2025-02-06

sdi: Oil painting of the Heliconian Muse whispering inspiration to Hesiod. (Default)
2025-02-06 07:40 am

History is Myth

History is a way of flattening out and making sense of the infinite complexity of happenings in nature, and so is necessarily a narrative. (Indeed, it a political propaganda narrative: we say that "history is written by the victors.") Nature itself doesn't deal in narratives, only humans do; so narratives are an artificial, social construct. Being a narrative, history therefore belongs to the realm of myth, not to "objective" "fact."

It is as if history was invented for propaganda purposes a few thousand years ago and we lost the thread, and have been for generations blindly obeying the propaganda of states that no longer exist. Much better, I think, to regard it for what it is so that we are not enslaved to it.