Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the Weird Left.

My name is Keir Milben and I'm joined as usual by my very good friend Nadia Eidl.

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 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 interested in.

So when we pick this topic, thank you Keir.

This is another great one of yours.

And 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 in 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 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 when we speak about Simone de Beauvoir's work later.

But this also got me thinking about where else mint 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 come 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 on to 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.

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