Narrative Framework · RAD Ideas

Mythcoin

Myth is not false story. It is load-bearing story — the kind that holds a community’s values, explains the world’s structure, and justifies who gets what. Mythcoin is the practice of understanding narrative as currency: stories have exchange value, they accumulate, depreciate, and compete.

How Myths Function as Currency

A myth is a story that answers the question “why is this the way it is?” — and in answering, makes it feel inevitable. “The market allocates resources efficiently” is a myth. “People are fundamentally self-interested” is a myth. “Growth is progress” is a myth. These are not simply false beliefs — they are stories that justify a distribution of power and make alternatives seem unnatural.

Myths circulate like currency: they are spent when someone uses them to win an argument, accumulated when institutions invest in spreading them, and hoarded when powerful interests fund their repetition. A myth with sufficient institutional backing can survive contact with contradicting evidence indefinitely — because myths are not evaluated against evidence. They are evaluated against other myths.

The Mythcoin Ledger

Mythcoin practice involves mapping the narrative economy of a particular domain — identifying which myths are in circulation, which have lost credibility, which are emerging, and which are being actively manufactured. This is the Mythcoin ledger: an account of the stories competing for authority in a given arena.

Dominant Myths

Stories so embedded in institutional practice that they are rarely named as stories. They appear as common sense. “Individual responsibility for systemic problems” is a dominant myth in most U.S. policy discourse.

Residual Myths

Stories that once had power but are losing it — credibility declining but still operationally significant. The myth of infinite economic growth is residual: still governing most policy, but increasingly contested at the edges.

Emergent Myths

Stories gaining traction against the dominant paradigm. Regenerative economy, mutual aid as infrastructure, community as wealth: these are emergent myths building exchange value in real time.

Manufactured Myths

Stories produced by interests with a stake in their adoption. Distinguished from other myths by their artificial amplification — the budget behind the story is disproportionate to its organic resonance.

Narrative Intervention

Understanding narrative as currency opens specific intervention strategies. You cannot defeat a dominant myth with facts — facts are evaluated within a mythic framework, not prior to it. The path to narrative change is through emergent myth: stories that carry sufficient emotional truth and explanatory power to compete with what they are replacing.

What Makes a Myth Competitive

Myths gain exchange value through: explanatory coherence (they account for more of lived experience than the alternatives), emotional resonance (they connect to feelings that already exist in the audience), institutional backing (repeated through trusted channels), and simplicity (they can be transmitted in a sentence). The most powerful emergent myths are simple truths that dominant myths have actively suppressed.

You cannot replace a story with a fact.
You replace a story with a better story.
Then you let it travel.