6. Healing the Wounds of History 🔗

1/ Vipassana-ing friend of mine said deep thing about wounds of history: someone has to experience repressed/deferred pain for it to go away

2/ There is a Genghis Khan statue in Mongolia. He's still central to their identity Equestrian statue of Genghis Khan - Wikipedia

3/ In India, people are still trying to rewrite history to paint Hindu losers of battles with Muslims from 13th, 16th centuries as victors

4/ By global festering-wound standards, the legacy of Robert E. Lee has not even scabbed over. This will take a LONG time to process.

5/ I don't believe in afterlife type karma, but there is such a thing as historical karma. It exists because full erasure is impossible

6/ No matter what your politics, Robert E. Lee existed and means something in the stories some people need to tell themselves to go on

7/ So does Hitler. There may be no big statues of him, but he remains a potent symbol in global history-writing. Live cultural currency.

8/ Beyond the historical specifics of their stories, heroes of alt-histories like Hitler and Lee are like currencies: of blood debts

9/ Today Genghis Khan is a healed wound for the most part, not an active cultural currency. We are free to view him as pure history data

10/ Why? Because the debts have been largely paid. The pains have been experienced over 8 centuries.

11/ But there is a ton of outstanding pain debt left to be experienced in history books, before it can be retired. Dark matter. Work to do.

12/ People approach the healing work differently depending on their spiritual bent. Christians seek to repent/forgive. Buddhists "process".

13/ Atheist techies are not immune. We frantically try to create more clean future so blood debts of history become trivial by comparison

14/ Whatever your coping strategy as a historically situated ape looking for meaning in aging rivers of blood flowing past scabs/wounds...

15/ ...One thing is for sure. The pain must be experienced in consciousness before it can be expiated from it.

16/ Denying this is dangerous for the same reason denying finanicial debt is dangerous: there is compound interest at work

17/ Compound interest so powerful that a 147 years after Lee died, a 20-year-old felt the need to drive a car into a crowd over his statue

18/ Do not ignore the blood debts of history (with interest). Do not lie to yourself that pains can be buried without being experienced.

19/ This shit has caused me pain in 2 countries/histories. Your share of debt can't be willed away with clever thinking or 'enlightenment'

20/ Its not about you. It's about building roads into history that allow us to visit past painlessly. Just as taxes are about physical roads