As George Orwell’s famous maxim goes, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”. Unless one accepts the most bizarre and nihilistic conclusions of Nietzschean logic, one must grant at least a moderate version of Orwell’s point. Consider first that we are what we repeatedly do; and that our possible actions are limited by our environments. That is, one could not have become a film director in the 17th century. Further, our environments are, in large part, shaped by culture and tradition—by the ways of living and thinking that have been passed down to us via record and memory. The past, by way of culture and tradition, thus sets out most of our possible choices ahead of time. To give a concrete example, most Westerners are raised in the tradition of the three-act plot structure, which determines our options and thereby influences our future output.
Although this train of thought can lead to a kind of historical fatalism, we need not endorse such extremes in order to acknowledge common sense: we can only choose what is available to choose. Our understanding of the past shapes us, for good and for ill, by shaping our knowledge of what may be chosen. One of the more terrifying examples of this process in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the Newspeak project, by which the Party gradually removes the possibility of dissent from language itself. The omnipotent state remains an impossible fiction; but cruder siblings of Newspeak—related to body image and consumerism, for example—exercise an insidious control over the day-to-day lives of most Westerners. Perhaps the deadliest and most intractable of these is the idea of progress.