Dark Money

The Election.

The Corporations.

The Weather.

The Economy.

The Population.

The Culture.

The War.

These are some of the new reverse anthropomorphised mythological entities of American mythic history. Where Greek mythology takes natural forces and gives them a human face, American mythology takes human decisions and gives them a, beyond human, natural image. Human destiny is guided by these inhuman entities just as the gods or the stars once determined fate.

The sense of forces beyond human control is palpable with any of our mythology but since we are so close to voting let's look at "The Election"

And much of that money comes from groups that don't disclose all their donors -- known in politics as dark money groups. They've grown in popularity since the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling loosened campaign finance rules to allow groups to raise unlimited money from secret donors and campaign for or against candidates.

Just as "dark matter"holds the universe together, "dark money" determines the outcome of The Election. A mythological pseudoscience absolves Americans of any responsibility in our decisions.

Instead, the existence and properties of dark matter are inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, radiation, and the large-scale structure of the universe.

We know the world is not going the way we want it to and so we can infer the existence of a pantheon of unfortunate factors beyond human control.
Similarly we have adopted a myth based standard model for our economy

Government spending surged 4.6% in the third quarter, the fastest annual rate since the fiscal stimulus days of 2009. That came mainly from a huge spike in military spending, which some analysts attributed partly to the U.S. bombing of Islamic militants in the Middle East.

So The Economy and The War interacted. The story could have just as easily been

Their mother Rhea incited the Gigantes to rebel against the Olympian gods and Zeus and Poseidon both fought and were victorious in the Battle of the Giants

as far as any sense of human involved decision is concerned. Even once it is determined that humans definitely did something

Climate change is happening, it's almost entirely man's fault and limiting its impacts may require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the U.N.'s panel on climate science said Sunday.

it doesn't mean that we actually had control of our own destiny. Perhaps there was no set of individual human decisions that led here. Perhaps humans are not capable of individual decision (like voting) - Climate change could alter male-female ratio

These findings suggest that "the recent temperature fluctuations in Japan seem to be linked to a lower male: female sex ratio of newborn infants, partly via increased male fetal deaths," the researchers wrote in the Sept. 14 issue of the journal Fertility and Sterility.

However, the new study only found an association, and cannot prove that the climate changes were responsible for the change in sex ratio in Japan. Other factors, such as pollution and toxins in the environment, may affect sex ratios. But the researchers noted that the study found a link between temperatures in a specific month, and the sex ratios nine months later, suggesting temperature fluctuations may play a role in recent declines in the country's sex ratio.

A less zealously mythological headline might have read "We Are Poisoning Our Unborn Children" but that would not have been as soothingly sciency.