“Who dares wins” is of course the motto of the Special Air Service, later adopted by similar forces in other countries, and a brief internet search suggests that the motto was invented – in English – by its founder, David Stirling, early in WWII. No, it isn’t Thucydides, and not just because he didn’t write in Latin. Total bollocks – obviously I’m talking about that final sentence – but it turns out to be interesting total bollocks. The hidden truth of Aude sapere (Kant’s ‘Dare to know’) is Audet adipiscitur (Thucydides’ ‘Whoever dares, wins’). In 2017, we should finally embrace our responsibility for the post-truth world and call forth our vulpine spirit to do something unexpectedly creative with it. While it is possible to defer democracy by trying to deflect attention from the naked power dynamics, as Latour does, with fancy metaphysical diversions and occasional outbursts in high dudgeon, those are leonine tactics that only serve to repress STS’s foxy roots. I’m grateful to over on the Twitter for bringing a quote from a blog by one Steve Fuller on Post-Truth and the STS Symmetry Principle to my attention: Increasingly, the most interesting aspect of investigating fake or dubious Thucydides quotes on the internet is not establishing their fakeness (Morley’s Law: the majority of quotations attributed to Thucydides on the internet fall into one of three categories: not quite what he said, not really what he meant, or not actually Thucydides at all) but exploring the processes by which anyone came to believe in them in the first place, and what this tells us about the cultural image of Thucydides.
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