20.00. Power Myths

Power Myths are the stories in society that provide meaning to help us rationalize the complex world we live in. Like other Capacitors, Power Myths are inherently neutral but given their propensity to justify existing beliefs or reduce nuance, they often end up maintaining or even contracting the Dominant Realm.

Power Myths reinforce who we should dislike (The Villain) and who we should root for (The Hero). They set the stage (The Setting) and what we're up against (The Conflict). Although stories imply some level of fiction, that's not to say they're entirely wrong. They do carry the perspective of the author, though, and they're probably oversimplified to get a point across.

How Do They Work?

You know how once you identify a pattern in media, you can't stop noticing it everywhere?

The warrior is suddenly on his last breath against an army, and everything seems lost... but wait! Help arrives at the last second!

A ton of tropes like this exist in storytelling. These shortcuts cut out fluff by relying on our familiarity with unstated assumptions. On occasion, that's really helpful! It saves time so we can get to more interesting stuff faster. Other times, you're left wondering how that second army came so quickly... was it just sloppy writing?

Power Myths function just like these tropes. They're shortcuts to understand the world based on the unstated assumptions embedded by the Realm Enforcers of culture and institutions. If we assume one thing to be true, it moves us on to the next step without questioning the validity of the premise.

The effectiveness of Power Myths is heavily context-dependent. After all, the target needs to share the unstated assumptions that the Myth is based around. While Myths that leverage the Dominant Realm might reach the widest audience, they can also be grounded in particular Mythoscapes.

What Happens?

We often think of government policy as a hard science, where programs are designed for an efficient society and laws are enacted to maintain order. It's the outcome of democratic processes where different perspectives work out their differences for a more reasonable solution! Perhaps that's sometimes the case, or at least the intent, but like... stories inform how we think the world should look in the first place. There's an interwoven relationship between culture and institutions.

Power Myths Negotiate Boundaries of Realms, they're just invisible and quite difficult to measure. Unlike other Capacitors, the effects cannot necessarily be seen in isolation (e.g., an employer paying substandard wages). Therefore, it's necessary to examine how patterns in narratives affect decision-making.

Particularly for efforts to address inequity, this might start with identifying contradictions between stated policy goals and the related research, for example. We have pretty strong evidence that providing unsheltered people with housing first, rather than it being conditional on treatment, leads to better outcomes for the individual and comes at less of a cost to taxpayers. People experiencing homelessness are frequent subjects of Unworthy Myths, though, so it is unfathomable for policymakers to afford them autonomy.

How many institutions were built from stories that set some people as inferior? Yikes.

For this Index, we'll primarily be looking at the Power Myths commonly used to contract the Dominant Realm through Mythappropriation. How have they been used to Normalize beliefs that internalize oppression and foster acceptance for domination? How have they been used to Categorize us in ways that shape us into particular spaces and pit us against each other?

One Last Thing

As cultures or Mythoscapes change, Power Myths need to be spiced up. It's pretty unlikely we'll create a full list of Power Myths in the first place, but it's simply impossible to identify every single variant of execution. The tropes themselves are so versatile that we can find Gnostics on the receiving end of some of these even 2,000 years ago.

Raw memorization of Power Myths probably shouldn't be the goal, then. Try to identify commonalities between them, find ways that it relates back to your life, and see if you start to notice new ones used in public debate. Then, challenge them!

Good luck!