Life is experienced dramatically; poetically. This appears to be a phenomenological truth (Heidegger [1975] 2013, 226). But because of this truth, life is most frequently experienced as lacking in drama and poetry. If all the world is indeed a stage (Shakespeare [1599] 1996, 2.7.139– 40), then for most of us, in terms of the big decisions that impact our lives, we are more often the audience than the actors. Our lives remain in the mundane scenes with which myths only begin. As the previous chapter explained, we carry such myths around in our heads. They shape who we are and our ethical and political choices. But rarely do we get the chance to ourselves be significant characters. This chapter is about the important role that institutions can play in helping us to share the myths that make up our own lives and, if we’re lucky, become key characters within them.

I think of these processes of sharing and acting out myths as rituals. Now talking of rituals among the non-religious may conjure images as varied as Scouts singing ‘kumbaya’ around a campfire, hipsters taking ayahuasca or schoolkids pledging allegiance to the flag. All of these examples may be equally alien and off-putting, reproducing an idea of rituals as ‘special activities inherently different from daily routine action and closely linked to the sacralities of tradition and organised religion’ (Bell 2009, 138). From this perspective, rituals seem not to fit with modern, non-religious life. They are things that people in the past or elsewhere engage in – or perhaps that odd family friend. But not ‘us’.

Such rituals are not what I am talking about here. Yet all of these examples do share a key feature that I do want to highlight: they performatively realize a world as it should or could be by subverting the everyday world: a world in which gods don’t seem to listen, in which life has no meaning or purpose, and in which a nation’s people are interminably divided.

Notice there are three elements to my observation: (1) performativity, (2) normativity and (3) subversion. The performative aspect can further be broken into two points: (a) intentionality and (b) theatrics.