I have decided to share my experiences through the creation of a myth because mythical thinking comes from people who have a very different way of understanding and experiencing the world than I do. Taking the task of creating a myth seriously means making an effort to put myself in the shoes of these people, trying to cancel (as much as possible) my own values and prejudices with the intention of understanding them from their own perspective and not from mine. However, as I pointed out above, the Malhechos project is based on my personal experiences, which is why, after partially shedding my values, I must dive back into them. I do this process with two clear goals: the first is to expand my thinking, incorporating the lessons I can learn by unfolding and creating as if I were someone else, in order to seek new alternatives that can help us overcome the environmental crisis. The second is that I have the intuition that this is a plausible way to find common elements between the thinking of people who are in some way so distant from me and my own thinking. Before continuing, it is necessary to question the possibility of carrying out the exercise I propose, considering that some specialists claim that mythical thinking and the mental structures that made it possible are already outdated. According to Mircea Eliade (1991), the word «myth» can be interpreted in two ways: as fiction from cultures full of irrationality or as an exemplary sacred narrative. It is also worth adding that the word «myth» is currently used to designate something that people believe, but which is not true. Miguel León Portilla (2019), a scholar of the myths of ancient Mesoamericans, points out that both positions are present in academic studies on this type of narrative. For Portilla, some researchers understand myths as an expression of a preliterate way of thinking, characteristic of the so-called «primitive man,» structurally different from ours (and often inferior). Some authors even assert that primitive thought is not entirely comprehensible to us due to its differences from ours. Portilla mentions that this position is often adopted under cultural or biological determinisms. In contrast, and still following the Mexican historian, there are those who assert that the cognitive abilities of human beings have been the same since they were first constituted as such. Therefore, there are no structural differences in the way of thinking of different peoples, but rather differences in the fields where mental faculties are applied and the number of accumulated experiences, with myths sharing structural similarities with the way modern humans think.

However, I believe a third way to approach the topic is possible, starting from a fundamental premise: contemporary human beings are not as rational, and our way of acting is not as logical as we think. The sociologist Karl Mannheim (2004) points out that modern humans use scientific thinking only under special circumstances, leaving other spheres of our lives to less systematic forms of thought and action. To carry out this work, I interviewed Francisco Javier Méndez, a sociologist from the Javeriana University, who told me, based on his own experience and Mannheim’s assertion: «When I analyze something related to my work, I try to do it as rationally and objectively as possible. But, if you pay attention, I only do this in that environment, because when I argue with someone or get upset, for example, I don’t apply sociological theories or anything like that, but I act emotionally. That said, I still follow the basic values I was taught as a child, such as being careful not to harm others.»

What I mean is that, although it is possible that mythical thinking and scientific thinking have irreconcilable differences in the way they understand the objects they analyze, the truth is that all human beings have emotions, no matter how “civilized” we believe ourselves to be. This is where the magic of art comes in, as artistic works, in this case, paintings and literature, have the ability to provoke emotions in the viewer that go beyond reason itself, which allows them to reach and call people to action in a way that often surpasses the analyses of specialists, which are frequently incomprehensible to the average person.