oligopsony

The difficulty with this concept, I think, is that when we seek social harmony, every group can theoretically represent itself, but the past can never speak for itself, it can only be spoken for. The result is that people who claim to speak for the past are usually speaking for themselves with a pretense of representing the past, in much the same way that those who claim to speak for the futute or for God are really just borrowing the prestige of those things to speak for themselves. That is, if you normalize the idea that people should honour the spirit of the past all that happens is that propagandist fictions of the past become more important. This failure state is already a serious problem among self-described traditionalists, after all.

A half-formed thought I've been nursing for a while is that the natural function of "history" in human society is as malleable, ephemeral propaganda that's all about the way it makes living people feel and not at all about accuracy, and that this function has been perverted and threatened by the rise of accurate, documented history as a field of study. That in turn makes historians among the most dangerous people in society unless they can be coaxed into prioritizing an ideological project over descriptive study.