Quotation of the Day
20th January 2025
Curtis Yarvin:
What makes history hard is that you never know where you are. History is like pitch. Even most musicians only have relative pitch, not absolute (“perfect”) pitch. They can hear the distance between notes, but not the frequency of the notes.
Imagine if the political phenomenon we call “left” versus “right” worked like this. You would have no way to sense where you are absolutely on the leftright spectrum. You would only be able to position yourself relative to the local period around you.
No need to imagine—this is indeed how it works. Moreover, humans can hear only a narrow range of the frequency spectrum. Outside 20 to 20000 hertz, there is no sound per se. There is vibration, explosion, etc. When reading the past, our normal reflex is to process events inside the local spectrum as news, and those outside the spectrum as history. This is also a subjective distinction.