Backwards and Forwards...Everything You Know is Wrong

I never really claim to know anything. This might sound weird to anyone who knows me, because I speak very confidently, even on topics that I am just conjecturing about. It makes people think I am absolutely sure of what I am saying. In reality, I just speak extemporaneously with a great deal of vigor. I get excited when I philosophize. In any case, I actively try to refrain from being absolutely sure of anything.

There is a great reason for this and it ties in to one of my favorite pastimes: Thinking about the things we absolutely "know" at this point in history as a human race and guessing which ones our descendents will laugh hysterically at us for believing in such an obvious falsehood. What is the current equivalent of our ancestors believing that the Earth was flat? How about the equivalent of our ancestors believing disease passed from person to person by smell?

That is the Forward example of that kind of philosophy. What I'm currently thinking about is how it applies Backward. It makes me think about history and what we "know" about what happened in our past. We take the stories we've heard in books as gospel, but in all honesty, there is no way that any of that actually happened.

The way I think about it is simple: with the advent of the internet, we have a ridiculous amount of angles and media of events that happen live...and yet, we still can't figure out what actually happened! If you talk to five different people, that were all present at the event, then watched video coverage of the event, followed by 2 hours of analysis by experts and viewers' reactions...then asked them to recount what happened, guess how many variations of that simple event you would get.

Now picture 200 years ago, and history being written. Just try and tell me that what they wrote was anywhere near what actually happened. It makes me wonder what actually happened, and some of the funniest things I've ever thought of have been alternative realities to historically famous events.