Oct 19, 2023·edited Oct 19, 2023Liked by Karl Schroeder
Self-styled "experts" are the bane of my existence as a historian. They sow seeds of doubt in established facts through their asinine and biased "conspiracy" theories, and they have done enormous damage through this to established social and political infrastructures.
I was taught as a historian to produce evidence for the claims I made, and clearly show how A led to Z via my notes and bibliographies. These people do not even consider doing this. If they come from any sort of academic background at all, it's usually not history, and that's a major part of the problem...
The question hanging over our heads seems to be, "how do we reassert voices of genuine authority when the institutions that used to be the guarantors of that authority are no longer credible themselves?" This is something I've been struggling with in trying to imagine a new social contract not based on our prior hierarchies of power.
Self-styled "experts" are the bane of my existence as a historian. They sow seeds of doubt in established facts through their asinine and biased "conspiracy" theories, and they have done enormous damage through this to established social and political infrastructures.
I was taught as a historian to produce evidence for the claims I made, and clearly show how A led to Z via my notes and bibliographies. These people do not even consider doing this. If they come from any sort of academic background at all, it's usually not history, and that's a major part of the problem...
The question hanging over our heads seems to be, "how do we reassert voices of genuine authority when the institutions that used to be the guarantors of that authority are no longer credible themselves?" This is something I've been struggling with in trying to imagine a new social contract not based on our prior hierarchies of power.