Interfering with history - culture version

Cafe Society
1

There have been a fair few threads in the past here on the best ways to meddle with history - what small change could you make that would have a big effect downstream? These tend to home in on either swinging the outcome of significant battles, or carefully chosen assassination. Other solutions often focus on an individual - e.g. getting Hitler into art college, stopping Lenin from going back to Russia. This is all fine, but it’s a little sanguinary and it lacks the big picture view.

I think we can take a more pacific, yet more sweeping approach. Culture underpins everything a society achieves or fails to achieve, as we all learnt from Civilization. An individual might win a battle, or invent a new kind of pump. But societies are more or less militaristic, more or less innovative, more or less insular. Ethics, economics, equality - they’re all driven by shared cultural heritage. Change the culture, and you change the whole sweep of a nation’s - or a continent’s - history.
So, what changes would you make to the development of culture (e.g. art, music, literature, dance, video games, Saturday morning cartoons - we define the term broadly) to have the biggest effect on historical outcomes today? Which works or artists would you influence to change the way the modern world thinks? You can wield your influence largely how you like, be it changing the mind of the artist/composer/writer before or during composition, slyly editing the work before publication, even getting them drunk and writing/making the whole damn thing yourself. Points will not be awarded (because how would that work) but if they were it would be for magnitude of change, efficiency (i.e. changing just one word vs rewriting the whole damn thing), style, technical difficulty and fun. (Please note, there is no requirement to change the world for the better, you monsters)

2

I’m going to start with a trip to Ancient Greece. The Iliad, of course, is one of the foundational texts of Western civilisation, whose impact can still be felt today. In this exercise, we’re gunning for that rugged individualist, Achilles. He plays by his own rules. He gets kicked off the force for insubordination. His stubborn insistence on his rights over the good of the greater cause gets his [del]best friend[/del] lover killed. He goes on a righteous rampage of revenge over the misfortune he caused by his selfishness, and dies a glorious death.

Fuck that guy. What we need is a foundational tale that treats the unruly maverick like the problem he is, and focuses instead on the team players who are prepared to forgo the benefits to themselves in order to get the job done. People who respect hierarchy. People who aren’t arrogant enough to believe that they are more important than the system. Round pegs in round holes.

Obviously, what with their being no actual Homer, it’s going to be difficult to influence the composition of the Iliad. But, in some ways that makes our job easier. Step 1 - we go back to c.9C BC and start seeding our own alternative Iliads. Step 2 - we fast forward to the earliest transcriptions of the poem, and make sure the written record reflects our preferred view.

Result: I expect a number of effects, ranging from the trivial to the fundamental. At the latter end of the scale, we’ll have a new plot structure for cop movies. On the trivial end, we’ll create a communitarian society that disregards innovation, disparages dissent and limits individual rights and self-expression. But that’s a small price to pay for ending the valorisation of so-called heroes who spend more time whinging about how badly they’re being treated than actually doing the goddam job.