Radical Institutionalism on the Colonizing Nature of Power: Cultural Impositions and the Intersectionality of Myths

:This article analyzes how enabling myths shape culturally specific patterns of social organization and reproduce intersecting systems of oppression under neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on Original and Radical Institutional Economics, culture is understood as a historically grounded set of habits of thought that evolves through institutional processes and is colonized by capitalist vested interests. Enabling myths are imposed as universalized legitimations of particular forms of social organization while obscuring relations of power and invidious distinctions. However, rather than functioning uniformly, these myths interact heterogeneously with distinct cultural environments, producing cumulative and context-dependent outcomes. The article advances an intersectional account of enabling myths to explain how different social groups experience power relations in uneven ways, emphasizing the colonial character of neoliberal myths as they mobilize multiple axes of oppressions—such as race, gender, and class—across historical and geographical contexts. Building on Radical Institutionalism’s understanding of power as institutionally structured and centralized in hegemonic dominance, the analysis examines how enabling myths contribute to cultural reductionism and constrain the emergence of resistance. The Brazilian myth of racial democracy is discussed as an illustrative case.