Mythmaking and Unmaking

The stories upon which past efforts at revolutionary transformation were based have largely run their course. This is for a variety of reasons. One is history: the stories we once told about what was possible, and how to attain it, are associated with real-world efforts at remaking society. The efforts that succeeded at attaining power perpetuated nightmares, and those that didn't perpetuate nightmares failed to attain power. Another reason is the fundamental plausibility of the underlying narratives. For instance, the insistence that human nature does not exist--a notion inextricably associated with many visions of social possibility--is simply not tenable.

But more than that, revolutionary movements have never been solely, or even primarily, a response to rational argumentation about the moral validity of a worldview and the strategic utility of a program of action. Revolutionary movements have, like fundamental human endeavors in general, been predicated on mythologies. It is extremely revealing that in much contemporary language “myth” simply means any story, regardless of its nature, that isn't true. We use this term to indicate a story which elicits a higher form of selfhood. The content of the specific narrative may or may not have happened, but the fundamental realities it describes, and the state of being one must attain in order to respond to those realities, is true.

Mythmaking and Unmaking is a storytelling project. We are dedicated to conceiving of narratives that are responsive to the unique realities we inhabit now, navigating the landscape of widely divergent worldviews to communicate on terms that are actually meaningful to different populations, and indicating ways of being in this world that both meet fundamental psychological needs and imply a politics of survival.