If credulity on the one hand and disregard on the other are of little help in understanding the mafia, prejudiced disbelief misses the point altogether, which is neither to establish whether symbols and terminology are believable to us (that is, whether they seem plausible to the scholar whose principal activity is not that of selling protection in a rough world) nor to pursue a chimerical distinction between those symbols which are genuine and those which are concocted by overimaginative outsiders. Inferring uni vocally from the "confusion between myth and reality" that reality is far less mythical than is often assumed (see Duggan 1989: 188) is simply not acceptable. In what follows I try to demonstrate that, in some special sense, the opposite obtains, namely, that myth lends force to a reality which would not otherwise be able to manifest itself.

QUESTION: Provocative claim worth pursuing: how exactly does myth 'lend force' to institutional reality? What mechanism makes rhetoric substantive rather than merely decorative?

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Busi…, loc. 333