Importance
Why this concept matters
Future myths are the symbolic stories through which a community imagines its obligations beyond the present — stories of repair, generational promise, cautionary futures. They are load-bearing: a society can only build the futures it can first narrate.
Historical context
How it arrived here
Fred Polak's The Image of the Future argued, from a survey of Western civilization, that cultures rise and fall with the vitality of their images of the future; Mircea Eliade showed how myth orients a community in time rather than merely entertaining it. The twentieth century demonstrated both the mobilizing and the manipulative power of engineered futures.
Future context
What changes next
The intelligence age currently runs on two thin myths — techno-destiny and doom. Jasanoff's 'sociotechnical imaginaries' names the real work: collectively authored visions that guide what gets built. Whether communities author their future myths or receive them from model vendors is an open contest.
Public framework
Risks and opportunities
Risks
Technological destiny claims
Manipulative prophecy
Opportunities
Shared long-term orientation
Cultural imagination
Position in the ontology
Where this concept sits
Also known as: image of the future · guiding future story
Broader: Narrative System
Related: Ritual System · Civilization Map · Meaning Crisis
Context package
Cross references
Sources
Citations and further reading
Fred Polak — The Image of the Future (1973), tr. Elise Boulding, Elsevier.
Mircea Eliade — Myth and Reality (1963), Harper & Row.
Recommended reading
Sheila Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun Kim (eds.) — Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (2015), University of Chicago Press.