I was just pondering the idea of History being written/edited by the victor, as I wrote a post here not long ago talking about how I think the blockchain could potentially put and end to that. I was also thinking about Ben Swann and how if he HAD come to steemit when I was asking him before he vanished and IF we had a working video decentralization service like they are attempting to bring to steem in the form of @furion's project View.LY then all of his works would still exist in the world. Instead many of them are no longer out there. I and others can tell you they were brilliant. We can describe them, but we cannot do them justice.
They are a part of history that is simply GONE. Why? Those in power did not like what he was telling the public.
This then lead me to think more about history and censorship. That History is written/edited by the victor is a huge one. If you truly look into that then you realize that most things you THINK you know are based upon accounts that you read, watch, etc but they are after the fact.
The only things you truly can know are those things which you experienced first hand with your own senses.
So when we start talking about history and being so sure of our knowledge on any subject how do we truly know?
I was watching a video on lost civilizations last night with my wife as we both fell asleep. There were some aspects of that which tied into this thought I am having now. All of them interwoven to form this idea of KNOWING.
Do we truly know, or are we simply afraid to not know?
A lot of DIFFERENT ideas on the past often are proposed based upon new evidence. The status quo will typically do everything they can to protect the model as it has been up to that point. "Ignore the new evidence... why don't you let us take it and put it in the museum archives?"
That is not at all about truth. It is about protecting legacy, and remaining comfortable. It is a fear reaction.
So the part I found interesting in this video I watched(I didn't actually finish it before we were both asleep) was about maps, that are pre-Ptolemaic, and those also by Ptolemy.
They show Antarctica, the coasts of South America and many other parts of the world that were supposedly not discovered yet. In fact some of them have the entire coast line of Antarctica. Yet our maps in the early 1800s still didn't have Antarctica on them as technically we had not "discovered" it (1818 by the Russians). Where did this information come from?
Ptolemy claimed he was building his maps from a lot of earlier reference maps he had.
Oronteus Finaeus Map of 1532
Source: Genesis Veracity Foundation
This quickly tells us that our history is not what we are trying to force the narrative to be. It cannot be and have these things exist. Now if these things can be destroyed, or stuck in a box in an archive then the narrative is protected as there is no longer evidence out there in the public that doesn't fit the "official" narrative.
Let's talk about those Ptolemy maps again. You see the information most of this was based upon supposedly came from maps saved from the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. To me that was one of the single largest knowledge catastrophes of our history. It is also a good example of why centralization can be bad, and decentralization might be better. :) Viva La Blockchain!
We know a vast amount of knowledge was lost in Alexandria. We speak of Plato's works and people reference them frequently, yet these are based upon the few works that survived the destruction of Alexandria. It is known from historical accounts that there were many other documents by Plato that did not survive that destruction.
So my title question comes into play here "Why are you so sure you know what you think you know?" Are you perhaps basing this upon Appeals to Authority, Appeals to Tradition, or Bandwagon fallacies?
