Foundation is a complex TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s series of famous sci-fi novels. The show spans hundreds of years, and few characters remain present throughout. One of the elect few, Gaal Dornick, understands a little more than the average figure about Hari Seldon’s plan to prevent society from going back to the Dark Ages for 30,000 years.
According to psychohistory, a new, socio-mathematical field of study Seldon discovered, with a “foundation,” an archive of human knowledge, it’s possible to shrink the oncoming collapse of the Empire to just 1,000 years. To that end, Seldon puts a century-spanning plan in place—and it needs more than one backup to work out.
At first his biggest fan, Gaal eventually realizes that Hari makes plenty of unpopular choices to see his plan through, including telling people just what they need to hear to act in the bigger picture’s interest. At one point, Gaal muses about all the lies, stories, and visions the differing sides try to push along with their agendas: “Ask a historian, ‘What was mankind’s greatest invention?’ Fire? The wheel? The sword? I would argue it’s history itself. History isn’t fact. It’s narrative, one carefully curated and shaped. Under the pen strokes of the right scribe, a villain becomes a hero, a lie becomes the truth.”
What do we tell our children? What do we censor? What do we emphasize, and what do we minimize? Our own personal history, our family’s, and the history of mankind at large. It’s all “an act of addition and subtraction,” Gaal concludes. She relates a quote from “a wise man:” “A people without history is like a tree without roots.” But what did that wise man know? What was missing or added to his history?
If history, as the saying goes, is written by the victors, none of us can believe everything we’re told. “When all the facts fall short of believability, fantasy feels reassuringly solid,” Gaal says. “History is the ultimate weapon, because it harnesses time itself. Used correctly, the past can alter the present. What other invention can do that?”
There is, however, one empowering ray of light in all of this: While you are alive, you are writing your own history. You get to decide what you believe has been subtracted, and what’s been added. Plus, you can create your own parts.
History is complicated—but it’s also largely out of our control. Will someone else turn it against you? Perhaps. But what you can do is choose how you act. Right here. Right now. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
History may be the ultimate weapon, but it’s not the only one capable of “harnessing time itself.” Direct your long stream of seconds with intention, and you’ll never encounter life unarmed.
