Ouranian Chronicles Thought Experiment (TX) 002
What if history is a mask? Commercial history that is, as popularized in movies, TV, and trendy podcasts. I love a good movie as much as anyone, but I am thinking of the kind of mercenary feel good fluff that can easily divert us from asking the important questions. Such as, how come the world is in the shape it’s in presently? And, more to the point, does it meet our expectations?
If the answer is “no, not really,” then who or what should be blamed? History? Or our understanding of it? I’d say that unrealistic expectations result from a certain amount of make-believe, a faux sense of who we are.
Let’s turn the question around. Remember the well-worn adage, ”Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it?”
Sorry but that sounds like a feel-bad meme meant to shame us for our supposed ignorance. Perhaps to cow us into buying a made-up narrative as truth? Besides, how does it correlate with the other favored catchphrase: “History is written by the victors?” Should this suggest that the losers are doomed to repeat their defeats because they have been robbed of their past?
Then what about the strongman’s obsession with history? Dictators and despots never forget. Worse, they never let us forget. In fact, most authoritarians are consummate historians, turning and twisting the past until we all feel wounded and wronged. Why else do they keep reminding us of what we have lost, instead of what we have gained? They know, the victim’s tale sells best. But wouldn’t this imply that history is actually written for its victims?
In reality autocrats don’t care about people. They only care about fame and making their mark. Life is a contest for them, and the game is besting the past. So wannabe tyrants are constantly competing against their predecessors’ glorified achievements. They all buy the lie that carving out a place in history is the next best thing to immortality. The greater the cruelty, the larger the pedestal.
What fools they are. While the rest of us pay for their delusions with our blood; reduced to bit players in their pompous schemes.
In truth only those who revere a pretend past are condemned to repeat it. Worse even, they are obliged to reenact it. Because deep down they know it is wrong. So they cosplay it over and over to silence their doubts. Welcome to Plato’s Cave.
Now, where are the exits? And how do we distinguish them from the dead ends?
At its heart the Ouranian Chronicles (the “OC”) is a work of philosophical fiction—speculative, unpredictable, replete with daring thought-experiments and fast paced action sequences. But it also offers a glimpse at events in our past that may have been glossed over by conventional feel good/feel bad story telling. Who says we can’t face what really happened?
My aim was to create a sort of antidote against communal memory loss, to be administered over the course of three novels, each dedicated to a different time period—the past, the present, and the future. Sure, it’s an ambitious project. Has to be. But it aims to engage, and, naturally, to entertain. How else to present such momentous subjects without creating doom and gloom? The series seeks to enlighten, even as it shows that our history may not be accidental. That it is devised, conceivably. That there might be a hidden agenda at work whose purpose is to shape us into what we have become. After all, we are what we remember.
Yet how much more would we be, if we could share our communal memory as human beings? That is what true history should be, a faithful account of humanity’s recollections. All of them.
This, in a nutshell, explains one of the OC’s central thought experiments as undergone by Kayin the Ariole, the series’ main character whose calling is to serve as the memory of the world.
Knowing what he knows, Kayin would ask us the following question: “If, as individuals, we cannot tolerate partial amnesia—and would do everything to find out the truth—then why are we content to suffer a partial amnesia as a species?”
What is our answer? “Because history is tedious and boring?”
“Perhaps you’ve only been taught the boring parts,” Kayin would say. “Sadly this might have shaped your expectations. But what if we are more than we think we are? More than the boring parts?
Shouldn’t we strive to dig deeper? To remember everything that happened, and not just the feel-good or victimizing falsehoods meant to wean us off the truth?
The truth about who we really are? And what our destiny could be?”
The future is now, ready to be seized. Haven’t we waited long enough?
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