EQUAL IN DEATH: Political Myth, the Mortality Symmetry Axiom, and Whether Founding Narratives of Freedom Survive Longevity Asymmetry

A specific and widespread class of founding political myth — what George Schöpflin's taxonomy (1997) names the myth of military valour and redemptive suffering, present in the national narratives of states as different as Vietnam, Poland, Serbia, Israel, Ireland, Korea, Ethiopia, France, and the United States — legitimates the state as the inheritor of a sacrifice its founders made in common: rich and poor, elite and ordinary, died together for a shared freedom, and the state exists to honor a debt owed equally to all of them. This paper argues that this myth-type rests on a premise it never states because it never needed to: that death in the founding struggle was distributed without regard to wealth, that the ancestors' mortality was, in Huynh's (2026c) terms, symmetric. The Mortality Symmetry Axiom is not merely a philosophical or religious substrate, as Huynh (2026c) establishes for six intellectual traditions. It is the buried premise of the specific political mythology that legitimates the modern nation-state's claim on its citizens' loyalty through shared ancestral sacrifice. Longevity asymmetry does not merely generate ordinary economic grievance against this myth-type, a phenomenon existing myth scholarship already documents as normal political contestation. It falsifies the myth's foundational premise directly and visibly, because the mechanism generating the asymmetry — A5, the same constitutive attachment that gave the founding sacrifice its emotional and political weight in the first place — now demonstrates, in the present generation, that mortality is not equally distributed among the inheritors of a story that specifically claims it once was. This paper formalizes myth integrity as a component of institutional legitimacy L_pol within the corpus's Sandbox Geometry (Huynh 2026), and identifies two reconstruction strategies available to a state facing this erosion: symbolic reassertion of the equal-sacrifice narrative despite its visible material falsification, which the Reform Acceleration Paradox and the Marie Antoinette Mechanism (Huynh 2026a, 2026v) predict accelerates rather than defuses the underlying pressure; and premise replacement, substituting a legitimating narrative that does not depend on equal mortality, which historical precedent — Russia's post-Soviet intensification, rather than replacement, of the Great Patriotic War myth; the French Third Republic's construction of civic-education infrastructure to reinforce, rather than retire, its revolutionary sacrifice narrative — suggests states have never actually attempted at scale, for a specific and structural reason this paper identifies: the mortality-linked myth's political power derives from the same A5 mechanism BZM asymmetry corrodes, meaning a state cannot straightforwardly retire the vulnerable premise without also retiring the emotional mechanism that made the myth capable of commanding loyalty in the first place. The paper does not predict which states will attempt which strategy. It states the structural bind both strategies share.