If your foundation story makes factual claims, it will die on the next frontier shift.
A good myth does a different job. Knowledge explains the world and gets replaced when a better explanation arrives. Myth explains you. It tells you how to stand, how to act, what kind of person to be when the facts move under your feet.
That’s why the story of Cincinnatus endures. You can’t disprove it by pointing to a leader who never returned to the plow. That person didn’t refute the myth. He failed to live inside it. The story isn’t a claim about what is true. It’s a claim about how to be.
This matters even more now because expertise has a shorter half-life. When identity is tied to what you know, it dissolves with the knowledge. When identity is tied to a way of being, it can survive the update.
Choose myths that orient conduct, not myths that impersonate facts. One will steady people through change. The other will break with the first broken forecast.