EPISTEMICIDE

Knowledge can be lost, or misplaced, or forgotten. It can also be deliberately murdered. Sometimes in history rulers have had a greedy interest in people not knowing things, not connecting the patterns. Not having the ability to detect truth by testing and experiment and comparing one experiment with another. Sometimes knowledge can be stolen to benefit a conqueror, but some conquerors want the knowledge to simply disappear so that no one can put two and two together again.

Blow up the monumental sixth-century standing buddhas in Bamiyan Valley. Raise the temperature of books to Fahrenheit 451.

Sometimes the emperor’s party seeks out scientists-artists-scholars-librarians to make it hard or even impossible for them to do their work. Sometimes, as in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the work is OK if it affirms the party line. Even if tolerated, it must be strictly monitored.

Data is collected at great effort and expense – a record of how Earth’s climate has changed, and how those changes have correlated with causes and conditions. Then one day the funding is withdrawn, the research is canceled, the lights are turned out in the lab, and the data vanishes. The research painstakingly gathered is gone. Entropy. The expertise withers. The emperor wins his prize.

Sometimes the remnants of knowledge go underground for a few years or centuries, kept in out-of-the-way monasteries and other enclaves. Sometimes those remnants peek out again in the unlikeliest of places.