How do categories of Importance or Famousness come to be? When we think of current events or events from world history, since we have limited minds, we have to abstract some list or some narrative out of Everyone Who Lived and Everything That Happened. We cannot have everyone or everything on our lists, in our minds or in the stories we tell. We don’t have that kind of mental capacity. We choose what and whom to include and exclude so that we can work with a representative sample of events and actors. A concise version of Everything. A representive sample of Everything sized to our mental capacities. The representative people and events mentioned become Famous and Important! How do we make these choices? What criteria do we apply? How do we know that we choose the right criteria for determining what and who is Important? It might not even be worthwhile deciphering the calculus we use to determine who should be Famous and Important. Our needing to edit down to pivotal events and influential actors is an artifact of our capacity to hold only a certain number of facts or ideas in mind at any given moment. We need drastically edited versions of broad scale events in order to think or talk about them. From that work-around of our limitations we form ideas that certain individuals and events - the stand-ins to represent the whole - have more significance than perhaps they really do have.
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