|
How can we draw lessons from this determined history to determine the future?
Must we not first understand real history? The history of humanity is not found in what has been done to this tribe or that nation through revolutions or wars. Rather it is found within the broader frame of how mankind as a whole has been enriching itself. Nor is history a chronicle of personal or public events, reflected in the rule of kings or presidents, although this chronicle has a place in understanding the unfolding of ideas and their effect on society. The real history of mankind is found when one explores, as a science, what mankind has done to raise itself above the sod: how mankind has achieved the transition from a stone age society to one that can stand on the moon by the power of its own resources, and look upon its world and the universe, and see itself with new eyes. Universal history is the history of mankind's ideas that have enabled the human species not only to survive, but to survive successfully and multiply 5000 fold.
In this vast theatre of unfolding ideas, manifest in the lives of individuals, tribes and nations, we can learn the principles that mankind has discovered, that are reflected in its civilization. By studying this history, as a science, we can determine not only the forces by which a nation is fit to play a leading role in the world, or is unfit to survive, but also what our potential is for a bright future, or for a new dark age, and what types of policy will determine that choice.
At times the success or failure of a single idea, by a single man, has shaped the course of mankind on a global scale. One such historic idea, based on discovered principles, was formulated into a military plan by General Feldmarschall Graf von Schlieffen. He had devised a plan for winning a war that was essentially a four nation aggression (Britain, France, Belgium, and Russia) against Germany, which became World War I. Historic records indicate that if the German command had not grossly violated the principle of the Schlieffen plan, then, by all probability, this war would have been concluded within the first few weeks and the British Empire would have been finished. History, from this point on, would have been totally different. There might never have been a second world war and an atom bomb. The many tens of millions of people who died in these wars and in the calamities that followed, might have lived. We would live in a totally different world, today, if this single idea of a single man had been implemented at this critical moment.
It must never be said by anyone, even in the face of great calamity: Who am I, that I should change the world? What can a single individual do?
In the action of individuals lies the practical aspect of history. We do have the power to change the world, and to advance human civilization beyond measure if we will but care to do so.
The depth to which mankind's universal history is learned will determine whether we see our destiny in infinity and the creation of boundless prosperity, or whether we allow ourselves to regress into impotence and a dark age of poverty. It will determine our actions and reaction in respect to what must be done.
Understanding the history of mankind, and man's potential for greatness may cause us to create the conditions needed for achieving a brighter civilization than any that ever existed, or whether we see our destiny in inevitable regression, decay, devolution, and death.
The social history of mankind has been a complex interplay between dynasties, empires, and periods of renaissance where ideas and perceptions of identity, and mankind's response to these, has become manifest. All have left their mark on civilization. Even today, everyone's life is deeply influenced by what has gone on in history: by the achievements of mankind's geniuses in terms of advanced ideas and perceptions; by the destructive brutality of its worst rulers, based on a lack of ideas and correct perception; by the outcome of defective axioms and defective economics; but also by discoveries of fundamental principles that have turned poverty into riches, slavery into freedom, and opened the door to the infinite.
Next Page
|| - page index -
|| - chapter index -
|| - Exit -
||
 |
Stories
about
Healing
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
|
|
|