Is history written by the winners?
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically.
It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.
Now that many people can easily take videos/photos on there phones, it turns out there's a lot of official and police misconduct, bigotry, and people acting like dilholes in general, and not many monsters. At least not yet.
Vampires are known to not show up properly in mirrors, so they may have properties that interfere with smartphone camera optics as well.
Though here's an iPhone ghost photo from 2015, blamed on "an oddity from an iPhone's imaging capture":
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150629-the-intriguing-h...
One can argue they are the monsters
I'm agnostic about the LNM and don't lean either way.
And of course this is now History Channel click-tainment, so it's not a serious topic.
Even so - it's not factually correct to suggest there are no recent photos or videos of surface phenomena that seem to match the profile.
Establishing provenance and reliability post 2020 is going to be...interesting...
Most of us don't have VFX knowledge or the ability to detect minute flaws in Deepfake works.
We do it through by filtering and selecting sources of information.
History looks at all available sources not just popular ones. Merely surviving up to the present age is a huge feat for any historical evidence.
I am constantly seeing disputed history when I look into historical events or figures. I only agree with your last sentence because much of history was oral and like the game of telephone it has gotten distorted or just lost.
For a long time they were a small minority. Even poor monks could leave manuscripts. Not necessarily the "winners".
Not that their experiences aren't valid, but that there is an overwhelming feeling that "America sucks and is failing" when this isn't a true assessment. Not for the middle class and above, and especially not relative to the rest of the world on average.
Social media lumps all voices in together and tends to amplify strong feelings. But if you zoomed out, you'd see a very different picture of what constitutes this collective voice.
1) We benefit from social media lumping voices together because it's easier to argue against and internally reason with. They aren't individuals with individual experiences, they're the unwashed entitled masses crying on social media spreading their lies. See how easy that was? We do this a lot for everything we don't agree with.
2) Spend any time anywhere and it's easy to start seeing "narratives". Online bubbles are real: most people do not comment on any given platform. Therefore, commenters are already a bubble in themselves. So we do what humans do and start seeking patterns, and then extract these patterns into narratives. Note: this does not mean that there aren't groups of people who do share whatever "narrative" idea, but the reality is their views on it tend to be more nuanced than the narrative we've imagined in our minds. For example, 'America sucks and is failing' could be a common vague narrative people share, but you would get so many varied explanations that it stops existing as such a simple narrative until you reduce it again into a vague narrative.
3) Social media has its pros and cons, but one of its neutrals is it forces people from entirely different groups to interact with each other. This winds up becoming world shattering a lot of the times, because as humans we tend to create these internal stories that justifies our world views. We seek out things that justify these internal stories. We seek out people who reflect what we want, and this feeds into #2 and makes it harder to break out of. So, if you are optimistic you'll seek others who are also optimistic, and when social media does its recommendation/random thing, you'll encounter people who do not share this view and then it leads right back into #1 turning this into tribes. A beautiful self powering triangle if you will.
I seriously don't understand your point, nor the level of mental gymnastics it takes to see a trend of independently dissatisfied people and say - oh, my neighborhood is doing fine, you're just being defeatist.
I'd wager that if you "zoom out" what you see is a dangerously reckless societal experiment for some, and a life of modern amenities for others. Both can be true at the same time.
Online content is overwhelmingly negative. Bad things happen, but in reality the proportionality is much smaller than you encounter online. But negativity is what gets amplified, since that drives engagement. The smallest grievances become threads that take up disproportional space in the attention feed and crowd out the rest.
I guess I'm wondering if this isn't just the algorithm, but also an amplification of certain subpopulations over others. The ones that tend to be angry.
> ...is your solution to have those sharing their pain and suffering made to stop?
I want a mute button. Or a threshold that caps it past a certain point.
Or, if this is just some people contributing to most of the problem, maybe just a way to opt out of their noisiest signals.
People can say all they want, but it doesn't mean they deserve a place in my limited attention and emotional energy feed.
Emotion is contagious.
I want my media use to drop to only the most salient bits. And I want it to be more positive.
On the flip side you should consider that some people like the affirmation and validity they get out of hearing stories similar to their own. People have their own needs that are met by social media. If yours aren't, maybe consider that you aren't the target audience?
> People have their own needs that are met by social media. If yours aren't, maybe consider that you aren't the target audience?
The internet isn't for me?
That's interesting. I was here first and then the platforms came and ripped apart our old methods of high-signal communication. RSS, IRC, and forums are ghost towns or dead. Replaced with anger amplification and marketing money printers.
My response to this is that we can perhaps begin filtering out these voices and negative remarks with AI and NLP. That could make social media broadly useful again, even if the platform owners themselves would be opposed.
What I'm hearing is basically "the poors are making too much noise for my liking." Well, prepare to get eaten I guess.
That doesn’t seem like a very thoughtful or measured response.
Anyone who says the internet, a resource used by billions of people, and prescribes changes that suit their personal preferences, is probably narcissistic too.
Often stories are exaggerated or twisted, not for any particular side, but for attention and clicks.
So "the media" has no internet?
> Society is made up of many parallel subcultures, and only a very small group of them keep journals, write, or otherwise record history. That group appears to be mostly disconnected from the nuts and bolts of what is actually going on technologically, politically and economically.
Is the fact they write or record history stopping them from digging out those real deep youtube videos about the truth behind everything?
> It has always been understood that history was unreliable, but the collapse of media credibility as we gain access to primary sources stands as a stark warning of just how little we really know about the past.
Did "the media credibility" collapse in that very moment when you found out that the pentagon was behind 9/11?
That's a funny question to ask, because a huge amount of people on the US lost confidence on the media exactly because most of them conspired to lie to the public about Iraq's WMDs shortly after 9/11.
I feel like you’re remembering this timeline pretty poorly. Were you living in the US at the time?
I for myself thought getting rid of saddam and creating a democratic irak was desirable if not easily achievable- i was not sure what would be best to do.
> So yes, of course history tends to be written by the winners. But luckily there is a dedicated band of highly trained, poorly paid and badly dressed historians out there trying to circumvent that.
Duh. But these unsung heroes don't have the means to pump out an endless amount of hollywood movies, cop dramas, and historical pieces. Even if one is educated and smart, they don't get to decide what society, at large, has accepted as truth. Even these days, I'd think propaganda is most potent once it reaches word of mouth.
Long term chronicling goes beyond short term propoganda. Society eventually (IMO) accepts the truth. And the highly trained, poorly dressed, unsung heroes are to be credited for it. Unfortunately, society at large pays importance to the short term "stuff". Regardless, I feel these guys stand for correctness and should be recognised (preferably much before they die).
I have a feeling that most of us still believe a pretty twisted narrative where things are just black and white, which frankly, can absolutely never be the case. Humans are never completely evil or completely good, but that's the narrative I hear most of the time, not just with current events but with a lot of wars more recent than I would say 200 years... for example, today, Napoleon is not considered to have been the devil himself, though for at least 100 years after his defeat, I believe the countries he briefly overpowered thought of him as such. What do you think about that?
Some propaganda that was around in WWII continued to be pushed, but it’s not WWII specific.
[0] https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/01hist.h...
[1] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec...
[2] https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspec...
The idea that more educated people are easier to propagandize practically goes against our self conception and mythology but that doesn't make it less true.
I am pretty sure most people believe that their education insulates them from propaganda or lets them decipher what is true or not but that is actually part of the problem. If what they read lines up with what they want to believe, viola.
Hollywood's profit motive is exactly the problem. Who wants to pay to see an uncomfortable or boring truth? Do you really look to Hollywood for accuracy?
As far as the why.. every case has its own reason. But there seems to be no shortage of humans who want to convince others of how to think on a given subject.
- The Tiananmen Square demonstrations. (1989)[1] At least in China.
- Britain's efforts to get the US into WWII before Pearl Harbor. (early 1940s) [2]
- DuPont's attempt at a US coup (1933) [3]
- The Israeli nuclear bomb test. (1979) [4]
The first one is a successful outright suppression. The rest were obfuscated and obscured at the time, but the historical record exists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...
[2] https://www.history.com/news/wwii-us-entry-secret-british-ca...
What really happened at the first and second thanksgivings in the us
The time the White House was burned down by an invading army ( who then left because they couldn’t be bothered)
The number of times the us has overthrown democratically elected governments around the world
The illegal drug testing the us has performed on peoples around the world
There’s plenty people inside the us are not taught.
The only truths taught in US schools are those beneficial to the empire - it's best viewed as propaganda.
- Norm MacDonald
"After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, he [Loewen] has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past."
"Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong" - James W. Loewen
https://www.amazon.com/Lies-My-Teacher-Told-Everything-dp-16...
This does indeed seem to work, to my surprise since I can't positively remember a word of what were taught at school. Went in one ear and out of another.
The bit that stuck with me was a little aside near the beginning.
> Whether we like it or not, we view the past from a modern standpoint, privileging (consciously or otherwise) the interests and ideals of the world we know. As a result, we tend to treat developments towards modernity as natural – and disparage the apparent dead ends that stood in its path.
I think modern values are pretty good. But we sit on a branch in a big tree which history has explored stochastically. The idea that, going back, some figures could be seen as good or bad not because of the fundamentals of their deeds, or because of the propaganda (good or ill) recorded about them, but because the just mismatch with modern values is interesting…
But I dunno, I can think of any, I must just be too throughly soaked through with modern values.
for instance, people will talk about computing today with react/javascript/facebook/google.. maybe good old microsoft/apple. But almost nobody will go deeper and read about backus team in the first FORTRAN compiler and his later years around FP influencing the 70s/80s functional school of thought that led to rust, ES6, react and the likes.
McNamara: "LeMay said, if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He, and I'd say, we were behaving as war criminals."
Gosh.
>The text notes that while powerful institutions and victorious factions may influence the preservation and interpretation of historical records, factors such as literacy also play a role. History's portrayal of England's Reformation illustrates how the 'winners' can shape historical narratives, in this case favoring Protestantism over Catholicism until recent reevaluation. The notion of 'winners' itself is questioned as too simplistic, potentially obscuring historical diversity. The text also explores the fluidity of 'winning', using the example of the Cold War's end and the subsequent scrutiny of neoliberal ideals. Lastly, the text asserts that contemporary history is largely crafted by historians, professionals dedicated to analyzing history's complexity and including the voices of marginalized groups.
Never mind many colleges and schools seems to be getting rid of or pairing down non-corporate majors.
That's called "the market."
Many schools are happy, within reason, to offer whatever programs students want to major in--whether they offer good post-graduation employment opportunities or not.
In the past, college-degree holders were scarce, so a history degree had "economic" value.
It's not that the past valued the humanities more. It's just that good jobs were a thinner slice of society and tended to be filled by the also-thin ranks of degree holders.
The illiterate leave no trace.
Regardless of how good/evil the winner was, the simple fact they came out on top is used as positive motivational material.
No, as Frank Herbert said, it is written by historians.
Did they have a lot of written material that all got destroyed? Or is it just that, if they'd won, they would have written a lot of stuff?
Once we acknowledge this and everything it implies, we can only assume we know what someone allowed us to know.