What If...Our History Has Been Distorted By Collective Amnesia?

In the Digital Age, it might be easier than ever to Memory Hole the past

Here at the Bigger Picture we love to play with ideas.

Many of the topics I write about deal with topical issues and events, but sometimes it’s important to just sit back, take a deep breath, and ask ourselves:

“What if…?”

I did this a lot in the early stages of my awakening, when I was just beginning to suspect that the world I lived in wasn’t the world I was told I lived in. As my curiosity ramped up I would quietly noodle thoughts and questions I dared never voice out loud, even with my closest friends or colleagues. I kept them to myself.

Those “what if”questions didn’t always lead to answers, and in many cases I still don’t know if they led me to the truth. But I can honestly say that some of the far-out thoughts I tossed around in my head for years — ideas that once seemed like crazy “conspiracy theories”— have proven to be not so crazy. From claims that the U.S. government has been hiding evidence of UFOs (that now appear to be true) to allegations of government “shadow” censorship on Twitter (that also appear to be true), it’s becoming pretty clear that we’re living in a world where the unthinkable isn’t always, well, unthinkable.

Which is why I’m inviting you to join me in occasionally asking: “What if…?”

I’ll kickstart our journey with a question inspired by a recent conversation with a friend wherein I had my first brush with a phenomenon I’d always heard about but had no direct, personal experience with: the Memory Hole.

If you’ve read George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, you might recall that the Ministry of Truth (er, propaganda) systematically re-created “potentially embarrassing historical documents,” essentially re-writing history to match ever-changing state propaganda. Remarkably, these changes were completely undetectable to the masses. In essence, the Ministry erased memories.

I didn’t think this was possible — until last week.

Joan is a dear friend and an intelligent, educated, and vivacious woman who spent many years teaching English and anthropology. Last week she joined us for dinner, and afterwards we sat around the table engaging in lively conversation (and some healthy debate). At some point, the discussion turned to the one thing most sane people avoid talking about these days: the pandemic.

Joan, who’s always been a follow-the-science kind of woman, has never been on the same page with me and my partner, Lisa, about many aspects of the pandemic. But we’ve agreed to let bygones be bygones. Even so, I couldn’t resist sharing the latest bombshell trending in the lab leak saga. According to multiple U.S. government officials, researchers working inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology were the first to be infected with the COVID-19 virus. This meant that Patient Zero wasn’t a bat in a wet market; it was a group of scientists. It was yet more evidence that the lab leak claim wasn’t a “conspiracy theory” after all.

Then Joan said something that blew us away:

“Why is that such a big deal? Everyone knows the virus came from a lab.”

You could have knocked us over with a paper clip.

“Actually…that’s not what we were told for the past few years,” I said. “Anyone who thought COVID came from a lab was called a loon or a racist. From the very beginning the story was that the virus came from a wet market.”

Joan crinkled her nose, confused. “Really? I don’t remember anyone saying that.”

Lisa and I exchanged confused looks. Was she serious?

“Joan, you don’t remember hearing that the virus came from a bat or some animal at a wet market in Wuhan?” Lisa asked. “And when Trump claimed it came from a Chinese lab they called it a conspiracy theory? It was all over the news.”

“But we always knew it came from a lab,” Joan insisted. “Where did you hear anything about it being a conspiracy theory? That’s just crazy.”

I picked up my phone, and in the span of sixty seconds I pulled five articles. I handed my phone to Joan. She looked blankly at the screen for several minutes, quietly scrolling through the articles, not saying a word. Finally she handed the phone back to me and sighed.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “This is the first I’m hearing about it.”

Now, Joan’s response was shocking and puzzling for a couple of reasons. Throughout the pandemic, Lisa and I had several conversations with her about the origins of the virus. We debated whether the U.S. government was indirectly involved in gain-of-function research that may have led to COVID-19, or if the virus was the product of natural evolution.

But even if we hadn’t had those conversations, it seemed inconceivable that Joan wouldn’t have heard about the wet market story and the lab leak “conspiracy theory” from some source. If she’d been living off-the-grid in the Yukon with no contact with the outside world, then yeah, it might have been plausible. But a woman who follows-the-science and reads The New York Times and The Washington Post cover to cover every day? It made no sense.

It wasn’t until later that night that it hit me: Joan had Memory Hole’d the wet market story and the lab leak “conspiracy theory.” As far as she was concerned — in her reality — they had never happened.

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

The incident with Joan got me thinking.

The pandemic was one of those rare events that consumed nearly everyone on the planet. If you’re an American and over the age of 30, you probably remember where you were on 9/11. But if you were living in Fiji, you might be forgiven for not having such a vivid memory of the event.

Not so with the COVID-19 pandemic. Like a global war, it was a collective experience we all experienced at the same time; the memories of billions of people were formed almost simultaneously. From lockdowns in 2020 to the re-opening of society two years later, people from all walks of life, all around the world, slogged their way through one of the most traumatic and stressful episodes in modern human history together.

So how was it possible, a mere three years later, that Joan’s memory of the origin of the virus, itself, was diametrically opposed to ours?

When I started digging, I realized Joan wasn’t the only one falling down this Memory Hole. Over time, experts have gradually shifted their perspective on COVID-19’s origin. By now, most accept that the virus almost certainly escaped from a lab. Even the FBI agrees. They’ve conveniently forgotten how outrageous the claim seemed even a year ago.

But it turns out that people have been re-writing other parts of pandemic history in their minds — and they’ve had help doing it. Let’s take a trip down Memory Lane, shall we?

Remember back in late 2020, when the world was desperate to abandon lockdowns and get “back to normal”? We were repeatedly told that vaccination was the only way to make that happen. Dr. Anthony Fauci was the leading voice on this front. In early 2021, he insisted that vaccinated people would become “dead ends” for the virus.

President Biden emphatically claimed in a July 2021 town hall that “[y]ou’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

Even MSNBC host Rachel Maddow did her part, confidently and passionately assuring us that “the virus stops with every vaccinated person… The virus does not infect them.”

On and on it went.

The problem isn’t that these people were wrong; anyone can get it wrong because we’re all human. The problem is that these people now expect us to forget that they got it wrong. They want us to purge our memories. Over time, the narrative has slooooowly shifted to create a completely different set of memories in our minds.

By the end of 2021, the media began messaging the idea that the vaccines “never promised perfection” and were never guaranteed to prevent infection (Hmmm. So…what part of “you won’t get infected” did we misunderstand?).

Then the Memory Hole deepened.

Last Fall, news broke that Pfizer CEO Alfred Bourla admitted the vaccines were never tested for their ability to stop transmission (and it wasn’t just Pfizer; it turns out none of the COVID-19 vaccines were tested for transmission). Within days, however, the media reminded us that this wasn’t such a shocking revelation — because we’d always known the vaccines hadn’t been tested for transmission.

Say what?

Anyone who had trouble reconciling this with their memory of the recent past was greeted with a slew of snippy fact checks that slapped the story with a “false” or “out of context” rating. They gently reminded us that neither the government nor Pfizer ever claimed to have studied the vaccine’s ability to stop transmission during initial clinical trials. A few particularly condescending fact checks even chided us for not reading information that was clearly available in press releases published by the European Medicines Agency and Pfizer’s own trials (which, of course, no one actually bothered to read because “experts” were so busy assuring us that the vaccines would keep us from getting infected).

But fact checks aside, anyone with common sense had to ask themselves how any of this squared with vaccine mandates. Why would governments and employers insist that billions of people get jabbed — to keep others “safe” — with a vaccine that had never been tested for transmission?

From there, the Memory Hole got deeper.

Within a year, we were reminded that the vaccines that were supposed to keep us from getting infected in the first place were really only designed to keep us from getting sick, and then to just keep us from getting really sick and dying — because that’s what mattered most (note: since this is clearly no longer the case, we should probably expect our memories to get adjusted again soon).

Oh, and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is already digging the next level of the Memory Hole. Two months ago he reminded Canadians that he didn’t actually “force” them to get vaccinated; he merely provided “incentives” to encourage them to get vaccinated. (Hmmm. “Incentives” like being able to keep their jobs, attend college, travel in and out of the country, dine indoors, attend indoor events, or work out at a gym, right? Otherwise, no need to get vaccinated).

It’s not hard to see where the Memory Hole might take us from here. In the coming years, would we be surprised to hear that lockdowns never really happened (“essential” businesses remained open, so technically we could leave our homes)? Or that no one ever forced us to mask (we were just given “incentives” to cover our faces)?

Believe it or not, the COVID pandemic isn’t the first time we’ve Memory Hole’d a major event. Most Americans were taught that the U.S. “won” World War II in Europe with our heroic efforts on Normandy Beach. Astute historians, however, remember that Russia turned the tide of the war and enabled an Allied win. Stalin sacrificed 5 million soldiers in the brutal winter siege of Stalingrad, paying the “butchers bill” that crippled the Nazi army and left it ripe for defeat.

How many Americans remember this? Very few. This ugly factoid has been Memory Hole’d in favor of a glamorous recollection of Western valor.

And the 1918 Spanish flu that supposedly originated in Spain and was brought to the U.S.? Another Memory Hole. In fact, the pandemic started on a military camp in Kansas, quickly spread to other camps, and was carried to Europe.

This begs the obvious question: if events of such magnitude can be forgotten or reimagined, how might this affect other parts of our history? What else has been re-written in our collective memories?

More important, could aspects of our shared, contemporary experience be Memory Hole’d in the future, events that will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s history? Will we even Memory Hole parts of our language? We’re already seeing words re-defined in real time. During the pandemic, the CDC changed the definition of a vaccine (so going forward, we shouldn’t expect any jabs to keep us from actually getting infected; they’ll do the job if they simply “stimulate” an immune response ). Will we forget that once upon a time “science” told us that there were only two sexes? Or that “white supremacists” used to be, well, white?

Ultimately, our only real grasp of history lies in our collective memories, passed down in written and oral form through generations. But physical books are quickly disappearing from shelves and being replaced by their digital equivalents, and films and photos caught on celluloid are disintegrating with the passage of time. Artificial intelligence is even replacing journalists and will soon dictate what news we hear (or don’t hear).

We’re rapidly moving into the age of Digital History.

Yes, people with memory spans longer than that of a chimp or a bee can still confirm their recollection of the past with Google searches. But in an era of rampant censorship aimed at preventing “misinformation,” when it’s easier than ever to erase events and voices, could the facts and soundbites I’ve captured in this article…completely disappear at some point in the future?

What if…Big Tech and AI can completely rewrite out history by Memory Hole-ing our digital past?

I don’t know the answer. Maybe I’m completely off base. But I think these are questions worth asking. What do you think?