3: Hope
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
- Joseph Campbell
What we talk about when we talk about hope changes from person to person, thought to thought, reality to reality. The unique part of the American mythos is that we are often oblivious to what Pandora supposedly left trapped inside her jar. We, sometimes uniquely, sometimes frustratingly, rely on the idea that Hope alone is enough to persevere.
But there was likely a reason that hope remain encapsulated to the Ancient Greeks. Not that humanity could never attain it, for if that was the case I do not think Prometheus would have done what he had done to progress man. You do not accidentally combine fire and ore and make steel — you hope the next thing you do makes a stronger sword. It's more likely, to me, that Hope, if undiluted, is as powerful a poison as anger, blame, or fear itself. Letting just a little bit of Hope out was just the right anxiety cocktail to keep humanity moving forward, wondering what was waiting for them around the next corner.
One aspect of our American delusion stems from the fact that a significant portion of our origin story is written down. While each culture has their own scribbled somewhere, most were not contemporaneously written — some details may have been lost in communication and therefore not admissible in a court of law. And even fewer were written down, signed and then sent to a King as a matter of record. These authors studied and knew all the stories of God divining Men to domain over land and people. To make their story unique, they knew they must petition God himself — just this time via King George III.
If those scrappy, history nerds could repel the God's greatest Navy and battalions, was there anything that couldn't be wrestled and arraigned to their desire? By pen and by power, men took the land and its resources, writing rule after rule that favored themselves over the other, allowing whoever wrote the friendliest letter with the most padding in the envelope take what they wanted and leave the rest for the future to figure out. They bent the Judeo-Christian good word to their will and proudly proclaimed: "God only helps those who help themselves." They left out the part about the gold and gunpowder on purpose, I suppose. The unique blend of Hope mixed with that blind Faith that piety so deftly requires is the true blend of myth that we Americans so truly get high upon.
The modern American mythologist is the Politician. Once the land had been allocated and turned over a few times, empire was no longer the goal of the people (though the Titans that still rumbled amongst us — who played with the Politicians like marionettes, had yet to squelch their thirst, and likely never will). As such, the Politician must sell the people on their origin story, heroic arc and fatal flaw. They must tell them the myth of the future America, one where their problems are solved and that hope that seems so locked away in a capsule that they can't see, it's there. They know because they've tasted it, and they want you to taste it too; if you'd just grant them a teensy bit of power first. And that's where our myths cross into modernity — eventually the story they peddle gets bought and produced, the world's largest military might and capital machine becomes a theatre stage, again and again.