I mean, just give an example, to be somebody that, every once in a while has a burgher. Fourth of july comes around. What do you do? You get out the barbecue, invite the family over, grill up some burghers and eat one with the family. No one's going to judge you for that. That's just the way the world is. That's just what it is to be an american. Barths would say, our subjectivity and the ideas we have about what it is to be an american, being engaged in that mythology, makes it possible for otherwise perfectly decent people to not even consider, for example, where that meat came from, which just from a statistical perspective, probably from a factory farming situation, that most people participating in the activity of eating a burgher wouldn't want to patronize or indorse necessarily. But none the less, the mythology of what it is to be an american kept them doing it without them even realizing they were hurting anyone. What other things that have been given to us historically about what it is to be an american are hurting pople around you unbeknown to you? Same question to whatever country you're listening to this from. This same dynamic applies to things that extend beyond nationality, though. Say a big part of your subjectivity or how you view yourself requires that you dress in a very specific style of clothes. Maybe youre relly into shoes, whatever it is. Say you're a surfedute, part of the mythology of being a surferdute is wearing some totally bodaceous surfedut clothes. Bro, andd what if, when you go down to the store to buy your surfer clothes? Bro, what if they were made by people that work in abject miserable conditions in a third world country? What if you're otherwise somebody that would be absolutely horrified to contribute to that process. But the mythology youve received your whole life through media, that makes up what it is to be you, has had you thinking about wearing those clothes, is just what it is to be a surfer dude. Again, this is just the way the world is. So now that we've talked about several examples of it, hopefully it's a little easier to see the similarities between the mythology of ancient greece and the mythology we still use in to day's world. Maybe a good visual to use when thinking about structuralism is to think of plato's cave. Remember plato's cave? There are the shadows on the cave wall, there are the puppets behind the people casting the shadows, and then there are the actual human beings that watch the shadows on the cave wall and mistake it for reality. Well, it's that visuale to think of structuralism. Think of the shadows on the cave wall as the distorted, narrow world view often given to someone by mass media and the culture they live in. This world view that structures reality for them into something comprehensible. It lets them navigate existence and they often mistakenly think of these shadows as just the way the world is, think of the puppets that cast the shadows as being the unmediated reality that we don't have access to. Well, what lies in between those two things? What makes the world view on the cave wall that people often mistake is unmediated reality, even possible? Well, to a structuralist, the answer is these structures that human beings use to derive meaning from that unmediated reality, the structure of language, the structure of economics, the structure of culture and all its parts. To a structural anthropologist by the name of cloud levy strauss, he would say that it's absolutely fitting in this example that human beings are the only things in between unmediated reality and their world views on the cave wall. See, to levy strauss, human culture, human behavior, your personal views on how you fit into all this. All this is really just a reflection of the underlying structures of the human mind and the way that it interfaces with reality. And these structures of the human mind are ultimately what is dictating everything about the way we arrive at these world views. And when levy strauss starts to study these structures within culture, what he notices, is the way that the human mind seems to make sense of everything is by thinking of things in the world in terms of dicodomes. Some structureists will call these dicodomies nebular oppositions, but by far the most common term used to describe these is that the human mind makes sense of reality in terms of binary oppositions. Some very simple examples of these binary oppositions are things like up versus down, left ses right in verses out on verses off. Thousands of binary oppositions that are the way the human mind make sense of and structures the meaning of this reality that were in. Remember when we talked about the structure of language, and how saser thought that words only have meaning in terms of their relationship to the other words within a given language?