Why History Hates Rascals
- The Winking Witch
- Mar 29
- 8 min read
WINKY:
Pull up a stool, darlings. Move those navigation charts—Jack’s been at them again. You’ve survived your first night at the Inn, which means you’re either very brave… or very lost. Either way, you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.
I’ve been watching the lanterns tonight. Funny things, lanterns. They don’t just light the room—they decide what stays in shadow.
There are people—past and present—who prefer things that way. Tidy stories. Clean edges. Heroes polished, villains clearly marked. No loose threads. No uncomfortable questions.
They’ve spent centuries trying to scrub certain voices out of the record.
We don’t do that here.
On the 13th Floor, we don’t tidy things away. We uncover them. And what we tend to find… isn’t neat.
A Report from the Vaults: The Trouble with Rascals
By The Archivist
Every culture that survives long enough eventually runs into the same uncomfortable truth: human beings are not clean creatures. We are contradictory by nature—curious and cautious, generous and self-serving, compassionate and cruel—often all at once.
The English philosopher Alan Watts often described it as the “element of irreducible rascality” in human nature—something that cannot be trained out, prayed away, or polished into virtue. It can only be acknowledged… or denied.
History suggests that denial is where things begin to go wrong.
The most dangerous people are rarely those who admit to this inner mischief.
They are usually the ones who insist they have none. Those who see themselves as pure often feel compelled to correct others—to save them, to fix them. They intervene with absolute certainty, convinced they know what is best.
There is an old parable from Eastern wisdom traditions that captures this instinct perfectly: “Kindly let me help you or you will drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree.
Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes, especially when certainty replaces understanding. Again and again, harm arrives wearing the mask of righteousness. Moral certainty creates permission—permission to judge, to punish, to erase. Once a group believes itself to be correct, anyone who complicates that certainty becomes a problem. Order demands obedience, and obedience rarely tolerates nuance.
This is where rascals and rogues enter the record.
They are not always criminals; often, they are simply inconvenient. They ask the wrong questions or behave in ways that expose the cracks in a tidy story. Their danger lies in refusal—refusal to accept that the rules are sacred simply because they exist.
II. The Pirate’s Ledger: The Radical Anomaly
Consider the pirate. Popular imagination paints them as chaotic savages, yet many crews were formed from naval sailors discarded by empires once they were no longer useful.
The Betrayal: In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht ended the War of the Spanish Succession. The Royal Navy went from 40,000 men to 10,000. Thousands of men were suddenly “surplus to requirements”—discarded without a pension.
The Democracy: Pirate crews created one of the most radical democratic systems of the early modern world—a forgotten forerunner of modern democratic thought, hidden in plain sight among men branded as criminals.
The Diversity: Estimates suggest 25% to 30% of some crews were of African descent. On a pirate ship, a Black man could be a free, voting member of the crew—a status impossible in the so-called civilized British Navy.
The Disability Pay: Long before social security, they maintained a “Common Chest.” Loss of a right arm: 600 pieces of eight. Loss of an eye: 100 pieces of eight.
The Evidence (Bartholomew Roberts’ Articles):
Article I: Every man has a vote in affairs of moment.
Article III: No person to game at cards or dice for money (to prevent infighting).
WINKY: So, the Empire uses you, bleeds you, and then kicks you to the curb because a treaty got signed? That’s not a hero’s welcome; that’s a death sentence. No wonder they flew the black flag.
III. The Land-Bound Rogues: The Highwayman
While the sailors took to the sea, their brothers-in-arms took to the mud. When the wars ended, many soldiers and cavalrymen were decommissioned.
The Skill Set: Figures like Claude Duval and Dick Turpin had a horse and a brace of pistols. With no pension and no trade, they turned those tools against the aristocrats who had sent them to war.
The “Rascal” Connection: The public loved them because the “official” economy was rigged. The highwayman was a “Redistribution Specialist”—the land-based version of the pirate.
They stole, yes—but largely from the same imperial powers who had already stripped nations bare. What made pirates and highwaymen unforgivable was not their lawlessness, but their refusal to accept the rules of sanctioned plunder. They were hunted, hanged, and written into history as scum.
IV. The Silencing of the Curious
The pattern repeats elsewhere, with remarkable consistency. Healers become witches. Philosophers become heretics.
Fray: “A ‘Healer’ is just a Witch with a better publicist." Bodkin: “Until the crop fails. Then it's: ‘Back in the pond with her!’” (They all sigh in unison. The sound of knitting needles intensifies.)
Scientists become blasphemers. Writers become corrupters of youth. Astronomers become threats to divine order. Across centuries, some of the most perceptive human minds were not silenced because they were wrong, but because they asked questions that destabilized authority. Giordano Bruno. Marguerite Porete. Alchemists, poets, inventors, and thinkers whose insight complicated a world that demanded obedience.
They were labeled rascals. Rogues. Troublemakers. Anything that made dismissal easier than engagement. History, after all, is rarely written by those who disrupt comfort. It is written by those who survive long enough to tidy the narrative.
Rascals rarely survive that process.
They ask the wrong questions. They refuse the approved version of events. They expose the cracks in systems that depend on certainty and obedience. In doing so, they become dangerous—not because they destroy, but because they reveal.
History does not hate rascals because they are reckless.
It hates them because they cannot be controlled.
V. The Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches)
The archives show a recurring pattern: the most destructive forces in history are rarely the self-admitted villains. They are the “Correct.”
In 1486, Heinrich Kramer—a man the local clergy actually thought was a bit of a lunatic—wrote the Malleus Maleficarum: a guide for detecting, prosecuting, and punishing witches, advocating torture to secure confessions.
It turned healers into targets by labeling their knowledge as a threat to the Divine Order.
The record shows that once a group decides they are 100% “Right,” anyone who complicates that truth is no longer a person—they are a problem to be solved.
The Body Count: While “millions” is a common myth, the reality is still staggering. From 1450 to 1750, there were roughly 100,000 trials and between 40,000 to 50,000 executions.
Roughly 80% of those executed were women.
The “Rascal” Connection: These weren’t just “witches.” The records show they were often midwives, healers, or women who owned land that someone else wanted. They were “rascals” because they held knowledge—medicine, property—outside the controlled systems of the State and Church.
Giordano Bruno (1600): He didn’t just suggest the universe was infinite; he suggested that every star was a sun with its own worlds. The “Correct” silenced him—gagged so he could not speak to the crowd—before he was executed by fire in the Campo de’ Fiori.
Marguerite Porete (1310): A mystic who wrote The Mirror of Simple Souls. She argued that a soul in love with God did not require the permission of a priest to exist. She was burned at the stake in Paris, her book cast into the flames with her.
Lucilio Vanini (1619): A polymath who suggested natural explanations for life that challenged religious doctrine. For the crime of “atheism,” the authorities in Toulouse had him executed, and his body burned.
Galileo Galilei (1633): The “Correct” did not want the truth; they wanted the status quo. He was forced to kneel and recant his life’s work, then kept under house arrest until his death—a prisoner in his own home for the crime of looking at the stars.
Hypatia of Alexandria (415 AD): A brilliant mathematician and astronomer. A mob, stirred by political and religious tensions, dragged her into a church and killed her. Her crime? Becoming a symbol of knowledge and influence in a city already fractured by power, belief, and the men who claimed authority over both.
VI. The Mechanism: How to Build a “Tidy” World
The pattern is clear: when a small group sits atop a mountain of people, they become obsessed with stability. To prevent the commoners from realizing they outnumber the elite many times over, the State and the Church have historically relied on a three-pronged toolkit.
1. The Distraction (Bread and Circuses)
The Roman satirist Juvenal coined the term Panem et Circenses. He observed that as long as the Roman mob had cheap grain and violent games, they did not concern themselves with the loss of political liberty.
Fray: “Makes you look at your season ticket or sports channel subscription in a slightly different way, doesn’t it?” Bodkin: “Anything that distracts you from questioning your tax return or those cheeky pay slip deductions.” Spindle: “Wait... what’s a sports channel?”
2. The Fear (The Public Spectacle)
When distraction fails, you use the “Extreme Example.” This is why executions weren’t held in secret; they were held in the town square. The gallows and the pyre weren’t just for punishment—they were a public display of the State’s power.
3. The Division (Divide and Rule)
If distraction keeps people passive, division keeps them apart. A population that might otherwise recognise its shared position can instead be encouraged to fracture—by class, by creed, by region, by grievance. The focus shifts sideways, neighbour against neighbour, rather than upward toward those holding power.
History offers no shortage of examples. Differences that might have coexisted are sharpened into conflicts that cannot. Suspicion replaces solidarity. Once divided, even overwhelming numbers struggle to act as one.
Fray: “Strange, isn’t it? The people with the least to fight over seem to do the most fighting.” Bodkin: “Keeps them busy. Hard to notice who’s picking your pocket when you’re arguing with your neighbour.” Spindle: “Wait… we’re supposed to be on the same side?”
WINKY:
He doesn’t mince words, does he? But he’s right.
The stories that survive the ‘polishing’ are rarely the ones worth telling. And let’s be honest, darlings—it would be a bit ridiculous of us to sit here in the Inn, talking about how voices from the past were silenced for not conforming, and then go ahead and muzzle ourselves just to please a system that prefers things tidy.
We know the risks. We know the ‘Smug Monks’ of the algorithm might hide this lantern under a very large, very heavy bucket.
The hammer never really disappeared. It just changed hands. These days, it doesn’t burn—it silences. Different tools, same instinct.
But a rascal doesn’t ask for permission to speak—and we certainly aren’t going to start now.
We aren’t here to be popular. We’re here to be real.
I’m filing this under ‘The Foundation.’ Consider it the ground you’re standing on while you’re here at the Inn. Now that you know why we do what we do—and why some would rather you didn’t hear it—we can start diving into the specifics of who else is hiding in these records.
Stay rebellious. The shadows are listening… and despite what the gatekeepers think, they finally have something worth hearing.
That is exactly the point, isn’t it?
If the price of “growth” is wearing a muzzle and using plastic words, then the growth isn’t worth the soul you sold to get it.
— Winky
For those who refuse to be a tidy story.
