Consider that ideas (even facts!) might be like mind-viruses: you could imagine they propagate themselves in human minds, but are not actually produced by those minds. What if human minds are just the substrate?
Perhaps the earliest "ur ideas" were something like instinctive emotions. Even very simple creatures seek food and avoid noxious stimuli. Is hunger an idea? Maybe from hunger arose desire, and from desire arose searching, and from searching arose planning... Ad astra per fame.
The same way viruses change: usually recombination, but sometimes random mutation. Yes this happens in a human mind, just like viruses change within cells. The point is to focus on ideas as self-propagating and humans as merely vessels, rather than the other way around as people usually think about them.
interesting book on memes.
Tying truth to written history is noble but also flawed.
For example, many people in America have a hot-take about what life is like in China. How? We heard it from somewhere, never lived a day there.
Can’t be that simple right? You say you heard it from a scholar?
Welp, hate to break it to ya, but unless you were there yourself, it’s just not 100% the truth.
It’s the main reason you’ll eventually see a book that says “we got Abraham Lincoln all wrong, let me tell you my hot take”. You’d have to read 30 of these hot takes before you can even mix the black and white into a gray truth (which the truth is, always gray).
Anyway, word on the street is the Queen is a saint. Give it a year, we’ll get the other hot take. Then another one.
Interestingly, the actual historians I came accros would not be shocked by such claim at all. They do make their own claims of that sort.
However, arbitrary fans of Ancient Greece would be shocked.
Yet wouldn't you be more interested in listening to the "sphere" guy?
Tall tales are a guilty pleasure for many. Clinically we call this conspiratorial thinking (or really clinically, paranoid schizophrenia?).
Some people really indulge in their campfire ghost stories. I would be interested in the “Lincoln actually loved slavery” lol, just want to see how far some asshole can take an idea.
I don't think this would hurt historians feelings. The idea that there are an infinity of different narratives one can express through the archive and that each author places part of themselves into the writing and that one can never achieve the TRUE HISTORICAL RECORD (TM) is not interesting or frustrating information for historians. They teach that shit in year one of grad school at the latest.
You will see books that are "here is my hot take on Lincoln" but you won't see them say "we got Lincoln all wrong." They'll simply see how their different view and analysis fits into the wider tapestry of historical writing.