Forgetful By Design

What's that Greek myth again about drinking the waters of Lethe making humans forgetful creatures?

I think macro history has some resemblance with how we function as a species on a micro level.

My mum has been complaining(again) that she has become too forgetful now. I suspect the culprit is spending too much time on social media, specifically YouTube watching old historical stories that neither I nor her can tell whether it's factually correct or as the name implies just a story.

I'm the main recipient of her debriefing situation, which is basically when you take in new information that you then discuss as a way to process it and somehow make it fit with your current understanding of the world or in certain cases increase your understanding of the new world you're exploring.

The Greek myth of drinking from the waters of Lethe goes something like this: souls in the underworld would drink from this river of forgetfulness to erase memories of their earthly lives before being reincarnated.

This creates a fresh start of sorts where no baggage from the past directly influences the soul's new journey which effectively allows for genuine transformation and growth unburdened by previous traumas or attachments.

Interesting Historical Stories

If you somehow reversed the myth into instead of drinking to forget the past and move forward, but drowning in information that makes you forget how to move forward at all, then you'll have an ideal metaphor for our digital age, in terms of consumption of content.

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This reversal captures something that seems profound to me about our moment.

At the macro level, civilizations have always had to navigate between remembering their origins and adapting to new realities. Too much attachment to the past creates stagnation and too much forgetting leads to repeating old mistakes.

But what happens when the information environment itself becomes the Lethe?

My mother's YouTube rabbit holes represent this situation in my view. She's swimming in a digital river and historical narratives flow through an endless stream, each one attempting to wash away the clarity of the previous one.

The "historical stories" she watches exist in this strange liminal space between education and entertainment.

Being the same birthday as Adolf Hitler, she has been very interested in his story. There was a time not long ago when she told me that Hitler may have not killed himself but escaped to somewhere in Argentina after the war ended in 1945, living out his days in exile.

Not that long ago, she came again and said Hitler did end his life at that bunker but now what she's amazed by is Hitler's wife whom she learnt was told by Hitler to leave for safety but declined opting to die with him.

The point is, she emerges from these sessions with a kind of pleasant confusion thanks to being armed with fragments that don't quite fit together.

And here I am, her happily designated processor, trying to help her - and myself - make sense of information that may not have been designed to make sense in the first place.

Survival of the Deliberately Dumb

In some ways, this mirrors what's happening to us collectively.

We're a species that has created more information than we can meaningfully process which has given birth to more narratives than we can coherently integrate.

We've built our own Lethe of getting drunk in a permanent state of cognitive overwhelm.

I sometimes posit that the forgetting my mother complains about isn't really about memory failure as it is known conventionally.

Because when almost everything is potentially significant and nothing is definitively true, the mind starts to let go of details as a survival mechanism.

Put in a simpler way, we're becoming more forgetful by design, because selective amnesia is the only way to function in an environment of infinite information.


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