They and their hidden knowledge

Someone recently brought this to my attention: back in April, a socialist MP in the UK tweeted out this map, showing the division of territory in Africa among the powers attending the Berlin Conference of 1884:

Her gloss on the map: “This map has been hidden from you all your life. This is how they carved up Africa”

Punctuation aside, I have questions. First of all—and a useful question with which to begin any discussion of paranoia—who is “they”? I ask because, based on my reading of both professional and amateur conspiracists, I’ve been impressed with how much “they” have been able to accomplish over the centuries.

But also, note that the first sentence above is passive: “This map has been hidden.” Who is the subject doing the hiding? Is that “they”? Is it the same “they” in the next sentence? Or did one “they” carve up Africa knowing another “they” would hide the evidence?

But the kicker is the idea that the Berlin Conference—which lasted over three months and had fourteen countries in attendance, which brought about results that were manifest immediately and for decades afterward, which has been taught as one of the most important geopolitical events of the Victorian era ever since, and which has Britannica and Wikipedia articles and many nicely designed maps readily available right there in Google Images—was somehow “hidden.”

The best response I saw to this set of vague insinuations: “So hidden that it was in my 8th grade social sciences classroom.”

But of course, insinuation and outrage bait is the game now, because people are ignorant and the frisson of discovering secret gnosis is everything. It’s the ignorant, the people who didn’t pay attention in school, that this kind of thing—everything from Howard Zinn to the 1619 Project and its supposedly patriotic counterparts to that deconstruction of the “heroic Anglo myth” of the Alamo I mentioned recently, none of which brings in any new information but relies on the reader’s ignorance to effect shock—is designed to work on.

So, a pro tip: Just because you haven’t been paying attention doesn’t mean someone is hiding something from you.

This is a cultural problem—starved of the revealed and transcendent, we crave occult knowledge and this-worldly insights—but it is also a failure of our educational system. Per CS Lewis, in a quotation I can’t believe I haven’t used on this blog before: “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.”