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The German version of Phantom Time proposes that the years AD 614 to 911 were falsified, ostensibly by the Catholic Church, so that rulers from the period could begin their reign in the year 1000
In this so-called New Chronology, everything that supposedly happened prior to the eleventh century is a historical forgery; the historical record we currently accept was constructed in the fifteenth century by French religious scholars.
This would mean that many historical figures are simply different mythological versions of the same root story (for example, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane would all be roughly based on the same person).
If you believe that all of history is a fabrication, every piece of evidence disputing that claim is also a fabrication.
Discounting those events that occurred within your own lifetime, what do you know about human history that was not communicated to you by someone else?
For most of human history, the act of dreaming was considered deeply important, almost like a spiritual interaction with a higher power.
The part of your mind that controls emotions (the limbic system) is highly active during dreams, while the part that controls logic (the prefrontal cortex) stays dormant. This is why a dream can feel intense and terrifying, even if what you’re seeing within that dream wouldn’t sound scary if described to someone else.
Dreaming is just something semi-interesting that happens when our mind is at rest—and when it happens in someone else’s mind (and that person insists on describing it to us at breakfast), it isn’t interesting at all. Which seems like a potentially massive misjudgment.
Linklater concedes that his willingness to view dreams as literal pathways to alternative worlds has “fallen off.” But he still thinks we’re underrating the psychological importance of nocturnal narratives.
You have this chemical in your brain, dimethyltryptamine,49 this never-ending chemical that is always there until you die. And there is this thinking that at the moment you die, maybe all the dimethyltryptamine that remains in your brain tissue gets used at once.
What Linklater is describing is an unrealized relationship between sleeping and dying, specifically the sensation of having one’s life “flash before your eyes” in a near-death episode.
Is it possible that our normal nightly dreams are vaguely connected to this dramatic eventuality?
Are we—as a society—discounting our only natural means of interacting with all the subterranean thoughts we don’t realize we have?
The argument that color is not a static property has been gingerly waged for decades, and it always seems to hinge on the ancient work of a possibly blind, probably imaginary, thoroughly unreliable poet. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer describes the Aegean Sea. Again and again, he describes this sea as “wine-dark.”
Adams is the author of On the Genealogy of Color. He believes the topic of color is the most concrete way to consider the question of how much—or how little—our experience with reality is shared with the experience of other people.
Instead of things appearing “red” simply because of their intrinsic “redness” (which is what Aristotle50 believed), Newton and Descartes realized it has to do with an object’s relationship to light.
“False memories, received memories, how we fill in the blanks of conjecture, the way the brain fills in those spaces with something that is technically incorrect—all of these errors allow us to make sense of the world, and are somehow accepted enough to be admissible in a court of law.
But what’s interesting is our communal willingness to assume most old stories may as well be true, based on the logic that (a) the story is already ancient, and (b) there isn’t any way to confirm an alternative version, despite the fact that we can’t categorically confirm the original version, either.
Hersh’s alternative narrative was scrutinized far more aggressively than the conventional narrative, even though the mainstream version of bin Laden’s assassination was substantially more dramatic
had this kind of alternative story emerged from a country like Russia, and if the man orchestrating the alleged conspiracy was Vladimir Putin—nobody in America would question it at all. It would immediately be accepted as plausible, and perhaps even probable.
“multiple truths” don’t really mesh with the machinations of human nature:
It was unconsciously assumed that Hersh’s alternative story had to both prove itself and disprove the primary story, which automatically galvanizes the primary version as factual.
Extrapolate that phenomenon to forty years, or to four hundred years, or to four thousand years: How much of history is classified as true simply because it can’t be sufficiently proven false?
So while it’s absurd to think that all of history never really happened, it’s almost as absurd to think that everything we know about history is real.
What significant historical event is most likely wrong? And not because of things we know that contradict it, but because of the way wrongness works.
There’s also the human compulsion to lie—and not just for bad reasons, but for good reasons, and sometimes for no reasons, beyond a desire to seem interesting.
It’s so hard to get viable info about pre-twentieth-century life that any nugget is reflexively taken at face value.
There’s a game I like to play with people when we’re at the bar, especially if they’re educated and drunk.
The first question is, “Name any historical figure who was alive in the twenty-first century.”
You continue moving backward through time, in centurial increments, until the player fails.
What this game illustrates is how vague our understanding of history truly is.
How could our abstract synopsis of what they did be internalized if the most rudimentary, verifiable detail of their lives seems tricky?
Television is an art form where the relationship to technology supersedes everything else about it.
Both collectively and individually, the experience of watching TV in 2016 already feels totally disconnected from the experience of watching TV in 1996.
Something will replace television, in the same way television replaced radio: through the process of addition.
The next tier of innovation will affix a third component, and that new component will make the previous iteration obsolete.
When something fits into a lucid, logical continuum, it’s generally remembered for how it (a) reinterprets the entity that influenced its creation, and (b) provides influence for whatever comes next.
That won’t happen with television. It seems more probable that the entrenched memory of television will be like those massive stone statues on Easter Island: monoliths of creative disconnection.
Let’s pretend archaeologists made a bizarre discovery: The ancient Egyptians had television.
the least compelling material would be whatever the Egyptians classified as their version of “prestige” television.
Because the aesthetic strengths that make sophisticated TV programs superior to their peers do not translate over time.
What we’d actually want from ancient Egyptian television is a way to look directly into the past, in the same manner we look at Egyptian hieroglyphics without fixating on the color palette or the precision of scale.
We’d want a TV show that provided the most realistic portrait of the society that created it, without the self-aware baggage embedded in any overt attempt at doing so.
If we consider all possible criteria, what were the most accidentally realistic TV shows of all time? Which American TV programs—if watched by a curious person in a distant future—would latently represent how day-to-day American society actually was?
Television’s only real-time responsibility is to entertain. But that changes as years start to elapse. We don’t reinvestigate low culture with the expectation that it will entertain us a second time—the hope is that it will be instructive and revelatory, which sometimes works against the intentions of the creator.
The way a TV show is photographed and staged (this is point number three) are industrial attributes that take advantage of viewers’ preexisting familiarity with the medium:
What is the realest fake thing we’ve ever made on purpose? I’m (slightly, but not really) embarrassed to admit that this is an inquiry I’ve been thinking about for my entire life, years before I ever had a financial incentive to do so.
Beyond a few key exceptions, simulacrum shows are soap operas, marketed as fantasies, geared toward mass audiences who don’t want to think very hard about what they’re watching.
If a piece of art openly defines itself as 90 percent fake, whatever remains is legitimized (and it’s that final 10 percent that matters most).
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, watching TV was just what people did when there was nothing else to do.
