and you shouldn't follow them. So that turns into a claim about truth,

like an epistemological claim, rather than just a claim about authority in some sense, and a claim about what's superior. But then because of all, once you get to the early 20th century, anyway, the idea that somehow myths are this, the ancient myths are this sort of key to understanding some universal features of human culture, are really, is really popular. It's all over the place. And I think probably the most influential today, the most influential elements of that idea that still survive are the psychological theories. So for Freud, for Sigmund Freud and for Karl Gustav Jung, his contemporary, the founders of modern theories of the unconscious, the idea that somehow the ancient mythic stories tell us

something about the universal workings of the human unconscious, it's really a central idea, actually. It's a central idea for them that persists to this day. But it's an idea which is really is always challengeable and is always potentially problematic. Because any time you're making claims to know and to be able to identify universal features of human consciousness, then you are going against what is normally the radical imperative to, as Jameson says, to always historicise, to recognise that in fact the forms of human consciousness are always changing. They're always variable dependent upon the historical, social, material circumstances. I think we should play, We Need a Myth by Occoville River.

There are kind of late 90s, it's got late 90s indie sound, but the best actually was released in 2011. And it's a band from Austin, Texas, and it's got that. It's got a nice, moody, mythical feel. So it's, that's, we need a myth by Okerville River. We should probably flesh that out a little bit as in, you know, what is Freud's use of myth? And so the most famous use of myth is like, you know, it comes from the Oedipal complex in which he resorts to the sort of Greek myth of Oedipus, in which Oedipus in which Oedipus kills his father and marries his mum. And so this is one of the things that, you know, Freud is influenced by this idea that, like, these, these myths repeating different circumstances are repeated, like fairy tales or in stories, you know, you see the happening over and over again. And so that where, where he goes from that is that, well, you know, what's causing that, you know, what's causing this repetition? And, you know, he's saying, you know, there's a, there's a universality in the experience of childhood or the movement from childhood to adulthood, perhaps we put it that way.

which is being figured by these myths, basically. That's his resort to, you know, it's a way, myths are a way of accessing universal truths. And where do those universal truths lie? Well, they lie in common moments in the life cycle or something like that. Yeah, I don't even know, actually, to what extent the Oedipus story predates, you know, the play. It's Sophocles' play, Edipus, Rex.

Which is, you know, the tragedy of Edipus, which Freud is actually referring to it with the idea of the Oedipus complex. But actually, yeah, I think it does. I think there's a reference to it in the Odyssey. There's references to it in Homer. So I guess it does count as a myth rather than just a really old fiction. And is there like a backlash or anything like in, you know, schools of psychology that there is the bringing in of kind of myth into analysis in that way?

Well, I mean, there's been, I mean, the whole of modern clinical psychology to some extent is a sort of backlash against what I've seen as being the overarching unscientific claims made by people like Freud and Young in the early 20th century, arguably. As anti-history as well, or just in anti-science? Well, I think, well, it's an interesting point. Like, psychologically, generally speaking, this is a massive generalisation, and they're all going to be huge exceptions to this. you know, mainstream clinical psychology in the developed world is shaped by a particular set

of scientific and philosophical traditions and assumptions, which are not massively interested in the question of the extent to which psychic experience is shaped by historical forces. They're just not really interested in that question. So they're more interested in kind of creating some sort of scientific protocols for developing theories of personality and behavior and motivation, which are testable in something like supposedly, can a laboratory or clinical conditions are just empirically verifiable through quantitative studies of some kind. And the question of the historicist critique of Freudianism and Jungianism and the general theory of the unconscious that they will come more from,

it'll come more from the Marxian traditional, come more from the socialist tradition. It'll also, it'll come from, you know, psychotherapists to some extent, even working within that tradition, who always, and also from sociologists, it'll come from sociologists and anthropologists more than anywhere else, actually. And because what happens over the course of the 20th century is that sociologists and anthropologists will increasingly say that they are identifying psychic structures in different cultural situations and different social groups, which are very different from those described by Freud. I mean, not always, of course. I mean, you know, anthropology is really, anthropology as a discipline in the second half of the 20th century is massively influenced by

the ideas of Claude Levy Strauss, the great French anthropologist, and again, Levy Strauss thinks he can identify some sort of basic structure of myth. But yeah, I would say those ideas are they're always in tension with any approach, whether it's sociological or anthropological or Marxian or philosophical, which wants to stress the way things are variable between different cultures and different historical moments. And it's a sort of perpetual tension, isn't it? It's really hard to say to Freud. Like, no, it's not even interesting that like the Oedipus myth and Hamlet have these really similar features, even though you can just explain that by the fact that Shakespeare would have been perfectly familiar with Oedipus Rex, for example. But, and that

there seems to be this very common theme in lots of fiction and culture of, you know, boys having traumatic relationships with their fathers, which are somehow symbolically figured in terms of a relationship with the mother and with other women as well. So it's really, you know, it's really hard to say, well, there's absolutely nothing to that. And it's really hard to say, well, there are absolutely no ubiquitous features of human culture just because the minimal experience of the physical, the physical, experience of sexual maturation, for example. On the one hand, of course, it will be experienced radically differently in different social historical context. On the other hand, biologically,

it is an experience that everybody goes through on the path from childhood to adulthood. So the idea that there might be some common features to the ways in which cultures have tried to narrate that and process it isn't that weird. The Cocto Twins, Persephone, from their 1984 album Treasure. Cocto Twins' classic British post-punk art, rock. Always really interesting. It's what it says, is what it says. It's what it's sad.

We should play a song to the siren, which was written by Tim Buckley, but I think we should play The Miss This Mortal Coil version. This Mortal Coil is sort of like a supergroup formed of the various artists. a sort of rotating super group of artists on 4 AD, this sort of indie record label. And in fact, it's Liz Fraser from Cocto Twins who sings on that, isn't it? So that's a reference back to Persephone. And the sirens are this sort of Greek mythological figure who have such beautiful

enchanting song that they entrance men, basically. And so in the Odyssey, Odysseus has his men, lash him to the mast. and then he clogs all their ears with beeswax so they can't hear. And he's driven sort of mad as they drive past this wonderful song. Oh, my heart. Oh, my heart. Do you want to say a bit about Jung's, where Young takes that sort of thinking,

if we want to get weird? I think I've set out, and I've said before in the show, like what is the basic Freudian assumption. The basic Freudian assumption is, yeah, the process of going from becoming a baby to becoming a functioning adult and then a functioning adult

who's also gone through puberty and entered into all the social norms of a society which has rules governing sexual relationships. That process, however variable, the way in which different cultures deal with it is, is always going to be sort of traumatic. Like, it's just a weird process and no other animals do it in the way that humans do, because they don't have language and social institutions. So, and it is going to produce effects in people, even if the effects it produces in people are going to vary all the time between individuals. and cultures and the job of the psychoanalyst

is to figure out the specificity of the experience of the individual going through, who's gone through those processes in relation to some assumptions about what the universal features of those experience

might be expected to be. So that's like the Freudian assumption. And then myths are usually read as, myths are often read as some, as telling some kind of story about what it means to be human according, you know, with reference to those phenomena that I've just talked about.

Now, Jung gets much more, is much weirder. And Jung is partly, I think there is a sort of radical impulse in Jung, is that he wants to, in that, I think unlike Freud, he thinks of the unconscious as this domain of shared ideas, like shared experiences, shared images. So whereas Freud's theory is a theory of individuation, It's a theory about how every individual becomes irreducibly an individual. Young is more interested in the extent to which there are these aspects. There seem to be these aspect of motivation and behaviour,

which he thinks are pretty much universal between cultures. And he thinks myths are what tell us about what are the features of human experience and the human psychic life, which are universal. You know, if Young was doing this today, and I think people have done this with Young and people have also put forward similar theories, not explicitly referencing Young, but I think actually coming to quite similar conclusions, what you would do is you would try to justify with reference to sort of neuroscience. You would say, are there these actual structures in the brain that produce specific patterns of thought which myths express? I mean, that is pretty much what people like, Lakoff, the inventor of frames theory, says. But Jung isn't that interested. He's not really interested in neuroscience, I don't think. I might be wrong about that. I don't think he is. But, yeah, but he thinks myths tell us something universal about the nature of human consciousness. And so he thinks that what you can identify in myths of these things he called archetypes.

And the archetypes are these images, these powerful images, which suffuse human culture and the human imagination and they are images like the hero, the wise old woman, like the caring mother, you know, maybe the trickster, for example. And these are tropes which recur in various mythologies, but somehow the way to understand a particular person's psychic experience is to understand the particular ways they process those universal archetypes. So that is it, that is young, as I understand it, I have to say, I've never really studied young, partly because young is really, you know, there never has really been much of a left Jungianism. I mean, there's a massive tradition of left Freudianism and left anti-Froidianism. Young, I mean, there definitely

are Jungian psychotherapists and people really into Young who would see themselves as politically on the left, but they're always treated with a lot of suspicion because young did really, youngian ideas, I would say in the mid-20th century, really became most popular with radical conservatives with people like Eliad, like one of the founders of modern religious studies, people like Joseph Campbell, with his theory of the universal, you know, well, Keir, you can talk about Campbell in a minute and his influence, but, you know, the most famous Jungian in the world today is Jordan Peterson. So perhaps we could bring it back to, like, other theorists about myth from the 20th century, one that's obvious is Bart's concept.

of Bartz book on mythologies, which is much more about, like, he's got this, it starts off of this list of modern myths. And it's much more about, it's much more idea that, in fact, it's much closer to like concepts of ideology, in fact. And he sort of, he looks at modern myths as ways in which, you know, myths work to sort of naturalize beliefs, beliefs or naturalized concepts in some sort of way, you know, by, you know, they create familiar impressions on you. Yeah, yeah. But Bart's book mythology, it is a classic work of popular ideology critique, basically, yeah.

Very similar to like Marx, to capitalist realism, actually, in that sense. And it is just, you know, as with Mark Fisher's book Capitalist Realism, if you'd called it, if you'd put in the title, this is a book about bourgeois ideology, you would have sold far fewer copies than calling it Mythology, which is the title of Bart's book. which came out in 56, I think, which is actually a collection. He had a column in a newspaper for a while, and each column was just like,

it was a very short analysis of like an advert or a concept in contemporary culture that was a myth. But in fact, when you get the book, when you get the book, you see that actually what he's putting forward is a theory of how ideologies are constructed and how ideology works in contemporary culture. So it is just a synonym for ideology, I think.

Yeah, it's an angle on ideology critique, you put it that way. Because one of the essays about wrestling, and it's sort of, like, his analysis of wrestling is, you know, in a way, it's a way in which you restage these, it's a sort of stage where you restage these myths. And so, you know, it's got, like, I'm quite interested in wrestling, like modern wrestling. And there's this concept of k-fabe where you must never bring. the illusion that this is a real, this is a real, um, sports, basically, and there's competition going on and never to reveal it, it's staged. And like, so what gets staged are these sort of, you know, society's conceptions or the operative conceptions of like good and evil. Do you know what I mean? I watched documentary the other day about this wrestler from the 70s, um, called

Adrian Street, who was, um, from the Welsh valleys and his dad was a, was a minor. And Adrian Street, like, basically, he was like glam rock before glam rock, basically. He had more makeup, he pranced around the stage. And he was a heel. You know, he was supposed to be like recreating, like, you know, basically homophobia in some sort of way, but also people sort of like him. But it's like restaging this battle between some sort of conception of good and some sort of conception of evil. I quite like that idea of like, yeah, we can see these sorts of instances in which sort of mythological, stories get rehearsed.

I don't think that you can do that analysis to all of the chapters in that book. But I like that one. SunRour, avant-garde jazz musician, mainly based in Chicago for his very long, decades-long career, his big band, most of whom live together in this big communal house,

the orchestra still exists, still functions, still does great music. We could play Realm of lightning from a 1970 to 71 recording they did, which was released under the title Sun Ra and his solar myth orchestra, the solar myth approach. And Sun Ra's whole stick from the late 50s was to have this sort of pseudo-feronic, pseudo-Egyptian costumes and imagery and make all these references to the Egyptian sun god Ra as a very deliberate and explicit exercise in contemporary Afrocentric myth-making.

This Egyptian imagery was important to African-American people like Sunra, because, of course, the Egyptian people were African, and yet the Africanness of the first, arguably the first, one of the first of the great Mediterranean civilizations was sort of written out of European ways of remembering that ancient history for a very long time. So it was a way of reasserting the centrality. of African experience to world history adopting this imagery in a very self-consciously,

explicitly mythical way, but in a constructive way, an enabling way. And so SunRrah is really a great example of mythic thinking and mythic practice, being explicit and obviously political. And this track, Realm of Lightning, is just one of very, very many. They recorded in many, many different styles over decades.

We also thought we'd mention LeCloan move, Vanessa LeClaue and Chantelle Moof, the doyends of so-called post-Marxist theory in the 90s, 2000s, up to the present. In their, probably their seminal theoretical statement, I would say, the 1990 book called New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. They also have this concept of the mythic space, which is very much like Bart, actually, very much like Bart. It is a sort of synthesis of Marxian ideology critique and psychoanalytic thinking. And I don't think there's any point me trying to get into a big unpacking of how they use that term in that book.

Basically, again, the mythic for them is the domain, the order of discourse within which a society imagines itself as a sort of totality, imagines itself as a sort of whole. Of course, what's really important for LeClois Moof is to stress the fact that any conception of society as a complete whole, as a totality, as not always constituted by antagonist. and incompletion and dissatisfactions is just that it is a fantasy it is a fantasy and you know the fantasy in psychoanalysis is always always to some extent if every fantasy is to some extent the same kind of fantasy and it is always a fantasy of completion fantasy of things being complete and whole and not being constituted by any inherent lack so that is how they conceptualize it so yeah you might think of something like brexit

like the fantasy of Brexit, the myth of Brexit as being the thing which is going to solve all the problems which will bring the nation together and will also define the difference between the nation and its enemies, whether they are internal enemies, the remoners or external enemies, the nasty foreigners, the Brexit is going to end the influence of. So that is how they use the term.

What is slightly ambiguous in both, Bart and LeCloem move, although LeCloem have tried to make it less ambiguous, is the question of, well, are these just modes of thought, which it is not possible to do without, if you are going to have a functioning society? Or are these particularly untrue ways of thinking about the world that a radical critic needs to try to get beyond in order to find some more true way of thinking about the world? And that is a question, and that is a question with thinking about myth. But we've sort of, we talked a bit about Freudian Young and Paulin Bach, and we've talked about Lecoigne Mu for writing in 1990, but we have leapt over somebody who I have, in print, I have said before in print, I think he's arguably the most important thinker of the 20th century. I think you're going to talk about here on you, Nadia. So I thought it was important to mention Simone de Beauvoir. I think it's chapter three of the famous book, The Second Sex, where basically she starts

talking about there being different kinds of myths. So in summary, she says that there's one kind of myth, which is like this one, the myth of women. And so she says it's sublimating an immutable aspect of human condition, namely the so-called division of humanity into two classes of individuals as a static myth. So she's got this concept of the static myth. And basically what she says on that is that this kind of myth projects onto the realm of ideas a reality that is directly experienced or conceptualized on the basis of experience in place of fact.

So the way she puts it is that the idea is it becomes indisputable because it's beyond the given. So she has this concept of beyond the given, and it's endowed with like an absolute truth. So even though, of course, in reality, you get multiple kind of different existences of woman or what a woman is and how a woman behaves, which calls actual women, you get this mythical thought, which puts this idea of the eternal feminine as, you know, unique and changeless. And so the interesting bit is that this concept of the eternal feminine, the myth of the eternal feminine, is obviously contradicted every day all of the time by the behavior of what she calls flesh and blood women, i.e. real world women. But in this myth, which is perpetuated by patriarchy every day, it is the real world women who are wrong. And we're not told that femininity is this kind of, false entity that is, i.e. gender, something in culture that's made up by culture and patriarchy. Rather, it's the women, the real world women who are not feminine or whatever. And the contradictory facts of women in real life and their behavior and their experiences are therefore

impotent against the myth. And she uses that term, you know, deliberately of impotency against the myth. And so her wording is to pose women is to pose the absolute other without reciprocity denying against all experience that she's a subject and a fellow human being. And that's what I really like about de Beauvoir's work is this constant reminder that what's happening here is a form of using myth to dehumanize women in this kind of myth of femininity. So that's my summary of that chapter three. Yeah, you can sort of see how that that gives us a never a sort of much, that much more sort of proximate conception of of myth, isn't it? Because you could do a sort of similar critique and think about, and in fact,

Jeremy was when he was talking about a clow moose conception of Brexit, a much more approximate conception of myths as these stories that seem to occur all the time, or the stereotypes that seem to recur. Like when something is mythic, it's put, it's basically it's seen as something which is given that we don't have to or it's not possible to critique. Do you know what I say? Yes, yeah.

Does this make sense? Yeah, of course, yeah. I mean, that is also, I mean, that is the classic definition of ideology as well. Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say, it's not a self-identifying myth. So in the case of, you know,

the eternal feminine, it's so beyond truth that it takes this identity as beyond given. Like there's no, awareness of it in culture, right? And that's the point where there are other myths which recognise themselves as myths. Yeah, that's a distinction in it, I think, is that these things which are sort of given and therefore not seen as myths or not recognised as myths and then things which are self, not self-consciously, which we self-consciously think about as myths or

as mythic. That is a really interesting distinction. And I think it does map onto actually different conceptions of ideology, because in the history of ideology critique, going back to Marx and Engels in the German ideology, in the 1840s, throughout that history, there is this tension between an idea that you differentiate ideology from scientific truth and knowledge, true knowledge of the world,

or whether you just differentiate ideologies from each other, socialist ideology, from capitalist ideology. And I think that tension is also played out in those different attitudes to the idea of myth. Like, is myth, are myths the lies, must expose to understand the truth of social reality and history or our myths, the stories we recognise as indispensable while also recognising that they are just stories. But interestingly, that tension I was just talking about is not really there for like some of the major

conservative thinkers of the mid-20th century. I mean, especially thinking here of Leo Strauss, we didn't mention in our notes, and I meant to, it Strauss was the guy, the American and conservative thinker who just flat out said, yeah, societies need myths. And he just said there are just necessary fictions. He said for a society to function, most of the people in the society have to believe a load of bullshit about it, that the power really have to know is bullshit. And he just literally said it. And it's still a hugely influential text within certain strands of elite conservatism. It is said to be one of the books which your real members of the power elite will study because that is what they believe themselves to be guided by.

I have no way of knowing if that's true or not. But that wasn't entirely separate from the use of the concept of myth made by people like the American mythologist Joseph Campbell. I think you You should talk about Campbell, Keir. It just made me think, when you were talking then, it just made me remember that the sort of at the high point of like the post-9-11 project for a new American century, that sort of like pre- or during the initial stages of the Iraq war, there were all of these. I remember the sort of like Straussians around Bush were like really into this idea that like,

I can't remember this interview, but there was an interview of a liberal journalist and this like arrogant young Straussian saying, oh, look, look, you go and study reality. Why don't you just go and study reality? It doesn't matter to us because while you're off studying reality, we'll be off creating a new reality. Then you can come along later on and study that, basically. It was like, you know, we're masters of the universe because we're going to create our own myths and those myths will structure the world, etc., etc. Yeah, and those guys genuinely thought that it was a good idea to do the Iraq war and it was necessary to do the Iraq war. And it was necessary to do the Iraq war without any reference to the question of whether

Saddam posed any real threat, even to American interests, because you need an enemy to fight, because America was losing its way, it was falling apart because of the end of the Cold War, and you just needed a war, and you needed an enemy. And they were really explicit. That was their theory. I mean, obviously, like, you can make a very small leap from that to, you know, Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell and the Sextap dossier and the faked, you know, Iraq can bomb the UK in 45 minutes or whatever, that sort of claim. Sure. And there's something there about myth as mobiliser, right? It's basically saying that these are important things to, you know, going back to what we're saying about ideology, to be able to mobilize society in a certain direction. to a certain aim, you know.

Did we talk about George Sorrell when we talked... That's exactly what just came to my mind. George Sorrell, Gramsci was in a sort of dialogue with sometimes. He had this whole weird idea that the idea that was coming out of syndicalism, which was that there was never really going to be a great general strike, but somehow the myth of the great general strike is the horizon to which you were organising was necessary for radical organisation. It's a dangerous direction to go in, the idea of the necessary.

myth. I agree. It's sort of interesting though. It's interesting because for Sorrell, it's not like the whole point of the myth is not that it will persuade people rationally to do something, but it will create, he talks about like an intuition of socialism that we'll have an intuition that like, you know, socialism is something which is definitely going to happen. Do you know what I mean? We can, we can feel it, feel it around us, you know, these intense feelings of, of certainty in some sort of way. And so it was that the myth would create the motivating or the animating force which would permit the sort of, you know, huge efforts and even like the great sacrifices that probably are actually necessary in order to get to socialism. That's an element of myth,

isn't it, basically? It acts on these, like, creating these sort of like effective bonds, basically, intense effective bonds. Yeah, well, I think we've, we have hit on something here, which I don't think we're not going to have time to explore here. It's something for future, but the philosophical position from which I would critique that would be, as it often is on this show, sort of Spinozist Marxism, which would say it is correct to recognize that you have to work with people at the level of their feelings and their hopes, and you have to give people opportunities to feel optimistic and hopeful. But it is wrong to say that the way you'd ever do that is by telling them stuff you know is not true, because that can never work.

I can know neapid to sad affect, bad effects. There's a whole distinction between a sort of materialist and in some sense rationalist tradition, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a tradition which always end up being quite conservative, which thinks you have to throw people some lies to get to do what you want. Just to complete the ACFM extended universe, we actually role-played this dilemma when we played comrades together. Yeah, we did. We did.

Or whether we should lie to people. people in order to get them to do something. I can't remember the conclusion we came to now. But anyway, it was a no. Jeremy kept trying to pull us into meetings, though. This was the problem. Well, that's the two options. Endless meetings or some animating myth, which will no doubt lead to fascism.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, that's exactly the point. That is Gilbertism. You cannot end, you cannot end the endless meeting of freedom. Here comes to defense. without imposing a kind of mythical surface on the collective discourse, which will tendentially lead to fascism.

Hey, this is Nadia. I hope you're enjoying this trip from ACFM, the home of the weird left. You can go even weirder and left here by subscribing to our newsletter, which we will now be sending out with every new trip, so no more than about once a month, with bonus content and updates from the ACFM crew. To sign up, go to novara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. For more music and less chat, follow the ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. Just search for ACFM.

And to support us to keep bringing you even more from the ACFM Cosmos, support our hosts Novara Media for as little as one pound a month, by going to Navarra.media forward slash support. That's all for now. Stay weird and wonderful, folks. Hyacinth House is a song by the Doors, the 1971 song. So some of the lyrics refer to

mythological hyacinth and the lover of the Greek god Apollo. So that's a nice song I think we should play. The bathroom is clear I think that somebody's here I'm sure that someone is following me. Oh, yeah. I've also got a reference to Apollo.

I just thought we should play an ending, which I think is the first. track from Brian Eno's 1983 album Apollo for no better reason that we don't play enough Brian Eno on the show and it's called Apollo who was a Greek god obviously So Joseph Campbell, most well known for his book, The Hero of the Thousand Faces, in which he rehearses this idea that there's a monomyth, that all myths basically relate back to one myth, basically,

and that one myth is the hero's journey. And the hero's journey is something which will be really, really familiar to us, because it structures so much of... I mean, it is the key to all mythologies. I mean, Campbell's basic argument is the story of Gilgamesh is just repeated again and again in all myths, and that is the key to all myths.

You would think, like, given that George Elliot was making fun of it, like, yeah, nearly 100 years previously, I suppose much less than that in Campbell was Swiss writing, but you would think that if George Elliott, several generations earlier, was already making fun of this idea, people would have been

embarrassed to start churning it out, It is incredible. Like, it's a satirical object in George Elliott, like the great Victorian novelist, the key to all mythologies. But all of these guys we're talking about, culminating in Campbell, they all think literally,

they think what they've got is the key to all mythologies. The hero's journey is that, you know, somebody exists in the everyday life. They go on an adventure. They go on a sort of journey. They get a, they meet a mentor,

they have a final battle, then they'll come back to the everyday world, but changed in some sort of way. You know, so in some ways it seems like, you know, almost a banal. Oh, yeah, well, that's how stories go, is there. And like, basically, you know, loads of the stuff that we watch now is just based around that narrative structure. Like George Lucas took it, took the, took Campbell's book

as the guide for which to write the original three Star Wars films around, for instance. and we just see it over and over and over again. And so what do you do about that, basically? What do you do about that? And one of the things you should know about that is the individual's journey. Do you know what I mean? It's the thing we should be concerned about with narratives is the individual's journey and the sort of like, I don't know whether we can say psychological,

but it is, it's the psychological change that takes place during this journey. It's like the interesting thing. well it is a really seductive idea and i mean one of the critiques of campbell from narratologists is just that it's sort of a banal idea that yeah there may be certain basic structures to all narrative fiction but say what it doesn't tell you necessarily anything about the structure of the brain it's just almost like geometry that there's only so many things can happen in a story like say what or you can you can basically create a you can create uh you can use the elements that you find in myths and probably create several stories, but this is one of them

sort of thing. It's probably more realistic. Yeah, yeah. Myth has a different quality to it than grand narratives. I'm trying to think whether we need to distinguish between these things in the conversation that we're having right now. The grand narrative is a story about society, though, is always a, and I think Kea is right. The hero's journey is always a story about an individual, although the individual may be a culture hero, but a grand narrative is a story about society and about the people as a whole, whether it's the children of Israel or the working class. That does get to. So Yves Sitton writes about myths. What's his book called? I think that might be called mythocracy as well, actually. It is called mythocracy. And like he's he's trying to

make a distinction between left wing and right wing myths and it's exactly around this, basically. You're saying like if you want to think about a right wing myth, you don't have to worry about the content, it's the form, basically. It's not whether it talks about, you know, the nation state or anything like that, it's like the form that the story takes and it's, is the agency individual basically? He says that the left wing

myth must be about collective agency. You know, that's the form of it, that a form that a left wing myth should take, which does make me think about Who's the agent? Who's the agent? Yes, a collective agent, which does make me think about George Sorrell again and his sort of myth.

Is that like a collective myth? I think it is in a way, yeah, I would sort of buy that. I don't know, it would be a semantic quibble whether you would have to use the word myth for these things. I would say left wing. Maybe it's fine. I mean, the way, yeah, I think it's fine. I mean, sit on in that book, I think it is sort of using the terms,

like in the second way. Like myths are structuring ways of thinking about the world that you can't really escape from. And so you need to figure out what are good ones versus bad ones. the left good ones are stories of collective liberation and solidarity and, you know, crying about minors and right-wing myths are myths about hero. They're either myths about the defense and restoration of authority and hierarchy, if they're really conservative myths, all their myths about the self-imantipation of the individual, which is the liberal myth. And I think

that's fine. I think that's, I think that is a useful frame of reference, actually. It'd be nice to think through our list of films about strikes, because I mean, films about strikes are rare because they are about collective agency, aren't they usually? But then you get things like Hoffer, etc., which is much more of the, not the hero's journey. Yeah, well, that's true, actually. I mean, that was why I said on the show that in some ways Eisenstein's film was still the most radical one, because it's the one that is most, it is trying to make the hero the crowd rather than the individual, that's only one way of reading it.

But I think it is interesting. and it's definitely, I know it's partly because, you know, I'm obsessed with the issue of collectivity versus individualism and collectivism versus individualism. I think we all are. That's what I'm always looking out. I'm always looking at whether I'm like, you know, whatever I'm reading, whatever fiction I'm consuming or watching,

I'm always thinking about this issue like, where is agency? I'm in the middle of reading Lord of the Rings to around 12-year-old at the moment, which has been going on for ages, and that's a notoriously complex modern fantasy work which I would say is partly the reason it's so popular is because it actually deploys elements like these liberal myths and conservative myths and even in some places radical myths

in a to create its fabric and but I'm always thinking about I'm always focusing on that question is who's actually got the agency here and is it being liberal or is it being conservative? I mean I suppose that's another way in which people use myths that we didn't think of before, which is like this idea of the mythos and a fiction

on mythos, such as the Kathulu Mythos, which is like a shared sort of world or, yeah, a shared world which has like creation myths and all of the other sort of types of myths. Yeah, that's true. I mean, that is one of the things about the idea of a mythos or a mythology is that it's shareable and reproducible, isn't it?

I mean, that is what differentiates. I mean, the great works or fantasy fiction of the 20th century, people like Lovecraft and Tolkien are partly considered great because they've sort of inspired other people to, you know, within the, depending on the limits of the IP, the relevant IP laws and the restrictiveness or otherwise of the attitudes of the author's estate. You know, they've inspired people to copy them or do things in their own, or do things, you know, do their own stories using the same tropes and images in imagined worlds.

I think we should come back to this distinction between left wing and right wing myths, though, because there is a character that we haven't talked about, which is Jordan Peterson. And he is sort of like, you know, if we want to think about the right wing deployment of studies about myths, etc. We'd have to talk about him. I'm not going to talk about him, though. I don't know enough. Well, I mean, Peterson is a Jungian. He's the most famous Jungian in the world today. And his whole thing is that he thinks that, for example, what it means to be male, what it means to be a man, is to either to take on the ancient role of the hero who fights for order against chaos, which he sees as being figured first in the epic of Gilgamesh, the great Babylonian story about culture hero Gilgamesh and his battle against the

demonic forces of Tiamat the dragon, who is represented as a sort of principle of the expression of the chaotic feminine. And either you are accepting that what it means to be a man is to be that person and occupy that role somehow, or you're just going to fail, you're going to dysfunction, you're going to become miserable. I mean, that's pretty, and that's why you should tolerate your room. I don't know, that's as much as I can say about it, really. Also, the thing that drives me nuts about this is that if you go to the average person's home, it's the woman who brings order of the chaos. Do you know what I mean? Like it's just taking it to the tidier room thing. I just find that specific, that kind of myth specifically, particularly infuriating

as a woman. The chaos and order one, I think it's so much bollocks. Well, that is true, but Jordan Peterson's readership or listenership more likely are basically a young teenage boys who experience mum coming into their bedroom and tidying up as a terrible infringement on their liberties that they must defend. You know, as I've said before, I totally get why Jordan Peterson is successful at this point in history. And I don't think the left does enough to try and understand that. But I still obviously think that myth is just really, you know,

disgusting as a woman. We could play a bit of Bob Dylan. Holland's long, some epic poem song, Isis, from his album, Desire, which I think was co-written with a guy called Jacques Levy, who was a sort of youngian, esoterical thinker who Dylan became friends with for a while. And it very, very deliberately tries to play around with these archetypes, such as the archetypes of Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess, who end up becoming a central figure in the mythology of some of the esoteric and occult. groups of the early 20th century as well.

A man in the corner approached me for a match. I knew right away, he was not ordinary. He said, are you looking for something easy to catch? Said I got no money. He said that ain't necessary. The first time he carried Young, or Jungian analysis, was in Grail Marcus's book, Lipstick Traces, which is basically his book about punk, but it's not about punk, it's basically about the situation as international and all of the, all of the sort of avant-garde art movements that sort of repeat in punk, I suppose you put it like that. But at a certain point he introduces the Jung's idea of archetypes.

And then he did, like the thing it really sticks in my head and he does this thing away. he links John Leiden, who is basically Johnny Rotten, aka Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols and then Pill. He links him to John of Leiden, who is like this and sort of like this proto-communist Anabaptist from the Peasant Revolt, you know, where they take over Munster and all these sorts of things. And like, he's just doing a fucking play on his words.

You know, it's like perhaps it's like synchronicity. It's like, oh yeah, John Liden and John of Liden. And it's like, I remember really, and it thinking, God, this is good fun. But, like, that is fucking bollocks, isn't it? It's just, and he's trying to use, like, this idea of archetypes in order to sort of, to back that up. But, like, I think that is part of what is appealing

or why that sort of, like, Jungian analysis sort of fits in to a sort of, the contemporary sort of cosmic right sort of, like, assemblage, if you want to put it that way, like, where basically, like, a lot of the joy of that sort of conspiratorial far right, which definitely goes into like, you know, Peterson and so forth, is that idea of like politics as like making these connections between these things, you know, like politics as a treasure hunt where you're, oh, look, look, this fits here. And then if we go, we can go over there and like, which is the structure of things

such as QAnon, you know, where you have to link things together and all that. We've talked about this before when we, when we talked about the cosmic right and so forth. I mean, how that works with the cosmic right stuff as well is about saying there is going back to Jeremy's point about truth. It's about you knowing something and the empowerment that you get from being like, aha, I know that this bit of the puzzle works. And, you know, it's somewhere for people to go when there is, you know, confusion and despair and, you know, economic reality where everything is falling apart. You know, it makes sense. That's what I mean by it makes sense. The system makes sense. Functions. I think it butts up against myth because like basically

what people are after is like the feeling or affect that is produced. And so, like, concerns about, like, dusty old concerns such as truth or coherence are basically less important, you know what I mean, which is why it's quite quite hard to to sort of, like, critique or argue against somebody. The latest far right myth is this thing about 15-minute cities. I'm sure you've seen it going round. And so 15-minute cities is just, like, it's some sort of, like, you know, it's an urban planning sort of trend in which you should be able to go to the local shops

and everything you need to be within a 15-minute walk or bike ride or something. And that's turned into you will not be allowed to go further than 15 minutes from your house, basically. And my taxi driver I had the other day started to try to tell me this. You know, it's like, like this is, like that's a myth. And like basically I tried to argue against him and he didn't really defend it that much. But it was obvious, like, he wasn't interested. I couldn't disprove it to him.

I couldn't say, well, look, if you read this thing, it explains what 15-minute cities are, etc. Because that's not what he's in it for. He's in it for the effective charge. Exactly, exactly. And that's how, you know, belief systems function effectively. Yeah, one thing to say about all that is that when you're looking at these things like conspiracy theories, it becomes very difficult to completely dismiss the claims

of the psychoanalysts or the mythologists or others that there are universal tropes or there are at least tropes which repeat and repeat and repeat within the very long tradition of quote-unquote Western culture because I mean the tropes around things like QAnon you can find in what are clearly of themselves just conspiracy theories going back to the early Middle Ages the idea that someone is murdering children somewhere for example is that it just does come up again and again and again to the point where you can say I would probably say don't really buy that it's absolutely ubiquitous feature of human culture, but might be a pretty ubiquitous feature of human cultures that have reached a certain degree

of urbanisation and complexity so that people sort of feel like they don't really know what's going on a lot of the time. Yeah. And that and people are anxious about who's going to look after their children if something happens to them because you're not in a tight tribal structure where you know who's going to look after them. So so there are these. really persistent tropes. LeCloan Moof, actually, LeCloin Moof would be very clear about the 15 minute thing. They'd say that's a perfect example

that what myths are always myths of to some extent or at least in the kind of society we live in today, then they miss that someone somewhere, someone, the constitutive outside, the other, the thing which defines the community you belong to simply by not being it, is trying to stop you achieving what LeClo calls the absent fullness.

Like stop you achieving the state of completion and satisfaction and complete freedom. So someone somewhere is going to stop you doing something. That's what 15 minute cities meet. It must mean that someone somewhere is going to stop you being happy and free. And to some extent, their psychoanalytic perspective is that, look, what actually what it means

to become a rational human subject is to recognize everybody feels all the time like not quite fully satisfied that's just what it means to be human so either go off and become a Buddhist monk like live in a meditate all day in a monastery you might achieve you might get rid of that feeling that's your solution to everything

either do that or just accept like live with it like learn to live with it learn to live that is just what it means to be human I mean that's the Licanian answer to some extent there's an alcoholism yeah sure yeah I'm not I mean I think it's I think it's powerful no I'm defending because Keir because Keir said that's your defense for

that's your solution of everything i think it's a better one well now i think it's not it's a non-solution to me that that solution go off and become a full-time monk is always sort of fascinating because it's been it's been around for two and a half thousand years it is a solution to many of these dilemmas it's clearly not one that everybody can do and it's clearly not a scalable solution so it's a sort of limit case of what you can't do so but i think that i think that leclo and move point is pretty powerful there But of course, LeCloa move as well as being Licanians are also Gramscians. And of course, as we said before, when we talked about the conspiracy show, the conspiracy stuff on the show about that,

the Gramscian perspective is that also there is always a grain of good sense in the common sense. There is always something that's not totally untrue about these myths. It's not totally untrue that power elite engage in behaviour, which is sadistically destructive to the life. lives of millions of children. It might not even be untrue that loads of them are paedophiles. I don't know. But more to the point, it's like what that 50-minute city thing is really about is like

basically traffic calming measures and low-traffic neighbourhoods sort of thing. No, it is. It is, but it is also true, I'm going to say it is also true that there is a certain constituency of people in a country like Britain who are massively, massively invested in their car. Their car is the most important thing in their lives and they have made all... It figures freedom for them basically.

Well, it's not just that. They've made all kinds of massive psychic and real material investments in a whole lifestyle in which getting the nice car is like why you go to work. That's why you don't have a more interesting job than you could have done. That's why you're living in this quite boring suburb

that you might not have wanted to live in when you were 20. That's how and why you do all this stuff. And then when people come along and say, actually, we're going to change the way we organise. this stuff. So there wouldn't be any need for you to have done all this stuff to have the car. They are for

being threatened. It is genuinely threatening their interest and also the way in which they've invested their time and energy over the year. So there is a grain of truth in it. Susie and the Banshees Mirage. I'm apologising,

but not really, for everything being from the 70s. in early 80s this time. It usually is. It is the great period for music. Susie and the band she's Mirage. I would want to play the version from the Peel sessions, the John Peel sessions, which were released in 87, but recorded, I think in 78, one of the first recordings they did. And it's really an extraordinary song. It's one of the very first manifestations of that feminist post-punk sensibility, which would be developed by bands like The Slits and the Raincoat. And the lyric goes,

bodies are an oasis to drink from as you please. The song is called Mirage and it's specifically about that conception of the woman as a myth, which is different from the flesh and bud woman. I mean, that's exactly what the song is about. Pretty extraordinary piece of word. I sort of think I have a clear idea about this and I did when we started, because I sort of think several things. I think on the one hand, ultimately, I think I always say this to people. One of the few things the left has going for it is the fact that we're telling people the truth. We can never let go of that. There is a difference between truth and bullshit and we

know more of the truth than the liberals and the conservatives do. We can demonstrate it. We can prove it. Outcomes correlate with expectations more often if you do what we say than if you do what they say. They don't always, but more often. And I think that is really important. We have to hang on to that. On the other hand, I sort of think it's true as people like LeClau would. say that any notion of society as a comprehensive totality, totality is sort of mythic and is going to be flawed and problematic. But I also agree with the Marxists, the lukatches, the Jamesons, that you have to sometimes think in terms of society as a totality. Again, you can't function politically. So there is a certain use of mythic thinking,

which we can't get away from. And that's also, I guess that's correlates. with things I've said on the show before. Like I would, I'm all for methodotogynisting and romanticising, the, the Southwell Coalfields and Ney Bevan, like I think, and Tridegar and the birth of the NHS. I think we should do more of that. I think we should, we should be insisting on a Labour government, putting up statues to all those people all over the place, so everybody has to hear about it all the time.

And I sort of think you can do that at the same time as saying in other contexts, well, look, you know. We know that, of course, the details are much more complex and there would be, there would have been all kinds of inequalities and bad things happening and oppressive power relationships going on in those communities. And you have to be able to operate at these different levels. Otherwise, you just can't really hope to successfully navigate the complexities of the present. I don't know. What do you think? I think that was really good. I like that bit. The thing I wanted to talk about though, or to go to riff off a little bit was when you, this idea that like we have a better grip on reality than than liberals or the right.

And I think that is true. But, you know, sometimes you feel as though that that isn't true. Do you know what I mean? Basically, I want to make this argument here, right, which is, which goes back to like Mark Fisher's, you know, acid communism project that, you know, which is one of the, the acid corbinism spin-off of that was one of the origins of the, that's our origin myth, actually, isn't it? Yeah, it is.

It is. It is. But the whole premise of that is that, like, like capitalist realism, which the book he wrote before, is all about, like, the future has disappeared

and, like, neoliberalism has this, like, eternal present. And in loads of ways, the big problem with that was, like, basically history had been suspended,

right? So that was the whole point of that with this neoliberal present. Change to something else, radically better, is basically not thinkable. Do you know what I mean? And then that breaks down,

partly 2008 in the financial crisis and basically a big, really, really big crisis for neoliberal ideology later on practice, but also the problem of climate change, which is, which sort of says there cannot be an eternal present because all of these problems build up. In fact, we're very, very close to the situation where things have to, will change fundamentally, either through conscious action or non-conscious action of like the natural, natural forces, whatever you put up, when I put that. And there are different ways in which people have responded to that. you know, the centrist response to this, the re-emergence of history is basically the long

90s is to pretend it doesn't exist. But the right-wing response seems to be, or some of the right-wing response seems to be that they're just going to basically abandon, because our present position in history basically leads to left-wing solutions or at a catastrophe, the right seems to have opted out of history, and they've done that by trying to think about time in a different way. So one of them is when we've sort of mentioned a couple of times recently, which is this idea of long-termism, where you just change your perspective of time to the long, long, distant future, basically, and then you don't have to deal with the present.

And in fact, the horizon within which everything you do now might end up having been justifiable. Yeah, it's basically, it's just to justify, ultimately it's to justify oligarchic concentrations of wealth, because they're the ones who are giving. the theorists of long-termism, loads and loads and loads of cash, basically. The other resort, of course, is like the deep past, which is like, if you think about evolutionary psychology, this is one of the things that feeds into Jordan Peterson's work, which is like, and this sort of relates to myth as well.

Oh, yeah, the key to the present is not the present. We're trapped by these forces from evolution, which emerged in the, you know, on the plains of Africa, however many, hundreds of thousands of years ago. But then the other one, the other one is like this embrace of myth, which you see in Peterson and people like that. And so, like, and myth being outside of history, we talked about it a little bit earlier, but like the type of temporality you see in myth, like mythic time tends to be like cyclical, so secular conceptions of time, which you do see come up quite often in, like, right-wing

conceptions of what's going on now. Look, you're mistaken to think about this as like time is linear, which is what history says. Instead, time is cyclical and what we're actually in the cusp of, you know, you have these things that repeat of a huge amounts of time. One of them is the conception of generations by Strauss and How, a very different Strauss, I can't remember his first name. And then Steve Bannon did it. And their idea is that there are four types of generations that repeat over very long periods. And so, you know, there's no progress. What you're doing is you keep repeating. And then Steve Bannon, who was a theorist around, well, an activist around Trump, did this really awful documentary called Generation

Zero, which uses that to sort of argue, you know, basically around the cusp of something new. It doesn't matter what you think the problems are of history now. We're in the cusp of something new. We have to look back to these long loops in order to understand that what we need to do is not dress climate change, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. No, it's really interesting to think about different ways of thinking about history and temporality, because, yes, I would say historically, conservatism is generally is given to cyclical theories of time, although there is cyclical theories of history,

although there is also a certain strand of conservative skepticism, which runs through sort of Burke into the 20th century, which is sort of anti-progressivist and it generally stresses just the contingency of outcomes. But the argument, it draws from recognising the fact that history is so complex that no one can really determine what's going to happen next and anything you try to do will probably go wrong.

The conclusion they draw from that is that you might as well stick with the tried and trusted methods of tradition and only ever try to change things very incremental. or in very small ways because otherwise you'll probably just make things worse. Well, that's a bit different from that cyclical version of history.

Yeah, no, it is, yeah. And then there's also, there's the liberal... That's basically, that's Burke, isn't it, emerging out of, like, rejection of revolution, basically? It's Burke, and then it's sort of oak shot in the 20th century. I mean, I think that, and it's people like John Gray today as well. So, and that cyclical version is really, really old.

I mean, that's the... I mean, they're the first ever theories of history. are these basically cyclical theories of history, I think, I would say. And then there's also the liberal, the classic liberal theory is just the theory of endless, if incremental progress. You know, the arc of history bends, but it bends towards justice. We just keep going, things will get better over time. That is really...

I do live by that, though. Well, it's an enlightened... The arc of history. I need that to... Yeah, is that your... Is that your animating myth, Nadia? It's my animating myth. It's Martin Luther King, isn't it?

The Arch of History is long, but it bends towards justice. I think so, yeah. It's been to justice. It was made famous by Obama. But I think it is a quote. I need that. I need that myth, yeah. My animating myth, thank you, Kea. You've nailed it. And then there is the millinarian myth,

which is something which the left is really given to you, I think. The millenarian myth is the myth that we are almost at the end of history. about to see the great cataclysmic change, which will write all the wrongs and write all the injustices of the past and put everything right. And there was certainly a millinarian strand of Corbinism. So I think, but the trouble with millinitarianism is that historically, it's always disabling for the left. Like as soon as the thing, it's the temptation to radicals, which I think you always have to avoid. I mean, one of the things which think as like LeCloa move, are preoccupied with from the 80s onwards, is trying to incorporate those elements of that

conservative, skeptical view, which are obviously right in some senses, which is into a left-wing perspective, which doesn't completely give up on the possibility of a different future and doesn't give up on, doesn't give up on the elements of Mediterraneanism, which are useful, the messianism, as water benjamin calls it, in just that you, you know, it doesn't give up on the hope for a possible better future. I think it's, I think it is really interesting. And I think, I think my perspective is that you sort of have to bring all of those elements together somehow, maybe not the cyclical theories, which I'm not sure are in any way recoverable from a radical perspective. But like there is a big tradition of thinking about repetitions.

So the left perspective on time in history is probably much more to do with, you know, it's not just that there's a linear progression, but there are like there are ruptures and jumps and moves backwards and leap. and repetitions. I'm thinking of like the 18th Broomer course, right? Yes, yes, of course. You know, basically, you know, the new emerges wearing the clothes of the old, et cetera. First as tragedy,

second time was fast and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, that's true. But it's also like, if you think about like Mark Fisher, when he writes acid communism and he's trying to sense the reopening of the future, he goes back to the 70s. It's like looking for the past, for the, yeah, the lost futures

that seem possibly in the 70s. We should play Stagherly by Lloyd Price, which is released in 1958, a big hit for Lloyd Price in 1956. When are we thinking about songs about myth, this came to mind for me because of an essay that Grail Marcus wrote in his book, Mystery Train, called The Myth of Stagherly, I think. Myth of Staggart and perhaps Slice Stone, because he uses this myth or this sort of, yeah, this myth, this repeated story as a way to talk about first of Black Panthers. and then Sly Stone, as in Sly and the Family Stone.

And so Stagherly is this sort of myth. It's based on an actual incident, I think, in which this sort of like high-living, you know, high-dressing pimp called Stagg-Lee and shoots a guy called Billy Lyon over a game of cards. Billy Lyon steals his stets and hat and Billy and Stagherly shoots him dead. And it's one of those, it's a story that, like, has been in loads and loads of songs.

before and after Lloyd Price's version. And in this essay, Grail Marcus starts to talk about it as a myth. So one of the myths around which black American men try to sort of deal with. And he starts off with this quote from Bobby Seal as one of the leaders of the Black Panthers who reveals that he named his son. Malik Nekrumo Staggerly Seal and Nekrumer is like a famous leader in Africa

Malik is a reference to Malcolm X and so like his idea is that Malcolm X was like a staggerly character before he had his conversion to religious and political conversion Malcolm X was also a you know he was a Hesler who ended up in jail etc and his conversion also Huey Newton

and Eldridge Cleaver the other sort of leaders of the Panthers also had this sort of of they had staggerly within them, he sort of says. And in fact, one of the, one of the, the ideas of the Panthers, they would mobilize the lumpen, the lumpen proletariat. You know, they tried to get the hustlers, the sort of streetmen, the Stagullies, and then convert them to politics. And of course, there's a not so nice story of how, once the Panthers are defeated, gangster rap replaces conscious rap, you know, once the, once the possibility of changes has been eliminated, the myth of staggerly, this

sort of idea of like a myth of freedom by not giving a fuck who will kill you just a drop of a hat which gives them this huge power and all this sort of stuff. That myth recurs basically until BLM. Flagglee

went to the barum and he stood across the barram door say now nobody move when he pulls his party four So, Beggone, oh, please don't take my life. I've got three little children and I'm very sickly wife.

So I suppose all of those perspectives have some use under different circumstances, actually. But I suppose my strong message to ACFM listeners, something I've been preoccupied with since the 90s is the danger of, the danger of the law of millinarianism, which Mark was absolutely not immune to. If you remember some of his more excitable Facebook posts back in the day, you know. That is true. The big problem of a critique of millinarianism. The difficulty, though, is it is the problem of climate change.

It does feel quite end of times. It definitely isn't millinarian in that we will have the apocalypse and then the better future will emerge. after it, but it, but it does seem, you know, it does seem as though... Well, I think that I know it seems, I know it seems that way, but I think, I mean, I've said this on the show several times, say this is a refrain now, but I think, I think that end of, that end of day's discourse within the climate movement is really disabling and it's also naive. It's naive about the reality of neo-colonialism, really, because I just think, as I've said, I've said exactly this on the show before, the reality is we are not,

looking at the imminent collapse of Westerns of civilisation into a zombie apocalypse. We're looking at a situation in which quite a lot of our freedom might be constrained and our standard of living will continue to slowly erode but mostly we'll be having to suffer the sort of the historic existential indignity and tragedy of having to watch hundreds of thousands of people die, millions of people die in places like Pakistan while our government. in class tell us nothing can be done to save them but it's not going to be the end of our world it's not the end of civilisation that is a disabled i mean that is a myth and we shouldn't keep

repeating it because i think lots of people who haven't really been brought on board to kind of radical position on climate haven't been brought on board because they intuit they know in their bones that that isn't true and when they keep when they get told it that it's easier for them to turn away from it so that's all bollocks because they into they know in their bones that's not true because it isn't yeah I know but like knowing something in your bones well this is an interesting point it goes it goes back to what you're saying about an intuition about like whether you can if you if you were creating an intuition which I'd say that that that's interesting as part of that discourse that you were talking about earlier because I don't think that's that's

right I don't think it is about intuition I don't think myth and intuition you know can work together I do think it's a real problem though I just look at like the sort of millionarianism of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, you know what I mean, of that. It's also that idea that like it, like one of the ways it plays out is it massively shortens any horizon within those, which those sort of movements think about politics. It's basically five years. There's nothing that exists beyond that. You know what it's true.

Also, well, that's a five, yeah. Yeah, well, that's why, you know, the correct synthesis of all these different perspectives on history into, and I would say, I would put my, stick my neck out here and say, a completely non-mythical, a completely non-mythical understanding of history in our place in it is, A, it's demonstrably true that progress is possible. That is demonstrably true. And so all the versions of the conservative view of history, which is that progress ultimately isn't really possible, either because it always goes wrong in the end or because

we're living through endless cycles of repetition, those things are just demonstrably untrue and the entire project of history as a discipline of the past couple of hundred years has been to show that they are untrue. That is untrue, but also, it's also, it is also, it's also not true that progress just happens without people, without fighting for it and without conflict

and without massive conflicts of interest having to be played out and resolved, as the Liberals say. And it's also not true that progress ever happens quickly, ever happens really suddenly, that there's ever a kind of sudden miraculous transformation of the kind that mininarianism promises. And I think that is what it means, actually, to live free from myth in a good way, is to recognise all of those things.

I think what the left needs to embrace after this, you know, after the slow cancellation of the future has been cancelled, is that problem of like the problem of transition of like, it is possible from go to here, from here, from starting here to go to somewhere else, basically, that doesn't happen in a millinary an instant, right? That is a problem that you have to think through, well, how can we act now in order to get to a different place in the future?

It's a problem that gets raised by climate change because one of the ways, if you say the problem of transition now, that people think about transition towns, etc. But that's one of the big, big problems that the left has grappled with and has a lot of knowledge of, I think, you know, over the last two or three centuries. And I think there's a deep insecurity on the part of parts of the left that their myth or story, however we're going to define myth in this case, is just not true that we cannot win. And I think that's a huge problem, like as a deep-seated latent affect that's sitting within the people.

Well, I think that this is something I've always said to students. I've always said, look, you must, the thing you've got to avoid is the fatalism of the disappointed revolutionary. That is why you have to avoid millionarianism. Because if you set yourself a ridiculously unachievable goal, then when you don't achieve that goal, you will then be easily convincedable that achieving no goal is possible. Also it goes back to the individualism thing, about if you think that everything has to happen now,

not just in your lifetime, like it has to happen this year. Then again, going back to what you were saying, Jeremy, about your place and history, like understanding that you are playing, a part, and then that is important. But you might not get all of these things in your lifetime, but if you understand history, then you can see that where gains have been made and how those have had a huge effect on people's lives. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to, I've done it before. I'm going to do it. I'm going to quote George Eddie. I'm going to quote Middlemarch again.

The growing good of the world is half, what is it? That things, do that again. I'm starting to quote wrong now, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden knife and rest in

unvisited tombs. That's massive shivers, yeah, that's made you feel really emotional. That's really good. Too far out. Deep far out.