This glossary is not meant to be a definitive glossary. It functions instead as mythic diagnostics, which is one of Mythic Plurality Projects (MPP) ways of moving through the world. For this particular glossary we are sticking to American mythology that very often borrows from, distorts, or absorbs other cultural mythologies in order to establish their authority. As I explore other dimensions of myth, other glossaries may organically come alive.
By ‘myth’ in this glossary, I do not mean fiction. I mean operative story that functions as a narrative pattern that shapes what feels possible, permissible, and real in everyday life.
Because MPP treats myth as infrastructure, as something systemically mythopoetic (rather than focusing only on symbology), this glossary works to name myths as active scripts shaping moral permission, behavior and even policy. A core refusal within MPP is that it refuses false neutrality.
Rather than aiming for detached objectivity or non-accountable subjectivity, this glossary leans toward function and shadow while attending to what myths do rather than what they claim, alongside relational discernment. Myths are often treated as ahistorical, but here they are understood as alive and operating as memory systems that organize power in the present. This approach avoids relativism by holding multiple stories while remaining attentive to a consequential ontology; sitting alongside a post-humanist relational sociology (often drawing from Delueuzian concepts and Glorias Anzaldua’s Nepantla). Think of this glossary as an inquiry into the waters we are swimming in or an invitation to notice what particular stories, myths, and narratives make possible, and what they render impossible. Definitions are shaped by questions such as Who benefits? Who is missing? What gets erased? What are the emotional, energetic, psychological, material, and ecological costs?
The glossary lives in the cracks. It holds tension without collapsing into nihilism or retreating into immature innocence. Contradictions are treated as signals, avoiding understandings that claims myths are failures and instead they keep us unsettled just long enough for moral clarity to simmer rather than harden or oxidize.
There is an acknowledgement of geographies, limits, locations, and angles of view which in these conditions they situate perception. From this place of situated clarity, the glossary practices ethical distance by creating enough space to assess harm without slipping into moral superiority or re-looping the very myths it seeks to interrupt
There is also a hospicing element that challenges domination driven myths while avoiding triumphism. There is not a better mastery story that gives you another singular protagonist arc. Instead, myth can be seen in their late stage exhaustion. Their shadows are treated as compost and allow for creating space for emergent forms of meaning and response-ability to be invited. MPP orients towards a sense of response-ability—> the capacity to respond ethically within complexity. In that spirit, this glossary functions as an orientation tool that does not tell the audience what to think but does make harm visible while allowing its function to be a form of practice.
Here, the intention is diagnostic to support discernment, responsibility, and mythic curiosity & literacy in plural contexts. I’m using an anatomical constellation to cluster the myths as stars and galaxies that have high visibility and a gravitational force; alongside connective tissue/dark matter/filaments that are less visible but structurally habitual.
How to Use This Glossary (long preface short)
This glossary isn’t written in a way that tries to master its meanings or read for agreement. If it’s useful, it can be consulted, returned to and lived with.
This glossary is not a debate tool. It is a reflection tool to help notice patterns in our own thinking. Each entry functions as a diagnostic lens and an invitation to notice which myths are shaping perception, permission, and response in a given moment. When referencing a ‘shadow’ it invites a way to see what patterns emerge when a story moves from idea into everyday effect.
This glossary traces effects and brings in contextual diagnosis. The purpose of naming these myths is not to correct the past, but to make responsibility visible in the present, especially where it has been quietly deferred to heroic journeys, dominant historical accounts, established institutions treated as norms, or time itself as a moral scaffolding.
Rather than asking whether a myth is true or false, readers are encouraged to ask what it makes possible and what it forecloses, how it moves through bodies, institutions, and relationships, and where its function or shadow may be operating unnoticed.
These myths can be encountered as stars, connective tissue, or atmosphere, depending on context. Please note, none are static. The work here is not to replace one story with another, but to cultivate discernment and pausing long enough to see the weather system we are already inside, and to consider what kinds of response, responsibility, and imagination become available once that system is named.
STARS and GALAXIES
Stars and Galaxies are the most visible myths witnessed as bright, familiar, and gravitational. They shape national identity, policy, and imagination at scale, often functioning as shared reference points even when contested. These myths organize meaning from a distance, exerting influence through repetition and recognition. Their visibility makes them feel foundational while their shadows form how they structure harm.
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The American Dream
The belief that hard work guarantees upward mobility and security.
Mythic function: Moralizes inequality by framing failure as personal. The myth does not address structural elements.
Shadow: Obscures inherited advantage, racialized dispossession, and policy design, redirecting frustration inward as personal inadequacy.
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Rugged Individualism
The idea that self-reliance is the highest virtue and dependency is weakness.
Mythic function: Justifies minimal social safety nets and privatized survival.
Shadow: Erases interdependence, care labor, and collective survival strategies.
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Meritocracy
The belief that talent and effort alone determine outcomes.
Mythic function: Naturalizes hierarchy as fair and deserved.
Shadow: Launders bias, access, and historical violence into “neutral” results, producing shame, exhaustion, and internalized failure.
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Manifest Destiny
The story that U.S. expansion was inevitable, divinely sanctioned, and civilizing.
Mythic function: Converts conquest into progress.
Shadow: Normalizes genocide, land theft, and ecological destruction as historical necessity rather than active harm.
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American Exceptionalism
The belief that the U.S. is uniquely moral, free, and destined to lead.
Mythic function: Exempts the nation from critique by framing power as virtue and dominance as responsibility.
Shadow: Enables imperialism, selective amnesia, and moral double standards by treating harm as anomaly when committed by the U.S. and as pathology when committed by others.
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The Frontier
The belief in endless land, opportunity, and the moral right to continual reinvention.
Mythic function: Converts extraction into exploration and frames displacement as progress or possibility.
Shadow: Erases Indigenous sovereignty, normalizes ecological exhaustion, and denies limits by treating land, life, and labor as perpetually available.
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The Melting Pot
The belief that cultural difference should dissolve into a single, unified national identity.
Mythic function: Frames assimilation as cohesion and sameness as social harmony.
Shadow: Erases cultural memory, racialized power asymmetries, and unequal terms of inclusion, requiring conformity to dominant norms as the price of belonging.
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Freedom as Absence
Freedom defined primarily as freedom from constraint instead of the freedom to belong, care, and flourish.
Mythic function: Resists regulation, collective obligation, and accountability.
Shadow: Allows domination by private power while claiming liberty.
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Law as Neutral Arbiter
The belief that laws are objective, impartial, and equally applied.
Mythic function: Converts power into procedure, shielding authority from moral interrogation by framing outcomes as impersonal and inevitable.
Shadow: Masks how law encodes inequality, normalizes selective enforcement, and transforms structural harm into “due process.”
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Violence as Necessary
The story that force is regrettable (typically apologizes after the harm done, knowing it was going to create harm) but is considered essential for safety, order, or freedom.
Mythic function: Makes harm feel responsible and inevitable.
Shadow: Forecloses imagination of nonviolent or reparative alternatives.
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The Good Guy with a Gun
The belief that armed individuals ensure safety, justice, and moral order.
Mythic function: Personalizes security by framing violence as protective virtue, displacing collective responsibility and systemic prevention.
Shadow: Escalates fear cycles, normalizes preemptive harm, and legitimizes lethal mistrust as common sense.
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Bootstrap Salvation
The belief that personal effort and perseverance can overcome any structural condition.
Mythic function: Translates systemic neglect into motivational rhetoric, reframing abandonment as opportunity.
Shadow: Exhausts bodies and spirits while absolving institutions of responsibility for repair, care, or redesign.
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Progress as Linear
The belief that history naturally advances toward justice through the passage of time alone.
Mythic function: Converts delay into virtue, encouraging patience where repair is required.
Shadow: Erases regression, backlash, and unfinished harm by mistaking movement for moral direction.
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Colorblindness
The story that ignoring race produces equality.
Mythic function: Frames attention to injustice as divisive.
Shadow: Preserves racial hierarchy through emotional anesthesia and trained un-seeing, dulling the capacity to perceive patterned harm while rewarding disassociation as fairness.
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The Innocent Nation
The belief that national harm is exceptional, accidental, or the result of a few bad actors rather than patterned systems.
Mythic function: Preserves moral self-conception by framing accountability as betrayal or disloyalty.
Shadow: Blocks pattern recognition, forecloses repair, and arrests collective maturity by protecting innocence over responsibility.
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The Lone Savior Leader
The belief that a single figure can resolve systemic collapse through charisma, authority, or moral clarity.
Mythic function: Centralizes power while suspending collective responsibility and democratic circulation.
Shadow: Produces dependency, disappointment, and recurring cycles of disillusionment that create openings for authoritarian consolidation.
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Growth Equals Health
The belief that economic expansion is synonymous with collective well-being and vitality.
Mythic function: Sanctifies extraction, accumulation, and overwork by framing expansion as care.
Shadow: Treats exhaustion, displacement, and ecological degradation as acceptable side effects, sacrificing bodies, communities, and ecosystems in the name of progress.
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Security Through Control
The story that surveillance, borders, and force create safety.
Mythic function: Expands carceral and militarized systems.
Shadow: Produces chronic fear and hypervigilance, replacing trust with compliance and care with coercion.
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Neutral Institutions
The idea that schools, hospitals, markets, and bureaucracies are apolitical.
Mythic function: Hides embedded values and power choices.
Shadow: Makes harm feel like a glitch instead of architecture, masking inequality is designed, maintained, and reproduced through ordinary institutional function.
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Freedom Equals Choice
The belief that freedom is primarily expressed through individual choice, particularly in markets and consumption.
Mythic function: Frames purchasing power, consumer options, and market participation as liberation.
Shadow: Reduces freedom to choice within constrained systems, obscuring structural limits, unequal access, and collective conditions for flourishing.
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Hard Borders Create Order
The belief that rigid borders and strict enforcement produce stability and safety.
Mythic function: Frames territorial control and exclusion as necessary for order.
Shadow: Treats movement and difference as threats, legitimizing disposability, fragmentation, and the erosion of relational security.
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Capitalism as Nature
The belief that capitalist markets are natural, inevitable, and biologically grounded.
Mythic function: Treats a historically contingent economic system as universal law.
Shadow: Forecloses alternative ways of organizing value, care, and survival while masking extraction as common sense.
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Technology as Neutral Progress
The belief that technological advancement is inherently neutral and socially emancipatory.
Mythic function: Frames innovation as inevitable improvement rather than a political choice.
Shadow: Obscures labor displacement, surveillance, ecological cost, and the values embedded in design.
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Philanthropy as Repair
The belief that charitable giving can resolve social harm without altering underlying power structures.
Mythic function: Softens harm and mitigates symptoms while leaving systems of extraction and inequality intact.
Shadow: Converts justice into benevolence, recasting accountability as generosity and recipients as dependents rather than agents.
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Strong Leadership Is the Answer
The belief that concentrated authority and decisive leadership are necessary to navigate uncertainty or crisis.
Mythic function: Concentrates power in moments of instability by framing command as clarity.
Shadow: Trades participation and collective agency for control, narrowing democratic circulation and normalizing obedience.
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Democracy Equals Voting
The belief that democracy is primarily expressed through periodic elections and ballots.
Mythic function: Narrows democratic participation to moments of formal consent.
Shadow: Obscures ongoing civic responsibility, collective governance, and democratic practice beyond the vote, enabling erosion without explicit abandonment.
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Pilgrims and the Thanksgiving Feast
The belief that the United States was founded through mutual cooperation, gratitude, and peaceful coexistence between settlers and Indigenous peoples.
Mythic function: Establishes a benevolent origin story that frames colonization as consensual, relational, and morally innocent.
Shadow: Erases Indigenous sovereignty, ongoing dispossession, and settler violence, transforming invasion into hospitality and genocide into gratitude.
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Columbus Discovered America
The belief that Christopher Columbus “discovered” an empty or unknown land, initiating the birth of the United States through exploration and courage.
Mythic function: Frames colonization as discovery and positions European arrival as the beginning of history.
Shadow: Erases Indigenous civilizations, sovereignty, and presence, legitimizing conquest, enslavement, and extraction by recasting invasion as innovation.
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The Founding Fathers Were United
The belief that the United States was founded through consensus, shared vision, and harmonious agreement among its architects.
Mythic function: Frames the nation’s origins as coherent, principled, and collectively intentional, lending moral authority to founding documents and institutions.
Shadow: Erases deep conflicts over power, enslavement, land, gender, and class, while obscuring who was excluded from authorship and whose interests were compromised or sacrificed.
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The True Role of the Minutemen
The belief that Minutemen were ordinary, unified civilians who spontaneously took up arms to defend freedom and liberty against tyranny.
Mythic function: Frames armed civilian militias as the moral origin of national defense and democratic legitimacy.
Shadow: Obscures internal divisions, class interests, colonial violence, and the role of organized force in enforcing property, racial hierarchy, and territorial control, legitimizing vigilantism as patriotic duty.
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The Civil War Was Solely About Slavery
The belief that the U.S. Civil War can be fully explained by a singular moral conflict over slavery, isolated from broader political, economic, and structural forces.
Mythic function: Compresses a complex war into a resolved moral lesson, allowing slavery to be named as evil while treating the conflict as historically contained.
Shadow: Obscures how slavery was embedded in systems of capital, governance, land, and racial hierarchy that persisted beyond emancipation, enabling the war’s aftermath to be remembered as closure rather than unfinished transformation.
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Prohibition Eliminated Alcohol
The belief that legal prohibition successfully eradicated alcohol consumption and its associated social harms.
Mythic function: Frames moral legislation and state enforcement as effective tools for reshaping behavior and virtue.
Shadow: Obscures the persistence of demand, the rise of illicit markets, selective enforcement, and the criminalization of marginalized communities, while treating policy failure as moral deficiency rather than structural design.
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The Three Settler Ships (While Slave Ships Are Forgotten)
The belief that the nation’s origins are adequately represented by a small number of settler ships, while the scale and centrality of the transatlantic slave trade are rendered peripheral or invisible.
Mythic function: Centers national memory on voluntary settlement and courage while marginalizing forced migration and racialized captivity.
Shadow: Erases the foundational role of enslavement in building the nation’s economy, institutions, and wealth, allowing freedom to be remembered as origin rather than aspiration forged through unfreedom.
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Mexico Agreed to the Border Through Treaties
The belief that U.S.–Mexico borders were fairly established through mutual agreement and legitimate treaties between equal sovereigns.
Mythic function: Frames territorial expansion as lawful, consensual, and diplomatically resolved.
Shadow: Obscures military coercion, asymmetrical power, broken treaties, and the racialized violence through which land was seized, converting conquest into legality and dispossession into agreement.
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Witches Were Burned at the Stake
The belief that accused witches in early American history were primarily executed by burning, as part of a distant, irrational past.
Mythic function: Distances religious and state violence by exaggerating spectacle while locating cruelty safely “back then.”
Shadow: Obscures the legal, procedural, and communal nature of persecution, most notably hanging, while minimizing how gendered fear, moral panic, and sanctioned violence were embedded in ordinary governance and social order.
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Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride
The story that Paul Revere singlehandedly warned the colonies of British invasion through a lone, decisive midnight ride.
Mythic function: Personalizes collective resistance by centering revolutionary action in one heroic figure.
Shadow: Erases the coordinated networks, multiple riders (including William Dawes and Samuel Prescott), and communal infrastructure that made communication and mobilization possible, reinforcing savior narratives over collective agency.
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Benjamin Franklin Wanted the Turkey as the National Bird
The story that Benjamin Franklin seriously advocated for the turkey as the United States’ national symbol, favoring humility and moral virtue over imperial dominance.
Mythic function: Softens national identity by projecting ethical modesty and folk wisdom onto the founding imagination.
Shadow: Obscures how national symbols were ultimately chosen to reinforce power, conquest, and supremacy, allowing the nation to claim moral restraint while embracing imperial iconography.
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Walt Disney Drew Mickey Mouse
The belief that Walt Disney personally created and drew Mickey Mouse as a singular act of creative genius.
Mythic function: Centers authorship and innovation in one visionary figure, reinforcing myths of individual creativity and proprietary ownership.
Shadow: Erases the collaborative labor of artists, most notably Ub Iwerks, and obscures how creative work is produced through collective skill, exploitation, and corporate consolidation.
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Cowboys Were Originally White Settlers
The belief that cowboys were primarily white, Anglo-American settlers who embodied rugged independence and frontier masculinity.
Mythic function: Racializes the frontier by centering whiteness as the face of freedom, labor, and national expansion.
Shadow: Erases the central roles of Mexican vaqueros, Black cowboys, Indigenous riders, and immigrant laborers, converting a multiracial working class into a white national archetype and obscuring how frontier labor was structured by conquest, displacement, and exploitation.
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The Declaration of Independence Was Signed on the Fourth of July
The belief that the Declaration of Independence was formally signed on July 4, 1776, marking a unified and immediate break from British rule.
Mythic function: Compresses a complex, contested process into a single ceremonial moment, anchoring national legitimacy to a clean origin date.
Shadow: Obscures the prolonged debates, staggered signatures, dissenting positions, and uneven commitments that characterized independence, reinforcing the illusion of unity, clarity, and consensus at the nation’s founding.
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The 1929 Wall Street Crash Caused Many Suicides
The belief that the stock market crash of 1929 directly led to widespread suicides among ruined investors, symbolizing the human toll of sudden economic collapse.
Mythic function: It personalizes systemic failure by converting structural economic harm into individual tragedy and moral spectacle.
Shadow: Obscures the broader causes of suffering like mass unemployment, inadequate social safety nets, prolonged poverty, and policy failure while reinforcing the idea that collapse is borne privately rather than collectively addressed.
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Richard Nixon Was an Environmentalist
The belief that Richard Nixon’s role in creating major environmental laws and agencies reflects a principled commitment to environmental protection.
Mythic function: Isolates policy outcomes from political context, framing environmental progress as evidence of individual virtue or bipartisan goodwill.
Shadow: Obscures how environmental reforms emerged from mass public pressure, crisis response, and political calculation, while severing ecological protection from broader patterns of authoritarian governance, imperial power, and harm.
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Pocahontas Fell in Love with John Smith
The belief that Pocahontas and John Smith shared a mutual romantic relationship that bridged cultures and softened early colonial conflict.
Mythic function: Transforms colonization into a story of personal affection and cross-cultural harmony.
Shadow: Erases coercion, age disparity, captivity, and the political realities of colonial violence, recasting exploitation and survival as romance while masking the systemic dispossession of Indigenous peoples.
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Thomas Edison Invented the Light Bulb
The belief that Thomas Edison singlehandedly invented the light bulb through individual brilliance and perseverance.
Mythic function: Centers technological innovation in a lone genius, reinforcing narratives of proprietary invention and heroic progress.
Shadow: Erases the collective, iterative, and international labor behind electrical lighting, including prior inventors, engineers, and exploited workers while obscuring how innovation is shaped by capital, patent regimes, and power.
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The War of the Worlds Caused Mass Hysteria
The belief that Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds triggered widespread panic and mass hysteria across the United States.
Mythic function: Frames the public as inherently irrational and easily manipulated by media.
Shadow: Obscures how reports of panic were exaggerated by competing newspaper, where only 1 recorded farmer was fully bought into the story, while reinforcing distrust of collective judgment and legitimizing paternalistic control over information.
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Cars Were Invented in America
The belief that automobiles originated as an American invention, emerging from U.S. ingenuity and industrial leadership.
Mythic function: Nationalizes technological progress by positioning the United States as the natural birthplace of modern innovation.
Shadow: Erases European origins and global knowledge exchange while obscuring how American power shaped the mass production, labor exploitation, urban redesign, ecological damage, and racialized infrastructure that followed.
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Lincoln Was Against Slavery
The belief that Abraham Lincoln was personally and unequivocally opposed to slavery and acted from moral abolitionist conviction.
Mythic function: Centers emancipation in the moral clarity of a single leader, framing liberation as the product of principled leadership. This myth does not deny the significance of emancipation; it names how moral clarity is retroactively simplified in ways that obscure collective struggle and ongoing responsibility.
Shadow: Obscures Lincoln’s explicitly stated prioritization of preserving the Union over ending slavery, minimizes the decisive roles of enslaved people and abolitionist movements, and converts a contingent political strategy into a story of moral inevitability.
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it…”
— Abraham Lincoln, 1862
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The Founding Fathers Were Christian
The belief that the United States was founded as a distinctly Christian nation by leaders unified in orthodox Christian belief.
Mythic function: Sanctifies national origins by grounding political authority in religious legitimacy.
Shadow: Obscures the founders’ wide range of beliefs (including Deism, skepticism, and explicit rejection of church authority), minimizes the intentional separation of church and state, and converts pluralistic constitutional design into a moralized religious inheritance.
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The Battle of the Alamo Was Fought to Keep America Free
The belief that the Battle of the Alamo represented a heroic stand for freedom and liberty against tyranny.
Mythic function: Recasts territorial expansion and rebellion as moral defense of freedom, elevating sacrifice while simplifying motive.
Shadow: Obscures how the conflict was entangled with settler colonial ambition, land seizure, and the defense of slavery; particularly by erasing that General Santa Anna and the Mexican government had abolished slavery, reframing resistance to anti-slavery law as a struggle for liberty.
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America Singlehandedly Beat Hitler
The belief that the United States was the primary or sole force responsible for defeating Nazi Germany in World War II.
Mythic function: Centers global victory in American intervention, framing liberation as the product of decisive U.S. action.
Shadow: Erases the decisive roles and immense losses of the Soviet Union, the sustained resistance across Europe, and the contributions of Allied forces, converting a collective, catastrophic struggle into a national redemption story.
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The Puritans Came to the New World Seeking Religious Freedom
The belief that Puritan settlers migrated to the New World primarily to escape religious persecution and practice faith freely.
Mythic function: Sanctifies colonial settlement by framing it as a moral quest for freedom of conscience.
Shadow: Obscures that Puritan “freedom” meant the authority to enforce religious uniformity; after leaving England for Holland in the 1590s, many Separatists rejected Dutch society as too permissive troubled by the presence of Jews, Catholics, atheists, and plural belief and ultimately sought a place to impose conformity rather than coexist with difference. It further obscures how Puritans pursued religious control, enforcing strict conformity, punishing dissent, and establishing theocratic governance that persecuted Quakers, Indigenous spiritual practices, and others deemed deviant.
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The Civil Rights Movement Ended Racism
The belief that the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement resolved racism in the United States, completing the struggle for racial justice.
Mythic function: Declares moral victory by treating legal reform and symbolic milestones as endpoints. This myth does not negate the movement’s victories; it names how declaring an endpoint converts unfinished work into cultural denial.
Shadow: Obscures how racism adapted rather than disappeared by restructuring itself through policy, institutions, economics, and culture while framing continued resistance as unnecessary, ungrateful, or disruptive.
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The Founders Intended the Second Amendment for Personal Gun Ownership
The belief that the Second Amendment was designed to guarantee an individual right to personal gun ownership for self-defense.
Mythic function: Recasts a historically contingent, militia-centered amendment as a timeless affirmation of individual liberty.
Shadow: Obscures the amendment’s roots in collective defense, state militias, and early governance concerns, including control of enslaved populations and frontier security while naturalizing contemporary gun culture as original intent rather than modern reinterpretation.
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BORDERLINE STARS
Borderline stars are myths that intensify under perceived threat, becoming highly visible during crisis while receding into assumption during periods labeled as normal.
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Citizenship Equals Worth
The belief that legal citizenship determines human value, legitimacy, and deservingness.
Mythic function: Ties rights, protection, and belonging to formal status.
Shadow: Justifies exclusion, disposability, and differential care by treating undocumented or non-citizen lives as lesser or conditional.
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Real Americans Look Like This
The belief that there is a recognizable, normative American identity against which others are measured.
Mythic function: Establishes implicit standards of belonging rooted in race, culture, language, or conformity.
Shadow: Marks difference as suspicion, rendering some lives perpetually provisional and subject to surveillance or erasure.
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Law-Abiding Equals Deserving
The belief that rights, safety, and care are earned through compliance with law and authority.
Mythic function: Conditions belonging on obedience rather than humanity.
Shadow: Justifies punishment, abandonment, and exclusion by framing harm as the result of individual failure rather than structural design.
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We’re a Nation of Immigrants
The belief that immigration is universally welcomed and foundational to American identity.
Mythic function: Performs inclusion rhetorically while avoiding accountability for exclusionary policy and racial hierarchy.
Shadow: Collapses radically different immigration histories into a single narrative, erasing Indigenous displacement, enslavement, and selective openness.
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Security Requires Sacrifice
The belief that safety must come at the cost of rights, privacy, or inclusion during moments of threat.
Mythic function: Normalizes exceptional measures by framing loss as necessary protection.
Shadow: Makes erosion of rights feel temporary and responsible, even when it becomes permanent and unevenly applied.
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Rules Apply to Everyone Equally
The belief that laws and systems operate uniformly across identity, status, and power.
Mythic function: Frames inequality as deviation rather than pattern.
Shadow: Conceals selective enforcement, discretionary punishment, and unequal exposure to risk.
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Hard Borders Protect Culture
The belief that national identity and cohesion depend on strict territorial boundaries.
Mythic function: Treats movement as threat and stasis as safety.
Shadow: Converts cultural anxiety into spatial control, legitimizing exclusion while masking historical hybridity and exchange.
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Those People Are Taking Advantage
The belief that social systems are being exploited by undeserving outsiders.
Mythic function: Redirects scarcity anxiety toward racialized or marginalized groups.
Shadow: Obscures how extraction and inequality are structurally produced, channeling resentment downward instead of upward.
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This Isn’t Who We Are
The belief that harm, violence, or injustice represents a deviation from national character.
Mythic function: Preserves moral self-image by isolating harm as anomaly.
Shadow: Prevents pattern recognition and structural accountability, enabling repetition.
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Participation Equals Consent
The belief that engagement within a system implies agreement with its outcomes or legitimacy.
Mythic function: Converts presence, voting, or compliance into moral endorsement.
Shadow: Silences dissent by framing critique as hypocrisy, collapsing constrained participation into consent and obscuring the absence of meaningful alternatives.
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CONNECTIVE TISSUE and FILAMENTS
Myths of Time, Urgency and Pace
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Urgency equals Importance
The belief that what is most urgent is therefore most important.
Mythic function: Justifies speed, compression, and crisis governance.
Shadow: Erodes discernment, care, nervous system capacity and long-term responsibility by rewarding constant activation over reflection.
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Time Heals All Wounds
The belief that the passage of time alone resolves harm and restores balance.
Mythic function: Delays accountability and defers responsibility.
Shadow: Treats harm as self-resolving rather than relational, allowing injury to persist unaddressed in bodies, relationships, and systems.
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Productivity as Moral Worthiness
The belief that human value is measured through output, efficiency, and visible contribution. Mythic Function: Measures worth through output. Moralizes work and equates exhaustion with virtue.
Shadow: Devalues rest, care, disability and non-instrumental life or forms of life that resist quantification; producing burnout often mistaken for virtue.
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Myths of Identity and Belonging
Assimilation as Inclusion
The belief that belonging is achieved through conformity to dominant norms.
Mythic function: Offers conditional inclusion while preserving cultural hierarchy.
Shadow: Requires erasure of memory, language, and difference in exchange for partial safety.
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Unity Requires Silence
The belief that cohesion is maintained by minimizing conflict and suppressing dissent.
Mythic function: Avoids conflict in the name of harmony and stability.
Shadow: Protects harm by framing truth-telling as divisive, producing isolation, self-censorship, and unresolved injury.
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Normalcy as Neutral
The belief that dominant identities, behaviors, and norms constitute an objective baseline.
Mythic function: Establishes dominant identity as neutral and universal.
Shadow: Renders others as “special cases” or deviations, producing marginalization, erasure, and unequal expectations.
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Civility Equals Ethics
The belief that politeness and restraint are indicators of moral integrity.
Mythic function: Prioritizes tone over substance.
Shadow: Shields power from disruption by delegitimizing anger, urgency, and dissent.
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Conflict Is Failure
The belief that disagreement signals breakdown rather than generative tension.
Mythic function: Frames conflict as something to be avoided or resolved quickly.
Shadow: Suppresses necessary friction, preventing learning, repair, and transformation.
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Calm Equals Reason
The belief that emotional restraint and composure are indicators of rationality and credibility.
Mythic function: Privileges a narrow affective register as legitimate knowledge.
Shadow: Delegitimizes anger, urgency, and grief, particularly from marginalized bodies by framing them as irrational or untrustworthy.
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Myths of Power and Governance
Power Is Best Held Centrally
The belief that authority functions most effectively when concentrated in centralized institutions or leaders.
Mythic function: Concentrates authority in the name of efficiency and coordination.
Shadow: Weakens local knowledge, relational intelligence, and the collective agency required for democratic circulation.
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Expertise Is Apolitical
The belief that expert knowledge exists outside of values, politics, or power.
Mythic function: Shields decision-making from public scrutiny and contestation.
Shadow: Hides normative assumptions and value judgments behind credentials, producing deference without accountability.
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Order Equals Justice
The belief that social stability and compliance are indicators of fairness and legitimacy.
Mythic function: Prioritizes order and predictability over repair and transformation.
Shadow: Confuses control with justice, legitimizing harm in the name of stability.
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Myths of Harm, Risk, and Safety
Risk Is Personal, Not Structural
The belief that exposure to harm results primarily from individual choices rather than systemic design.
Mythic function: Individualizes vulnerability and responsibility for risk.
Shadow: Obscures designed exposure to harm, redirecting fear, blame, and prevention away from structural accountability.
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Safety Is a Zero-Sum Game
The belief that safety can only be secured by limiting or excluding others.
Mythic function: Justifies exclusion, fortification, and competitive protection.
Shadow: Prevents mutual security and trust, producing cycles of fear, isolation, and escalation.
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Bad Actors, Not Bad Systems
The belief that harm results primarily from individual wrongdoing rather than structural design.
Mythic function: Isolates blame and protects institutional architectures.
Shadow: Preserves systemic harm by treating violence, abuse, or failure as anomalous rather than patterned.
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Resilience Is the Goal
The belief that the capacity to endure hardship is the primary measure of success or health.
Mythic function: Reframes chronic stress, precarity, and harm as challenges to be managed rather than conditions to be changed.
Shadow: Normalizes exhaustion and injury, shifting responsibility from prevention and repair to individual endurance.
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Scarcity Is Natural
The belief that limited resources and competition are inevitable features of reality rather than products of design.
Mythic function: Naturalizes hoarding, exclusion, and austerity as common sense.
Shadow: Obscures how scarcity is manufactured and unevenly imposed, channeling fear into zero-sum thinking while legitimizing deprivation as unavoidable.
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Myths of Knowledge and Truth
Facts Speak for Themselves
The belief that facts are self-evident and independent of interpretation or narrative framing.
Mythic function: Depoliticizes interpretation and obscures the role of storytelling in meaning-making.
Shadow: Ignores power in framing and narrative, allowing dominant interpretations to masquerade as neutral truth.
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Objectivity Equals Fairness
The belief that neutrality and detachment ensure just and unbiased outcomes.
Mythic function: Performs impartiality while discouraging situated accountability.
Shadow: Masks positionality and embedded bias, protecting unequal power relations from scrutiny.
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Data Is Innocent
The belief that data and measurement are neutral reflections of reality.
Mythic function: Treats quantification as objective and value-free.
Shadow: Conceals who decides what counts, whose experiences are measured, and which realities are rendered invisible.
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Neutral Process Produces Fair Outcomes
The belief that standardized, impartial procedures naturally yield just results.
Mythic function: Transfers moral responsibility from outcomes to process design.
Shadow: Masks how power, values, and exclusion are embedded in supposedly neutral systems, allowing inequity to persist under procedural legitimacy.
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Myths of Change and Repair
Awareness Is Action
The belief that recognition or acknowledgment of harm constitutes meaningful change.
Mythic function: Substitutes awareness for responsibility and response.
Shadow: Stalls material change by relieving pressure for structural or relational repair.
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Reform Is Always Progress
The belief that incremental institutional change necessarily moves systems toward justice.
Mythic function: Maintains faith in existing institutions and processes.
Shadow: Allows relief to replace repair, mistaking modification for transformation and reducing pressure for deeper structural change.
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There Is a Right Solution
The belief that complex social problems have a single correct or optimal answer.
Mythic function: Narrows imagination and privileges technical fixes.
Shadow: Collapses plural futures into managerial or technocratic solutions, foreclosing ethical experimentation.
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We Meant Well
The belief that benevolent motivation mitigates responsibility for harm caused.
Mythic function: Softens accountability through sentiment and retrospective justification.
Shadow: Converts responsibility into reassurance, leaving injury unaddressed and patterns intact.
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Good Intentions Are What Matter
The belief that moral intent outweighs impact in evaluating harm or responsibility. Mythic function: Centers self-perception and benevolence over centering the consequence of action. Shadow: Excuses harm by preserving moral innocence, deflecting accountability from lived effects.
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Helping Is Inherently Good
The belief that acts of help are morally virtuous regardless of power, consent, or outcome.
Mythic function: Moralizes intervention and assistance.
Shadow: Obscures power asymmetries, dependency, and harm enacted in the name of care.
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Complexity Means Inaction
The belief that the complexity of a problem makes meaningful intervention impractical or premature.
Mythic function: Suspends responsibility under the guise of sophistication and caution.
Shadow: Converts complexity into paralysis, allowing known harms to continue without disruption.
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ATOMOSPHERE
Atmospheric myths may be felt more like attunement rather than confrontation. They regulate tempo, affect, and closure rather than belief or policy. Debunking isn’t centered here, but there is a sense of slowing, sensing and restoring relational time.
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Something Must Be Done (Now)
The belief that immediate action is inherently preferable to deliberation or pause.
Mythic function: Collapses discernment into urgency, treating speed as moral clarity.
Shadow: Bypasses participation, reflection, and care, producing reactive harm justified as necessity.
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The Arc Bends on Its Own
The belief that justice and progress emerge naturally over time without sustained intervention.
Mythic function: Outsources responsibility to historical inevitability.
Shadow: Discourages action by reframing delay as patience and inaction as moral maturity.
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We’ve Already Moved On
The belief that sufficient time has passed to consider harm resolved or irrelevant.
Mythic function: Enforces premature closure and signals the end of responsibility.
Shadow: Silences unresolved injury and delegitimizes continued claims for repair.
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That Was a Long Time Ago
The belief that historical distance severs present responsibility from past harm.
Mythic function: Abstracts history to minimize accountability in the present.
Shadow: Treats structural continuity as coincidence, allowing inherited harm to persist unaddressed.
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Hardship Builds Character
The belief that suffering is inherently formative and morally improving.
Mythic function: Sanctifies endurance and reframes avoidable harm as necessary growth.
Shadow: Normalizes injury, shame, and deprivation while shifting responsibility away from preventable conditions.
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Anger Is Irrational
The belief that anger undermines credibility, reason, and moral legitimacy.
Mythic function: Polices emotional expression by privileging calm over truth.
Shadow: Delegitimizes moral protest and affective knowledge, protecting power from disruption.
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Hope Is Mandatory
The belief that optimism is a moral obligation regardless of conditions.
Mythic function: Regulates emotional tone by privileging positivity over honesty.
Shadow: Silences grief, rage, and warning signals, replacing truth with performative reassurance.
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Cynicism Is Intelligence
The belief that detachment, skepticism, or irony signal depth and sophistication.
Mythic function: Rewards disengagement while discouraging care and commitment.
Shadow: Forecloses imagination and collective action by mistaking withdrawal for insight.
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Burnout Is Personal Failure
The belief that exhaustion reflects individual weakness rather than systemic strain.
Mythic function: Individualizes collapse and absolves structural conditions.
Shadow: Produces shame and self-blame while leaving exploitative systems intact.
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Stability Is Always Preferable
The belief that maintaining order is inherently better than risking disruption.
Mythic function: Frames disruption as danger rather than possibility.
Shadow: Protects harmful arrangements by treating instability as a greater threat than injustice.
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Many of these myths once served a function. To read these myths diagnostically signals that none of us are outside the weather system. We are inside it; breathing it, reproducing it, sometimes resisting it, often inheriting it… without consent.
What comes next may be new stories, counter-practices, rituals, or collective sense-making that cannot be rushed or prescribed. Those emerge only when dominant myths are allowed to be seen clearly, composted honestly, and released without replacement guarantees.
This glossary pauses there: at the threshold.
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