Truth as Labor: the Ethics of History and Collective Memory in a Post-Factual World

At its most vital, history is meant to instruct. It is the mirror we hold to our past so that we do not stumble blindly in repetition. But what if the mirror is fogged? History relies on fragile foundations: photographs & documents, monuments worn by time. Artifacts secondary and only meaningful in service of something more human; the primary foundation of all: memory. Collective remembrance. 

Our best hold on truth lies in fragments shaped by those who remember. But human memory is malleable as clay. It can be shaped and misshaped. So, if full truth is literally beyond human reach, how do we know if we’re living in truth at all? 

What do we mean when we say ‘history’? 

We must begin with a distinction that there are two kinds of history: formal and folk. 

Foucault says that "power produces knowledge.” (Discipline and Punish 27), that “truth as we know it today is not an objective constant, but a historical artifact shaped by discourse and institutions.” (Power/Knowledge 131). History begins at an education curated to project a particular version of events, standardized into the same chapters & vocabulary. Underneath this ocial narrative runs a second current; lived stories, passed down in fragments: in protest songs, in family memories, in the silence of absence. 

While formal history does begin from people’s history, it can break away and even override it. Formal – authorized history, holds the systemic power to choose what becomes (or becomes of) the prevailing narratives. It has the power not just to record but to define the past. Here, truth is not neutral; it is governed. 

A clear example is the Japanese government’s treatment of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. A clearly documented campaign of mass murder, rape, and destruction veried through photographs, diaries of Japanese soldiers and Western witnesses, records from the post-war Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal (Chang, The Rape of Nanking 87). Carved into its survivors.

Yet, it was for decades, reduced to a simple ‘military conict’ or reframed as Chinese propaganda. The result is a generation of Japanese citizens potentially unaware of, or misinformed about, one of the most horric war crimes of the 20th century. 

The truth wasn’t disproved; it was rebranded. The facts were not erased but recast as ‘opinion’. The result is twofold: victims are erased, and the collective memory becomes complicit. This is not simply a loss of information. It is the erosion of a shared moral reality. 

Hannah Arendt calls this the defactualization of reality (Truth and Politics 227–264). Dened not by the absence of evidence, but the reclassification of evidence as ideology, opinion, exaggeration. Factual truths that inconvenience are no longer denied outright — they are labeled as bias. And so we no longer argue over what happened, but over whether what happened counts as truth at all. 

But history always calls for some interpretation, so, what makes something a historical fact?

Arendt draws a critical distinction. Facts — like “Germany invaded Belgium in 1914” — are not opinions but a collective reality, therefore to deny it would be falsication. The opposite of truth is not error, but the lie told with intent (Between Past and Future, 242). Error is human. Lies are political. And if public discourse is saturated with lies, people will lose the distinction between fact and fiction. 

In Assassins of Memory, Pierre Vidal-Naquet (Assassins of Memory 3–5) calls them revisionists. Those who deliberately distort shared reality and fog the mirror. History becomes not “What happened?” but whose definition prevails. Whose truth does it become? 

It’s important to note that not all revisionism is pejorative. Sometimes it corrects lies. It’s the kind that sanitizes or erases that must be resisted. But how do we know when to resist, or when to trust? Isn’t people’s history just as prone to distortion, whether by agenda, time, or forgetting? 

What then, when all your anchors—what you were taught & told—become questionable? 

The answer is not to descend into paranoia. That path often leads to conspiratorial cynicism, not clarity. But we also can’t rely passively on inherited narratives; critical memory is a moral obligation. 

Social change is always driven by discernment. Movements begin in minds. People act not because they know everything, but because they know enough to draw a line. Before people ever take to the streets, they have taken positions in their minds. Conviction precedes motion. 

The great danger is not in being wrong, but in not knowing where you stand — or that you needed to. ‘If You Stand for Nothing, Burr, What’ll You Fall For?’ 

In Hamilton (Miranda, Hamilton: An American Musical), Aaron Burr’s refusal to take a stand is not merely indecision. It is the erosion of identity, and it mirrors what happens when people either cannot or refuse to dene their selves, values, or history. Untethered from memory or principle, we drift not towards truth, but toward what’s convenient: staying idle, and it has distorted our understanding of what truth looks like. 

Truth demands labor: it requires standing, questioning, thinking. But in a post-factual age, truth is often mistaken for consensus — echoed, but not examined. This is not dialogue nor comprehension. It is herd repetition. A performance of agreement (a kind of pseudo-truth, perhaps. One that feels like unity but stems from inertia, not understanding) born for the sake of blissful ignorance. 

Factual truth is a collective reality – but only when held in integrity. It is not a mere general consensus, rather, it’s what survives after honest scrutiny. Real truth is forged not from uniformity, but from confrontation: dissent, nuance, discourse. Without integrity, the collective dissolves into a mob. 

And as Arendt warns, “The mob is not a crowd. It is the refusal to be a person.” (Origins of Totalitarianism 315). The danger is not merely believing falsehoods, but also the collapse of individual thought. When we surrender individuality for belonging, we do not deepen the truth; we atten it. We no longer remember; we echo. And in that echo, truth becomes less a matter of what happened and more a matter of what we’re willing to repeat.

The antidote is dicult, but necessary: we must learn to belong critically. Belonging oers unity, but truth gives it substance. Abandon one, and the other becomes hollow. A belonging without critique is a recipe for disaster. A truth without belonging becomes detached abstraction. 

But here’s the painful truth: many don’t drift into ignorance by choice. For some, it is inheritance—shaped by systems that never taught them how to dissent. For them, complicity is not a decision, but a design. That’s why ignorance is a matter of choice, it is a privilege. And recognizing this makes the task clearer: to act where others couldn’t. This is our responsibility. 

History Has Its Eyes on You 

What comes next of history depends on how we choose to carry what we know. 

To remember is not enough. As Nietzsche once wrote, “history must serve life, not stifle it” (On the Use and Abuse of History for Life 10–15). Too much reverence for the past can paralyze. When we reduce history to brittle preservation, we forget it was meant to guide us. History was never meant to be a museum. 

Nietzsche proposes three kinds of history. Monumental history inspires action, critical history exposes injustice & dismantles lies, and antiquarian memory roots identity (On the Use and Abuse of History for Life 10–15). If we don’t balance the three, history either weakens or oppresses us. Forgetting makes us naive, but so will holding on without clarity or agency. This aligns with Arendt’s reminder that our political life — our ability to act meaningfully in the world — depends on the integrity of thought and speech (The Human Condition 175, 184). Without it, we collapse purely into conformity (thus sacricing truth), and history becomes a spectacle instead of instruction. 

We must remember actively and wield history not as dogma or decoration, but as an ethical tool. It is not there to be worshipped. Nor to be erased. But to be understood. 

This takes discernment. It takes moral clarity. It takes refusal and the willingness to say: “this matters, and this cannot be forgotten.” 

Human history is not determined by victors alone. Eventually, it is shaped by what ordinary people choose to preserve, and what they choose to protect. This is the real weight of history’s gaze: not what has happened, but how we respond to it. 

History, then, is not a chronicle. It is a living ethical project. 

And the question is no longer whether truth exists — 

but whether we are willing — and brave enough — to carry it.