What is History?

I've been keeping a diary since 2012, with some other bits written down earlier than that starting in 2006 (The Urban Mystic itself was started as a diary of my own mystical experiences). In preparation for writing a 365 day reflection book on various events (talking about great figures in the history of philosophy and mysticism and events like the Last Supper and the Resurrection) I've been looking back on those diaries and I was struck by just how much my recollections of events have changed over the years.

In a sense my life began in 2012 (and in another sense it began in 2006 when I was born again). Before then, in the great years like 2011, 2010, and others, I have no records, just vague memories, and, looking back on existing memories, I can see how much memory deviates from reality. Most of it is just forgetting stuff, but some of it is remembering things out of order. Who knows what really happened at that point.

It makes you wonder how accurate history really is. The oldest records of Alexander the Great are from 300 years after he died. The earliest Christian writings are from 40 years after the Resurrection, which is about as accurate as you can get until modern times. We now have primary sources and the printing press, which has allowed us to make unlimited copies to assure that the accounts of history are preserved.

We have cameras and video and now everyone is journalist. Everyone has a camera, everyone has Internet access, everyone can make unlimited copies of live events and protect them for posterity.

No longer are we reliant on official sources of news and information, now we can see events as they happen in real time and form our own opinions on events.

And yet there is the downside of this too. Technology is rapidly advancing toward the point where people can take audio and video samples and create perfect digital replicas of real people and places and create fake events that are indistinguishable from the real thing (unless you have access to the metadata). “Deep fake” they call it. We're not there yet, but we're getting there quickly.

Then there is the censorship. The corporate press and elite tech robber barons are frightened of a world where they are not the sole arbiter of truth. If a person with a smart phone can reach more people than a stuffed shirt with hair plugs and a journalism degree whose making seven figures then who needs the stuffed shirt? The gate keepers are becoming irrelevant and that frightens them, so they've turned to two tools that all tyrants employ when faced with this situation: censorship and propaganda (physical violence happens when these methods fail). Anyone who questions the official narrative is labeled as a bigot or a heretic and their material is removed from the polite web. Dangerous individuals (Facebook literally removed several accounts of people they said were “dangerous” like Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones) are deplatformed, unpersoned, and slandered. They are tainted and rendered unemployable. Banks won't touch them. It is no longer necessary to execute political undesirables as they had in the Twentieth Century, now you can make sure undesirables can't get a job so they become homeless and starve and descend into suicidal despair.

Then there is the condition of living in what is called “post truth”. Pilate asked “What is truth?” Today this question is answered with another question, “Whose truth?” Different people have different truths. People can witness the same objective events and experience them as totally different subjective realities. Beliefs about reality have begun to superseded objective reality itself. Understanding this allows one to manipulate others perceptions for fun and profit. It makes writing history a nightmare, but it's great for trolling people on Twitter.

Take the shampeachment for instance. Tens of millions of people can watch the shampeachment as a great crusade against the most evil being who has ever or will ever live. They will see Trump extorting the President of Ukraine to investigate Biden's son in an attempt to destroy Biden's own presidential campaign years before he even decided to run for office, back when he said he was not going to run. Even though President Zelensky himself admits nothing of the sort happened. But we can't believe his own testimony, it's clearly Stockholm syndrome! And, of course, even though we have Biden admit on video that he deliberately extorted Ukraine to fire an ambassador in exchange for aid money, committing the very crime President Trump was accused of, that never happened either. It's a deep fake created by the “vast right-wing conspiracy”.

At the same time tens of millions of people see the shampeachment as nothing more than a purely partisan political shitshow that was an attempted soft coup that had been in the planning stages since before Trump had even been inaugurated.

Tens of millions of people are living in totally opposite alternate realities that happen to occupy the same physical space but different psychosocial spaces.

Wikipedia, a Chinese-controlled far-leftist propaganda machine, has proposed solutions to the post truth world (and the newspeak equivalents in parentheses):

1. Have the tech oligarchs design algorithms to filter out opinions that run counter to the official narrative (“filter out fake news”)

2. Have bought and paid for priests of the new secular religion make public appearances to spread propaganda because their livelihoods literally depend on it (“greater visibility of scientists and the scientific community”)

3. Government crackdowns on any dissenters through deplatforming and unpersoning, and, if you're a Bernie Bro, gulags, which “weren't all that bad.” (“stronger government involvement in combating fake news”)

4. Make people rat one another out like they did in the Soviet Union (“scrutinizing fake news”).

Roger Scruton has his own theories about post truth, so does Ken Wilber, but that's a topic for another day.

We are living in times that are both exciting and frightening. Things are changing so fast, much faster even than in the 2010s when I wrote about the World Gone Mad and how society was racing toward fundamental changes without even stopping to consider the potential consequences, that it strains the mind to even keep up. The human brain might not be large enough to handle so much information all at once, and might not be able to develop the psychological, social, economic, or political structures such a rapidly changing world requires. We may very well reach the hypothesized singularity, where technological growth trends toward infinity, or we may be reaching Calhoun's behavioral sink and the collapse of society as we reach the point where economic growth can no longer be sustained. And with things like post truth and deep fakes who knows if we'll even realize what's going on when we do reach that point.