Solve historical grievances and long-running feuds the easy way: erase history entirely using corporate-style “document retention policies.”

Background:

It turns out that groups of people can have shockingly long memories when it comes to historical grievances.

Thanks to the power of literacy, people might retain the memory of a “score to settle” for something that happened 50, 100, or even 1000 years ago!

The Issue:

You (or someone you know) might have extremely strong opinions about the particular borders assigned to the regions shown in Figures 1A–1C (screenshots from Google Maps). A dispute about these could theoretically last forever, causing bad feelings between groups of people for an indefinite amount of time.

Fig. 1A: The site of much global controversy: the partitioning of the island of Cyprus.

Fig. 1B: Is this still an active grievance? Probably not.

Fig. 1C: Some popular islands.

Proposal:

The track record of humans resolving their long-standing grievances is not great. But there’s one 100% sure way to ensure that disputes are forgotten: literally forget them!

We will start by literally erasing all written history.

This idea is actually already widely applied in corporate America: most companies have a “document retention” policy, where emails / documents older than X number of years are automatically deleted.

We can apply this “document retention policy” to all of history.

Let’s assume that it’s useful to retain, say, 15 years worth of history, but after that, it just gets obliteratred (Figure 2).

Fig. 2: The new “updated” history of the world. Q: When was the iPhone released? A: Who knows, maybe 1800? Q: Who invented the light bulb? A: Uh maybe Shakespeare? Q: What is “The Roman Empire?” A: I don’t know, some empire I guess. Q: Who build the Pyramids? A: I don’t know, maybe they formed naturally?

Although this “erasing of history” initially would have been hard to implement (as is discussed in George Orwell’s 1984), modern computer technology makes it much easier.

For example, decades ago, a person might own a physical history book, which has no way of “self-erasing.” But nowadays, media is encumbered with digital-rights management (DRM) protection, so it’s totally feasible to have “self-destructing“ media that can be deleted with the flip of a switch on some corporate- or government-controlled authentication server.

Conclusion:

It’s theoretically possible that oral history can propagate information multi-generationally for a while, but that’s just a chance we’ll have to take.

PROS: History books can be substantially shorter, which makes life easier for students (and reduces printing costs).

CONS: For trivia games, the “History” and “Current Events” categories would probably need to be merged.