How did the world come to be as it is now? 

We seem to be in an extremely crazy situation.  The world is divided into roughly 200 individual units that we were raised to call ‘countries.’  Each of these countries claims that a certain part of the planet essentially belongs to it; the countries take wealth from their people and use it to build the most horrific weapons imaginable and use them to make sure that these claims are respected. 

How did the world come to work this way?

Did some group of super-intelligent people sit down when the  human race first evolved to discuss the different ways humans could organize  our existence?  Did they determine this was the best one?  Do you think that the smartest of all these people said something like, ‘I think the human race would be better off if we divided the land into various sovereign entities that fight each other to determine which of them will be the classified as the ‘owner’ of each part of the world where humans live?’ Do you think that the others were in awe of this person’s brilliance, to come up with a system so obviously good, and voted unanimously to set up the world this way? 

Or, perhaps, might this system have come to exist by some other process?  Might it have evolved over time, as humans evolved?  Might it have started with some sort of territorial instincts certain people inherited from their distant evolutionary ancestors that were then institutionalized into formal structures, perhaps through a process that no one really intended and wasn’t planned in any way?

Might we possibly have the ability to figure out how, why, when, and where the key structures of our world first came to exist?  Might we then be able to figure out how these structures evolved from their simple starting form to the incredibly powerful institutions that shape human events and are clearly pushing us toward our own extinction at a fantastic rate?

Perhaps, if we knew how we got where we are now, we may use this information to understand how the world might be working now if our ancient ancestors had made slightly different decisions.  Perhaps there are many paths that we could have taken through time and, if we understood how we got onto the path we are on, we would be able to use this information to help us understand if this is the path we—the members of the human race and inhabitants of planet earth—want to be on.  If this path does NOT take us where we want to go, perhaps we could use our understanding of the past to figure out what could be the right path if we wanted something else. 

We may use an understanding of certain key aspects of history to help us move toward a better future.  For example, there are certain very important tools that humans have built over our history that we might be able to use to our advantage if we understood them better.  If we knew how we developed them, when we developed them, why we developed them and put them to their current use, we may be able to see that we can use them for other purposes.  Many people I talk to are very depressed about the current world situation.  They think we are headed for extinction and there isn’t anything we can do about it.  Perhaps, if we had information about important matters from our past, we would realize that we actually have much greater capabilities than we appear to have when we look at them with a limited perspective. Perhaps we aren’t in as bad of a situation as we appear to be in.  Perhaps we are actually in a very good situation; if we only had the right information and knew what had to be done, we might be able to make truly momentous changes that will put the entire human race on a path to a better future. 

What events happened in the past that caused the world to work as it does now?  

We absolutely need to know this.

But this information doesn’t seem available. 

Conventional history books don’t seem to discuss it.  These books overwhelm us with details of past events that are essentially useless and do nothing to help us move toward a better world.  What good does it do us to know the names given to individual wars in an endless sequence of wars that is so long and dense that no one could ever memorize it all, even if they spent the rest of their lives doing this? What good does it do us to memorize the names and dates of key battles, the names of generals and descriptions of tactics, the dates and names of key peace treaties?  What good does it do us to memorize a list of names of people called ‘presidents’ of certain countries, together with biographies of each and details about the wars and other important events they presided over?

Children are force-fed this information over a period of more than a decade, with test after test to make sure that they can regurgitate it upon request.  They are told they are learning ‘history’ and, after they pass the test, they are told they understand history.

But have they really learned anything important?  Do they understand the big picture, the way the key institutions of the world (including countries and corporations) came to be a part of the human condition and then evolved into their current form?

How did we get here in this world?

How did the world itself come to exist?

How and when did life appear?   What are the steps in evolution that led eventually to humans? What, exactly, is a human and what are the forces that led to the development of the characteristics that we consider to be ‘human?’

How did humans live when we first evolved?

Did we immediately separate ourselves from other people with imaginary lines called ‘borders’ and start fighting over the locations of the borders?  In other words, is this system the only system humans have ever had?  Or did we start with something else?  If we had something else, how did this other type of society work?  Did it have any advantages that the systems now in place don’t have?  Can we learn anything by studying the way people lived before the systems now in place came to exist?  What sort of factors caused people to make the changes that ultimately led to the world working as it does now?

Once the systems based on countries came to exist, how did they evolve over time?  How and why did they create the institutions called ‘corporations?’  How did the corporations evolve to the point where they became capable of manipulating governments to grant them rights to destroy the world around us?  (Without an immense legal system backed by police and military forces, corporations would not be able to do the truly horrible things they do now.  People protest the activities of corporations every day; the corporate leaders take advantage of laws that protect them from the unrest and protests.  The laws require the governments to bring in their militaries to remove the protestors and they do this, even if they have to kill the protesters to accomplish this. How, when, and why did this system come to work this way?)

This book is about the big-picture items of history.  It deals with the forces and factors that caused the key structures and institutions of our world to come to exist and to evolve into their current form.  It is designed to present information in a clear and understandable manner that is objective and designed only to enlighten people about key events of the past so that they may understand how we can build a better world in the future.

 

A New Way to Analyze History

We have a lot of objective scientific information that we can use to basically reconstruct the key events of the past that made the world work as it now works.  The great majority of the tools we can use for this are brand new, so new, in fact, that we are only beginning to understand the extremely important information they are able to give us.

For example, just a few decades ago, there were no such things as ‘gene sequencers.’  Even a decade ago, the sequencers could only process tiny snippets of DNA and we knew nothing about the functions of individual genes.  Now, gene sequencers are available for prices low enough to put them into high schools. 

Students can sequence their own DNA in high school.  They can see that the code they get is identical all the time.  To verify that it represents them, they can go to their parents and ask for something they kept from childhood, perhaps a piece of their baby hair.  They can sequence it and see they are getting the same codes.  They are reading their own code.

They can then sequence DNA from others.  They can determine the exact coding differences between themselves and people around the world.  If they trust the databases, they can do this by looking up the information.  If not, they can travel to other places and take samples.  They can then look up the codes from historical people whose DNA has been sampled (King Tut, for example).  They can see how they are related to these historical people.  They can then look up the codes of neanderthals and denisovans (early proto humans; these are links in the chain from apes to humans) to determine how they, personally, differ from the proto-humans and which mixes of the coding of proto-humans they have in their own DNA. They can keep going back this way through their own ancestors and trace their heritage. 

MRI scanners are brand-new tools that help us understand how the human brain works.  College students can have access to these machines.  They can study the places in their own brains where various thoughts reside.  Using real-time magnetic images, they can track single neural discharges and map each tiny bit of electrical activity to the various parts of the mind that are affected when they think certain thoughts.  They can chart and map the brain components responsible for speech, for understanding words, for solving puzzles, for facial recognition, and for sexual desire.  They can then study the brain differences between different animals, including their own evolutionary ancestors. 

We now have tools to answer questions that, for most of history, people believed would never and could never be known.  People thought that we would never know how and when the world came to exist, how and when life came to this world, how and when humans came to this world, and what, exactly, made humans unique in the animal kingdom.  Now, we can collect data in objective ways, apply scientific tests to the data, and work out the answers to all of these questions. 

The internet gives us fantastic new tools we can use to reconstruct more recent events.  People all around the world are taking machines to personal archives and collections of books, letters, journals, and records to scan the contents onto the internet.  Computers can digitize all this and set up databases that are searchable in microseconds to find any combination of words, letters, or symbols (even in cuneiform documents from 3500BC) that is present in any of the documents.  This allows cross referencing that was never before possible.  

It also makes falsification of history so difficult as to be effectively impossible.  Do you think someone may have lied about the contents of a document from a few hundred or a few thousand years ago?  You can get the original document.  (Photographs of the 5,500 cuneiform documents are posted on the internet; if you are really cynical, you can travel to Turkey and see them in person in museums.  If you doubt the dates, you can talk to the people who dated them and they will show you their data.)     

Many cultures with written languages were wiped out so quickly that no one survived that could read their messages. 

 

 

Computer programs are helping us to crack these codes.  You can now get an app for your phone that you can use to decode the messages in the 5,500 cuneiform records that are being dug up in many parts of the world. 

This only scratches the surface of the new techniques being used, for the very first time, to reconstruct history.  We don’t have to take the words of teachers, who took the words of teachers before them, who were taught versions of history created by the entities called ‘governments’ that have strong incentives to lie about the past.  Now, if you want to know about the people who came over on the Mayflower, you don’t have to read the biased accounts that claim they were ‘pilgrims.’  You can pull up copies of their indenture agreements (they were slaves, bought and paid for by giant corporations), you can read their diary entries written in their own hands, you can read the actual ‘patents’ granted to the corporations that started the process.   You can look at the actual documents.  

Many people have made some attempts to reconstruct key events.  In his book ‘The conquest of paradise : Christopher Columbus and the Columbian legacy’ Kirkpatrick Sale reconstructs the events surrounding the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492 and compares this with standard versions of history.  He shows that the standard versions are basically nonsense, with a clear slant to make the niave children who hear this message believe things that are not true.  In the book ‘Lies My Teacher Told me,’ James Loewen goes over several other important events in American history and shows (as the name of the book implies), that the stories told in school totally misrepresent what the actual documents tell us happened.      

This book, Fact Based History, is designed to lay out a framework that explains how the world we live on came to work as it does now. 

 

Why Does This Matter?

Why do we care about history?

If we only think of history books as decorations on shelves, we don’t care; it doesn’t matter what the words say as long as the bindings are pretty and impress people who see them that the owners of these books must be smart to buy books this pretty. 

But if we want to learn from history, the existing situation is very dangerous. 

If we want to use history as a tool to help us solve very real problems, we absolutely need objective information.  The nonsense presented in politicized histories isn’t going to help us understand anything important about our world. 

This book presents a new kind of history. 

We are on a path through time.

This book attempts to go over the way we got onto this path and the track we have followed since we got on it.  It focuses on how the important institutions and structures that shape the realities of existence for humans today.  It is basically a reconstruction of the important events that led to these structures based on forensic analysis. 

This book is an attempt to help you see the achievements of the human race from a new perspective. 

You will see that the human race is an incredibly capable group of beings. 

You will also see that the limited histories we were raised with distort our perception of these abilities and make us appear to be less capable than we really are. 

You will see that human history is actually much, much longer than the conventional histories claim.  (In order to make it appear that a certain race and culture is responsible for everything, history has to start at the point that race and culture first gained dominance, and then somehow convince people that there was no history before that.)  You will see that our actual history is far richer and more varied than the conventional histories claim.  True human beings—people who may not have had the appropriate skin color or belief system to be included in histories written by the groups that ultimately conquered, but are clearly members of the genus ‘homo sapiens’ with all of the associated capabilities—have done much, much more than we have been led to believe. 

We have accomplished more. 

This means we are capable of more.

I believe that we can use history as a tool to help us understand the present and the future.  If we understand how we got where we are now, we will understand exactly where we are.  We will understand what we have to work with to make the world a better place. 

That is what this book is about.