Wit & Attitude Quote by Roland Barthes

Barthes’s line is a tidy little demolition of the lazy binary that haunts public discourse: true versus false, sincerity versus spin. By insisting that myth is “neither a lie nor a confession,” he refuses to treat ideology as a simple act of deception or a naked outpouring of belief. Myth, in his account, is more slippery and more powerful because it doesn’t need to falsify facts; it only needs to bend their meaning.

“Inflexion” is the key word, and it’s surgical. An inflection doesn’t invent new material, it changes the angle of what’s already there - the tonal shift that makes a statement sound like common sense, nature, destiny. Myth operates like a vocal cadence in culture: it makes the contingent feel inevitable. A photograph, a slogan, a consumer object, a news story can remain technically “accurate” while being rhetorically steered toward a moral. That’s why myth is so durable: it’s not persuasion by argument, it’s persuasion by atmosphere.

The context is Barthes’s mid-century project in Mythologies, written against a France saturated with mass media, advertising, and national self-image. He’s diagnosing how bourgeois values travel incognito, dressed up as neutrality. The subtext is a warning: if you only hunt for “lies,” you miss the more sophisticated operation - the way power smuggles itself into the everyday by changing the intonation of reality. Myth is culture’s stealth mode, making ideology sound like mere description.