“Why?!?!” we find ourselves screaming out loud or whispering silently in times of great despair. “Why is this happening to me?” For humans, the world is story shaped (Ricoeur 2009). When life fails to make sense in terms of cause and effect, beginning, middle and end, it becomes unfathomable and we fall into a pit of despair (MacIntyre [1981] 2012, 217). Only the fervently faithful and outright nihilists are safe. But not all stories answer these weighty why questions. This is where myth comes in.

To speak of the myths of liberalism may seem oxymoronic. As I have been explaining in the previous chapters, liberal modernity is widely understood to be defined by its having consigned traditional and charismatic forms of legitimacy to the past in favour of rational-legal legitimacy. This Weberian thesis has achieved the status of a master narrative, taught across the humanities and social sciences in classrooms around the world. Liberal scholars warn against the urge to ground politics in something emotionally or metaphysically deeper since this is the root to totalitarianism (Habermas 2011, 24). The dominance of this perspective is evidenced in the numerous opinion pieces that treat the recent rise of populism as a dangerous return of non-rational forms of legitimacy – as if these could be left behind (Ioris and Pagliarini 2019).

Myths are thought of as things that fools believe in. The term myth has historically been used to separate ‘primitive’ religions from Christianity, and later religion generally from a rational worldview (Bell 2009). In the 19th century, myth implied stories of events that defy the laws of nature and which are believed in propositionally – an early science. Today the word myth is usually only used to refer to things long-dead Greek people told. When ‘myth’ is used in popular parlance, it is as an antonym to ‘fact’, such as in the recent New York Times headline ‘The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant’ (Flagg 2018). Such myths are little more than tall tales that need to be debunked; lies that deluded and uneducated people believe. But to dismiss myths in this way is to ignore exactly why and how they influence people, as well as their potential for harnessing political engagement.