Good Ol' Times?

Were the old days really good, or is it one of those delusions that come from the fact that [human] memories of events passed are always rewritten each time they are being retrieved, and are therefore not even remotely accurate about what they were?

I'm not even talking about the current trend of the sixty-/seventy-year-old politician taking over their country trying to bring back ``the good ol' times'' because the current generation (which?) has brought on enough decadence to decimate what is considered the core of the nation's identity and prestige.

I'm just talking about the whole ``nostalgia'' factor that afflicts us in one way or another. It is the kind of reason why someone might want to go back to an ex-anything (girlfriend/boyfriend, company), or to revert to some kind of earlier behaviour in the face of issues that stem from the current behaviour. It is the kind of meaningless argument that is trumpeted about as the ``final word'' when there seems to be no other viable arguments left to be made in a debate.

Personally, I don't think the old days were really good, when compared to the present. The key premise here that I am relying on is the idea that personal agency of choice is a key component of separating the self from the not-self, and that more [relevant] knowledge/information often leadsd to better choices that can be made. In other words, I think that ``good'' happens when one can make better choices than before due to the knowing of more [relevant] information.

In that sense then, the old days were not good at all. The ideas of decorum and etiquette were based on society rules that were put in place by the privileged few, and even so, their politeness acted as a fig leaf over the still-existent discrimination that comes about from [deliberate] incomplete information for actions and states of being that do not conform to what is widely believed as the norm. It may be good for the majority of people then (we'll use 80% a la 80/20 rule ceteris paribus), but for the minority who had to live through that, it can be a true living hell.

And the thing is, what is majority and minority is never set in stone. So to make an unqualified statement of ``the good ol' times'' is to make yet another improbable [population] assumption that will age poorly in time to come.

Now compound this with the observation that memory is always retrieved in the manner in which it was last remembered (i.e. retrieved). A contradiction of sorts, but such is the mechanism of the original abstract demonstration of sentience before all the logic theories and Turing tests. The ``good ol' days'' are just an exaggeration of the parts of memory that we believe to be ``good'', where the quotation marks are to indicate that it is a heavily biased/conditioned context that we are referring to said memory. Just as the cringeworthy moments remain exceedingly embarrassing on recall, the ``good stuff'' are also exceedingly ``good'' on recall as well---the mind works on the same general middleware regardless of the valence of the specific thought. It is, from neurological formulations, an example of the ``network effect'', where the ``rich get richer'' (i.e. the more retrieved the memory, the more the memory is strengthened), but with the caveat that each time the memory is retrieved, it needs to be rewritten as part of the retrieval process.

Which means that we can actually self-brainwash to believe something when it isn't so, whether we realise it or not.

The infidelity of memory is why there has been a change in eye-witness interview protocol in the face of an inquest into a criminal act---no one is supposed to talk to the eye-witness before the official interview, and that interview needs to occur as early as practically possible from the criminal act's occurrence.

``MT, what about the historical writing?''

I think that the historical writing can show that ``the good ol' times'' are mythological for the most part. First hand accounts are rarely taken in situ, and are often taken years after occurrence. Second hand accounts are summarised works with the benefit of hindsight of many other perspectives that no one from the same era would have easily seen. And when these are written up in the more prevalent manner of the narrative form, hardly any ``good ol' times'' are spelt out---most historical writing is about how badly folks from the past screwed up. Anything writing that makes it sound like it was a dandy old time then are often marked out as propaganda, and more often than not, it is the correct assessment.

It is unlikely that anyone who isn't a propagandist will go through the effort to dig through the records, interview the people, just to write only positive things without identifying the issues that were actually being dealt with by the participants of the era.

So where does this leave us?

A sobering realisation that the past remains there, it wasn't really good, yet many are trying to rewrite that narrative to advance their own agenda.

And that the future is still not wholly certain nor deterministic, and yet can be sufficiently influenced through the actions we take today.

Which therefore means that we should always seize the day, and not let history dictate what actions we ought to be taking.

After all, history is just one of the two advisers we have to make decisions for today.