Historiai

The assassination of Philip II is one of the most contentious murders in history. While it is certain that Pausanias was the man who actually committed the deed and stabbed Philip, the question of who, if anyone, put him up to the crime is massively debated. This might seem rather odd. How is it that such a well-documented and public assassination, committed in front of hundreds of people, is such a hotly debated topic?

To answer that question, one need only look at the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt. This event was committed in an age of cameras, with thousands of witnesses present, with metadata that can pinpoint events down to the second, and yet the precise course of events is already being debated. Already conspiracy theories are emerging: the secret service allowed it to happen, there were multiple shooters, etc. These will only become more prevalent and detailed over time. They are, almost certainly, untrue. But this is besides the point, the point is that we are conspiratorial beings. When events like this happen, simple explanations do not seem adequate enough for us to be accepted. The reality is likely that the Trump assassination attempt happened because of incompetence, but this is not an explanation that feels satisfying, and it does not feel like a complete narrative. The reality is that people commit assassinations for varying reasons and they are often simple: they want to enact a change in politics, they hate the target, or they want fame, perhaps a combination of the three. This particular shooter seems to have been motivated by a desire for fame and infamy. The problem is that, for many people, this motivation is not commensurate with the act. The act of trying to assassinate a president is colossal, a historical landmark of an event, and so we want there to be an equally impactful motivation behind the act. This is why people create conspiracy theories, they are trying to make sense of a situation which they find to be nonsensical.

In millennia to come there will be historians who analyse the Trump assassination attempt. Those historians are going to be coming across many of these conspiracy theories and the progress of time will have blurred the line between what is fact and what is theory. When considering why it happened, they will no doubt come across the evidence that the shooter acted purely for infamy, but they will also find numerous other explanations: that it was a Democrat backed attempt to kill Trump, that it was a false flag operation, etc. These conspiracy theories will persevere and be preserved for precisely same reason that they are created in the first place: they provide a more “satisfying” narrative. It will be interesting to see how later historians tackle this problem. The conspiracy theories will effectively ‘muddy the water’ making it extremely difficult to get a clear picture of what really happened. After all, how will a historian thousands of years in the future know whether to believe the narrative of their being only one or two shooters? Such confusion is certain, despite us living in the best documented and most information rich period of human history.

To turn back to the assassination of Philip II, these conspiracy theories will again have proliferated. There will have been countless theories trying to provide a satisfying answer, tonnes of finger pointing, and political grandstanding. Almost as soon as the event happened, the truth of what actually happened was fated to be lost. Just as with the Trump assassination attempt, the one person who knew everything about why it happened, the perpetrator, was killed. It was left to everyone else to try and piece together what had happened and inevitably, they fell victim to the same thing we do today, wanting  an incredible narrative to match the incredible event. This confusion was certainly present in ancient Macedonia. The first few months after Philip’s death were one of chaos, particularly for his son Alexander, as numerous culprits seemed to spring forward from all directions. He would have been bombarded by explanations from those around him about how it had happened, all of which would have been fuelled by their own agendas. The truth was lost to him from the start.

The same process is happening now with the Trump assassination attempt. So much information and misinformation has already been catapulted into the public sphere that the truth, for all intents and purposes, is lost. No doubt, there will eventually emerge a narrative that is true, that does actually describe what happened and why. But the point is that people will not know which of the many narratives is the true one. The one put forward by official sources will be unsatisfying, it will be about incompetence and a desire for fame. The one put forward by non-official sources will be more exciting, conspiracies and plots. The boringness of the official narrative will mean that it wont be trusted be some, and the conspiracy theories will not trusted by others who think it too dramatic. As a result, the issue will effectively no longer be which of these narratives it the most accurate, it will be which of these appeals to you the most? Just as with Philip II, the truth of what happened became unknowable almost immediately after the assassin was killed.