About Discourse Alignment LLC
Ours is a country established by second sons, peasants, and the persecuted; our system of governance has naturally split between those who are stuck repeating the European model in their attempts to govern via the establishment of various centralized caste/class systems and those who are more dedicated to the messy and unpredictable experiment of sharing power by decentralizing amongst all citizens.
As US political discourse becomes increasingly polarized, so too do we all. Revisionist history rolled out to high schools since the 70s and reaching down into primary school curriculum around the turn of the century, has created an ever-widening gulf between generations. Isolation resulting from social media, which dramatically increased due to Covid-related lockdowns, has pulled the social threads of our nation to the limit.
Identifying significant civil rights milestones, illuminating political attribution, reconnecting the threads, and straightening everything out exposes patterns that are shockingly clear and of great interest to anyone who has begun to question their schooling and desires to think for themselves. Thus, a project to provide a historical level set, encourage constructive civil discourse, and create a forum for courteous face-to-face debate was born.
1792 Project Background
This did not start as an academic initiative; it is undertaken by a self-admittedly poor student of history whose natural skills fall more in the realm of analysis and pattern recognition. An adult passion for knowledge of exploration and first encounters was motivated, no doubt, by the nature lover and science geek within, but additionally because it provided context-rich threads of history that were effortless to internalize. What began as a hodgepodge collection of alpine, Amazonian, Arctic, and Antarctic tales of adventure soon evolved into a more structured decades-long initiative to identify explorers in chronological order and consume their biographies.
For the first few years, the reading was easy breezy and pure fun. For better or worse, knowledge was absorbed without question, but after working forward into the exploration of North America, a funny thing happened; the information encountered via reading no longer correlated very well with the information acquired via schooling. For a person who predominantly relies on visuospatial skills to organize and retain information, breaks in pattern or anomalous information are the equivalent of being screamed at, as they cannot be fully processed or ignored. So, what was going on? Something was twisted, and it became necessary to stop reading and instead take time to unwind and realign this ever-growing mass of conflicting details. A theme had emerged, and it was abundantly clear that all the troubling tidbits were directly or indirectly related to civil rights.
By this time, it was evident that the most useful histories are penned about a century (3 – 4 generations) after the fact. It’s long enough to acquire a significant scope of pertinent knowledge from a more detached, neutral perspective without yet losing direct access to the cultural context necessary for accurate interpretation. A smaller gap can lead to slanted or incomplete understanding, and much more becomes increasingly susceptible to revisionist agendas. Works by well-regarded historians of their time were identified and consumed (such as Francis Parkman for information about the 17th - 18th centuries and Bernard De Voto for the 19th century), and as US history finally began to take shape the nature of the questions changed from “Did that really happen?” to “How is it possible to have been so unaware that really happened?”
This project intends to inform those who are starting to question their schooling and prefer to think for themselves, but fair warning, be prepared for numerous assumptions to be challenged (especially for anyone who entered high school after the 70s). It’s a lot, but thus far, those who have taken the time to consume the information provided have all found it to be a worthwhile exercise and informative at some significant level.
One last thing to consider before joining this educational revolution is that the scientist and explorer for whom the most places have been named on Earth is Alexander von Humboldt, who is credited as being the father of ecology, and whose birthday used to be an international celebration. Who the heck is he? Oh, wait, he’s Prussian, therefore, too closely associated with Germany and its troubled history. Never mind that he died in 1859, 8 years before Marx published “Das Kapital”and 12 years before the foundation of the German nation-state; this association became so uncomfortable that one of the most famous and prolific scientists throughout history was successfully purged from common knowledge. So much so that Carl Sagan, a well-known American scientist of his time, published Cosmos, a book series that aired on PBS in 1980, closely mirroring Humboldt's internationally renowned 1845 - 1862 Kosmos series, without any realization of the similitude by modern audiences.
Creepily Orwellian? You bet! But more to the point, if it can happen to Humboldt, it can happen to anyone or anything. The power of modern propaganda honed throughout the 20th century unleashed a tool for suppressing uncomfortable truths that has been utilized around the world ever since, and the US is no exception. Sadly, it’s not as complicated as one might think to sweep uncomfortable truths under the rug when holding the reins of power.
