Clearly, something went wrong with the practice of “mythopoesis” or “myth-making from the bottom up”, which was – and still is – at the core of our philosophy.

By “myth” we never meant a false story, i.e. the most banal and superficial use of the term. We always used the word for a narrative with a great symbolic value, a narrative whose meaning is understood and shared in the community (e.g. a social movement) whose members tell it one another. We’ve always been interested in stories that create bonds between human beings. Communities keep sharing such stories and, as they share them, they (hopefully) keep them alive and inspiring, ongoing narration makes them evolve, because what happens in the present changes the way we recollect the past. As a result, those tales are modified according to the context and acquire new symbolic/metaphorical meanings. Myths provide us with examples to follow or reject, give us a sense of continuity or discontinuity with the past, and allow us to imagine a future. We couldn’t live without them, it’s the way our mind works, our brain is “wired” to think through narratives, metaphors and allegories [3].

At a certain point, a metaphor may suffer sclerosis and become less and less useful, until it’s void of all meaning, a disgusting cliché, an obstacle to the growth of inspiring stories. When this happens, people have to veer off, looking for other words and images.
Revolutionary and progressive movements have always found their own metaphors and narrated their myths. Most of the times these myths survived their being useful and became alienating. Rigor mortis set in, language became wooden, metaphors ended up enslaving the people instead of setting them free […]

No-one can erase mythological thought from human communication, because it’s embedded in the circuitry of our brains. As a matter of fact, every iconoclasm eventually generates a new iconophilia, against which new iconoclasts will rage. The cycle will be endless if we don’t understand the way these narratives work.
The trouble with myths is not their intrinsic falsehood, truth… or truthiness. The trouble with myths is that they sclerotise easily if we take them for granted. The flow of tales must be kept fresh and lively, we have to tell stories by ever changing means, angles and points of view, give our tales constant exercise so they don’t harden and darken and clog our brains.

Full text here.

As we think more about the post-nihilist turn and the centrality of certain kind of narratives, I wonder if our politics ought not reflect the need for a fiction that knows it is a fiction, a kind of mimesis that is unconcerned with its mimetic nature: a specular image of the collective subject. For some time I’ve wondered if this might not mean the need for a political myth. This is a frightening idea given its proximity to fascist and Platonic ideas about noble lies. Yet this mythopoesis that Wu Ming define as myth-making from the bottom-up, a kind of grassroots storytelling, makes the idea a little less terrifying and a little more thinkable.

From the groups bio:

In 1994, hundreds of European artists, activists and pranksters adopted and shared the same identity.
They all called themselves Luther Blissett and started to raise hell in the cultural industry. It was a five year plan. They worked together to tell the world a great story, create a legend, give birth to a new kind of folk hero. In January 2000, some of them regrouped as Wu Ming. The latter project, albeit more focused on literature and storytelling in a narrower sense of the word, is no less radical than the old one.