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It seems to be a property of every human society to mythologize the history of ones peoples. I'm not sure we are capable of building a society by internalizing
by macspoofing 7y ago
It seems to be a property of every human society to mythologize the history of ones peoples. I'm not sure we are capable of building a society by internalizing a 'raw' version of our history.
>I see similar narratives forming about bastions of the "west" constantly assailed by the barbarians just outside the gates.
The irony is that this is a true statement of any major culture/society/empire/etc. Unraveling a complex structures is easy (entropy) when compared to the effort it takes to build and maintain one. All complex structures are always susceptible to atrophy and sudden collapse. All complex structures inevitably collapse due to entropy. In very real ways there are 'barbarians' at the gates of every major culture.
- setr 7y ago>I'm not sure we are capable of building a society by internalizing a 'raw' version of our history. Probably because a ‘raw’ version doesn’t make much sense.. its like looking at a log file. It’s dense. Far too dense to be worth communicating in that format. So instead you pick out key facts and build out a narrative of events, usually with something in mind (a moral, a bug, etc). The bias and myth that people complain about is an inevitable result of this process.. it’s simply a complaint that one set of facts, and resulting narrative, was chosen, but this second set of facts, and narrative should have been chosen instead. Of course, sets C, D and E also exist, but they’re not being argued for.