What happens if you subvert the myth and protest, maybe by using art? ibid.
The Myth of signs … humans have this amazing ability to create and follow conventions … ‘the sign is a visual signal of authority.’ ibid.
To Barthes, it’s the sheer scale of the repetition of things. ibid.
The Myth of Wi-Fi: To Accept. Obey. Move on. Here’s a signifier Barthes would never have seen but he might have recognised its mythic power to enchant the masses: Wi-Fi, a myth symbolised everywhere by a fan of black bars. The internet has come to signify our empowerment, how quickly we can reach information – the latest slug of news, create a meme or social media rumour. Yet there’s a deeper meaning: this connectivity runs two ways … Your emails and apps are tracking you … The myth of the internet is meshed with the myth of money. ibid.
Michelangel’s beautiful sculpture of David … [exits shop with statuette] David: this quintessential figure of Florentine masculinity is everywhere now … David is an industry in his own right. ibid.
Images of everything from margarine to marriage were carefully confected myths, persuading women to be perfect beings. ibid.
The Virgin Mary was never depicted in her own lifetime yet her image is recognised pretty much everywhere … An image of perfection, symbol of virginity, innocence and immortality, gold-flecked and unobtainable. ibid.
The Myth of Guns in Movies: Is it true there are no bad guns, only bad people? I mean, take the Tommy Gun. Wielded by gangsters, a symbol of criminal violence; by Winston Churchill, a symbol of the bulldog defiance. ibid.
The Myth of Race: The biggest, most pernicious, dangerous of modern myths – race … Racial difference and hierarchies of race have been used to justify exploitation. We now know that less than 1% of 1% of the human genome differs between people who are categorised as belonging to different races. Race is a myth – but one that has appalling, real-world consequences. ibid.
Philosophy has an image problem. Philosophers are thought to be mystics, religious figures, bullshit artists – anything divorced from reality … Why is philosophy held in such contempt by many physicists? … one part of the answer probably lies in the split between the two major branches of modern Western philosophy, Analytic and Continental philosophy.
Continental philosophers tend to be much more suspicious of scientific claims about knowledge and truth than are their analytic colleagues.
Yet the distinction between the two kinds of philosophy is not apparent from a distance — most scientists have never heard of the analytic-Continental divide.
So, given that most of the highly visible philosophers in the public sphere today are Continental, and given the attitude that some (not all) Continental philosophers have toward science, it’s not terribly surprising that scientists often have disdain for all philosophers, and sometimes even think that they can do philosophy better than the philosophers can. Adam Becker, What is Real?
At this point we reach the supreme irony of how ideology functions today: it appears precisely as its own opposite, a radical critique of ideological utopias. The predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future but a cynical resignation, an acceptance of how ‘the world really is’, accompanied by a warning that, if we want to change it (too much), only totalitarian horror can ensue. Slavoj Zizek, The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, 2019