{
  "id": "right-side-of-history.destined",
  "term": "right side of history",
  "sense": "destined",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "published",
  "level": 19,
  "domain": "agency",
  "style": "folk",
  "definition": "A story reading history as moving toward one final state already set, so current acts are read by whether they move with it.",
  "folk_gloss": "being on the side that the future will judge to have been right",
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "story.narrative",
      "history.record",
      "motion.movement",
      "toward.spatial",
      "final.order",
      "state.condition",
      "already.temporal",
      "set.fix",
      "current.present",
      "act.deed",
      "read.information",
      "narrative.self-story",
      "model.representation"
    ],
    "interaction": "The narrative reads the whole drift of history as having a direction, then places the self's acts relative to it; a verdict that only a later time could give is borrowed now, and used as a wall on which acts are acceptable.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "drift read as direction",
      "a later verdict borrowed for current use",
      "opponents placed against time itself"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "Martin Luther King Jr. said 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice', adapting a line from Theodore Parker's 1853 sermons.",
      "domain": "history"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "doomed.inevitable",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "doomed reads a wall ahead with no maintenance; this reads an end ahead as the good one"
    },
    {
      "id": "rising-power.upward",
      "type": "contrasts-with",
      "note": "a rising power reads its own reach widening; this reads history as a whole moving"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "arc of history",
    "arc of the moral universe",
    "right side of history",
    "the arc of history",
    "the right side of history",
    "the wrong side of history",
    "wrong side of history"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "claude-opus-5-5:hand-curated",
    "date": "2026-09-29",
    "confidence": 0.85,
    "sources": [
      "schema/power-agency-phase.md"
    ]
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-right-side-of-history.destined"
}