Reinterpretation

All of those people of the past who articulated the profound ideas that influence us today, for example, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, etc” and all such utterances - we should only be so concerned with what their authors originally intended. They held slaves, they restricted the right to vote to a small subset of the population, and from a modern lens they might seem like hypocrites - but perhaps they weren’t, given their own interpretation of the words. Sometimes, it is better to simply discard the person behind the idea and receive it on it’s surface, through our own lens. We should say: not even, they, really, knew what they meant to say - it is only today, after the long course of history, that the true meaning of their words can be grasped. They were a prophet - but they were a prophet who could only see so far into the future. They were unable to understand the implications of the message they had received. They were blessed by God, by Fate, by Fortune, but they were not ready to comprehend the very message they were tasked with delivering. Pearls before swine - but it was a swine that came bearing, came offering those pearls - they themselves did not understand the true value of what they had to offer. The loftiest rhetoric is an empty vessel, waiting to be filled with the content of the recipients mind. Feel free to exploit it - everyone does, by default, even if they don’t know it. Everyone is already and all the time a revisionist. But maybe try to figure out what it is you really mean. You might be disappointed - maybe you aren’t much better than they were. When using universal language, you should ask - who am I not imagining? Who is not in the frame?