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@ Ben Eng
2025-05-05 14:49:36
We must recognize that history serves a purpose. Its purpose is not to log a series of events. It is to provide an explanation that teaches us lessons toward strategically guiding our future with ideological and moral clarity. Clarity comes from romanticizing good and evil, separating heroes from villains. Without essentializing in this way, history is noise with no signal.
Signal is discerned from recognizing essential characteristics and filtering out the noise. Thus, history must be mythologized to be useful toward its purpose. The history of America's founding was drowned by noise (slavery, colonialism), and its essential lessons (secession, rights, liberty, protection against government tyranny) were muddied. So too has the Renaissance. The noise now overwhelms the signal, as the mythology is lost to the noise-makers.