Our ancestors put us on a path that leads to the extinction of our race.  We can all see the end in the distance.  We don't have to stay on this path.
          If we want to find a better path into the future, we need to understand where we are and how we got here.  Conventional histories don’t seem able to provide this information.  They are built on fairy tales that try to mix magic with science and leave out any information that isn’t consistent with the perspective they are trying to create.  We need something better.  We need a history based on hard facts and evidence.  That is what Fact Based History is about. 

 

Fact Based History 
A Forensic (Fact-Based) Analysis of Our Past

 

How did we, the members of the human race get where we are now?

We are in a dangerous situation: 

Our world is divided into roughly 261 of the entities we call ‘countries.’  These ‘countries’ act a lot like the troops of territorial apes that were our evolutionary ancestors:  They fight over territory using the organized mass murder events that we were raised to call ‘wars.’

Wars are fantastically costly, more so than any other human activity.   According to the World Economic Forum, war costs have averaged about $14.4 trillion a year over the past few years. This is about 14.4% of the value of everything produced on the entire planet.   (The global GDP, a measure of the total production of everything, is about $100 trillion a year.) 

To provide resources for the wars, the leaders of the countries create, sponsor, and protect organizations that work actively to rape the world of anything that might be useful to the combatants.  We call these organizations ‘multinational corporations.’  The country administrations don’t just support destructive activity with legal and military protections.  They actively subsidize them, taking wealth from their people as taxes and giving it to the corporations, with the rewards tied directly to their destruction.  According to the World Bank, subsidies paid to global destroyers total about $6 trillion per year.  This means that, between payments to destroyers and wealth wasted on organized mass murder events, a fifth of everything the world produces is used to pay people to harm, destroy or kill things or people that we care about.

We humans are strange beings.

If we judge our priorities by the resources that we devote to different projects, the only thing we seem to want more than to destroy the world around us is to wipe out as many of our fellow human beings as we can. 

But there is much more going on than meets the eye.  We are not doing these horrible things because we want them to happen.  We live in societies that operate in ways that tie our hands.  They don’t give us the freedoms we would need to organize a global plan to make the world better. Decisions made by people in the past have forced us to live a certain way.  We have become the tools; the ‘establishment’ has become the master. We do what it tells us to do, not the other way around.

How did this situation come to exist? 

How did these strange systems come to exist?  (They are strange, as you will see when you understand other options and can compare them.) Once they did exist, what series of events caused them to become the systems that are around us now?

We need to know this.

We can only control our future if we can understand where we are now.  We can only understand this if we understand how we got here.

 

The Failures of Conventional Histories

 

We all had classes in something called ‘history’ in school. 

For most of us, these classes provided the background for our understanding of the past.  But the histories we learn in school don’t provide a solid foundation that we can use to support an understanding of the present.   It doesn’t present an objective and unbiased analysis of the way the human race came to be exist (which most don’t even discuss), how the realities of the world came to work as they do (for example, how the things called ‘countries’ came to exist), and why these things happened. 

The histories I was taught, the ones I read, and the ones people presented me with after I was an adult, don’t seem to make any serious effort to help us understand the really important issues.  In fact, they don’t even acknowledge that key periods of history existed.  For example, we know about when and how the solar system came to exist. We know the first evidence of ‘life’ existed.  How long was the intermediate period?   What was the Earth like during this period?  They don’t discuss the first life forms.  We actually have a great deal of hard scientific evidence about this.  We need to start somewhere to understand human history.  This seems like a good starting place.  You can find thousands of volumes of data on this, all of which goes together very well.  Yet the standard books written for ordinary people don’t even mention it. 

They don’t discuss the most dramatic transition in earth history, the ‘great oxygenation event’ that took place about 2.4 billion years ago.  Complex life forms, including all beings with ‘cells,’ can’t survive without the oxygen that suddenly appeared at this time.  This made complex life possible.  How did it happen?  They don’t discuss how this event led to a very diverse and prolific ecosystem.  This is the very system that we, modern humans, are destroying at this time.  How can we hope to understand what is happening when we destroy this system if we don’t understand what happened to cause it to exist in the first place?  

We don’t need a full and complete scientific understanding of these matters to understand why the world works as it does.  But we do need a basic idea.  With the internet and AI, you go into as much detail as you want once you understand the basics.  You don’t have to understand the science, AI can verify it supports the things you understand and explain it to you.  But you can’t need something.  You can’t build understanding on absolute ignorance.  It is critically important to understand that there is an ecosystem for us to destroy for a reason and to have some idea what this reason is. 

Perhaps the most glaring omission of conventional history concerns how we got here.  In this sentence, ‘we’ means humans).  There was a time when there were no beings that a reasonable person would classify as ‘humans’ on this planet.  (You could set common sense standards here:  you can tell if you encounter another animal if it is an ape or a human.)   There was a time when there were no ‘higher primates.’  (Scientists have defined this term; it refers to the most intelligent of the apes, like gorillas and chimpanzees.)  Something happened to cause a transition from the ‘time when there were no humans but were primates’ to the ‘time when there were humans.’  Scientists actually know a lot about this 6.7 million year period in history.  It is basically a giant hole in our understanding of the past. 

When you understand what happened in this period, you will see that it isn’t really possible to understand the human experience without having some idea about this period in the past.  We need to know how the beings called ‘humans’ got here.  We need to know about the ancestry of these humans.  We need to know how the ancestors lived.  Do we live similarly?  If so, we have some idea why we do the apparently insane things we do.  How much information do we have about how the evolutionary ancestors of modern humans lived?  (We will see we know an enormous amount about this.  You won’t find it in history books written for ordinary people, but the information is there.) 

We know that humans now live in very dangerous ways.  We organize ourselves into ‘countries’ with borders.  We use organized warfare (mass murder and destruction on an unlimited scale) to enforce national sovereignty (absolute rights for people born inside the group that inherited control of land) over the territory inside of these borders.  We aren’t passive or reasonable in this area:  we are willing to sacrifice anything to protect our groups ‘national sovereignty.’  (If this weren’t true, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction would not exist.)   Where did this behavior come from? 

 

The standard explanation given in the roughly 55% of the areas of earth with Abrahamic religions says it started suddenly.   Everyone was getting along nicely.  They people of the world (back when the population was small) were working together to build a tower in a city called ‘Babel.’  For some reason, a superbeing that lived in the sky was offended by something about this effort.  This being, who I was raised to call ‘Jehovah,’  cast a spell that made people confused, unable to understand each other, and unable to agree on much of anything.   They then wanted off into the desert to form groups that became tribes.  These tribes disagreed on almost everything.  They eventually got land and fought over it. 

This explanation is no explanation at all.  Saying ‘its magic’ is something a cruel adult might say to a child to shut her up.  It is designed to close conversation, not enlighten or inform about anything.

 

This hole in our understanding of history doesn’t have to exist.  Science can provide evidence of all periods in history, including this critical one.  We need this information.  To quote Socrates, ‘the most important part of any process is the beginning.’  How can we understand where we are and how we got here if we have to start immediately before the present time, after everything that caused problems was already in place, and have no idea how the process started?  

We will see that, if we want to understand this period in history, we have to explore a part of our history that seems to be an embarrassment to the people who document our past.  They are ashamed of it.  To avoid having to admit that humans are something they don’t want to accept we are, they either have to pretend that large parts of our past didn’t take place, or replace it with the simplistic and childish explanation:  ‘its all magic.’  

We don’t have to have this hole in understanding.  We can fill it.  If our ancestors went through embarrassing periods, we have to accept this.  (You were a baby once.  You did some things then that you don’t do now.)  We are in a very dangerous situation.  We need to get out of it.  That has to be our first priority.  We need to put aside our fear, our arrogance, our embarrassment, or whatever it is that makes us want to look at history selectively and accept the truth.  Later, after we are on firm ground, we can take the time to worry about our self image. 

We will see, in the course of this book, that there are reasons for our world works as it does.  It is not a mystery and not magic.  Forces pushed us from behind starting before humans evolved, to act certain ways.  We have evidence about how these forces worked.   All of the institutions important in our came to exist for reasons.  They evolved into their current form for reasons.  If we understand the background, we will be able to understand everything we see around us.  We will know why we are in our current situation.  This will give us the information we need to choose a path to a better future. 

 

A Heretic Looks at History

 

Fact Based History is presents a non-conventional view of our past.  Many people—probably most people—are going to have negative emotional reactions to some of this information. 

The part of history that conventional historians leave out is the ‘bad’ part.  It is the part that paints the human race and the global establishment in a bad light.  It shows that we, humans, are not in-flesh versions of divine beings, created though an act of love.  We are extremely primitive animals who evolved from even more primitive animals.  We have only a few human qualities that make us capable of living in ways that other animals can’t. 

Part of us wants to accept the histories that make us believe we are much better than objective history tells us we are.  Many people will want to try to rationalize or make excuses for past events.  They want to take each war and other horrible event and come up with some sort of explanation that holds it is an anomaly.  We are good beings.  We are moral and kind and empathetic.  We don’t do these things, at least not voluntarily.  Each horrible thing we do is the side effect of a freak event that is an anomaly.  Evil breaks out and infects some people.  We want to believe that the system we have now (the global integrated establishment; the system that Orwell called ‘Oligarchic Collectivism’) is built on an attempt to bring freedom, justice, liberty, democracy, and universal human rights to the world and human race.  We want to believe that the things we call ‘countries’ are paradises where all our needs are met by benevolent, kind, and loving governments with the assistance of higher powers (or single ‘power’ for those who grew up in monotheist countries) as a result of endless love. 

These histories pander to us.  They let us believe the things we want to believe.  But it isn’t the truth.  Our global system is divided into individual tribal systems that strongly resemble the tribal systems of apes and our other evolutionary ancestors.  This resemblance is not a coincidence, as you will see when you start to understand what happened during the period conventional histories ignore.  These societies are brutal and violent for a reason:  the same forces that acted on our evolutionary ancestors to make them brutal and violent act on us and make us brutal and violent. 

We can control these forces if we understand them.  But many people don’t really want to.  They want to think of the systems they live in as sound and well-designed (something conventional histories either state or strongly imply) their leaders as good, loving, benevolent, and altruistic, and the people on the other side of imaginary lines as evil monsters who deserve nothing but the most horrible deaths we (the people on our side of the line) can impose on them.  As long as they can keep their minds from understanding the truth about the past, they can hold on to their animal side, feel their ancestors did the right thing, and feel they are doing the right thing by acting the same way as their ancestors. 

I want to ask a favor.  I want to ask you to try to understand the purpose of this book.  

It is not an attempt to criticize the human race and make you feel ashamed to be a part of it.  It is not an attempt to make you think that the things you were raised to love and be willing to die for, like the entity you were raised to call ‘your country,’ is a horrible thing and you should be ashamed to have ever loved it. 

It is an attempt to help you, the reader, understand how we, the members of the human race, came to be in the situation in which we find ourselves.  I think you will find it easier to understand the points of this book if you can find a way to look at the realities of earth existence as if you are an outsider. 

Try to pretend that you aren’t vested in anything on this planet.  Try to pretend that that you are actually from some other world who happens to have been given a chance to visit this planet for a short time, by being born into the body of a human infant.  Your ‘Earth life’ is just a learning experience.  Perhaps it is a part of a class on primitive cultures that your real self is taking on a world a billion light years away.  When the class is over (when the fragile human body to which you were assigned finally gives out) you will go back and have to write a paper about the way the beings in this world live. 

If you can do this, you will not feel bound, by racial pride (as part of the human race) to ignore some bad things this race has done.  You won’t feel bound, by national pride, to ignore the way the entities called ‘nations’ really work or pretend they have qualities that logic tells you they don’t really have.  You can see the world as it really is. 

If you can manage this, I think you will realize that the Earth beings are being needlessly pessimistic.  They seem to have given up hope and seem to want to believe there is nothing they can do.  (If have convinced yourself that you are helpless and nothing you do will matter, you have a good excuse to not do anything.  If you look at humans as an outsider, I think you will realize that there is a lot of reason to have hope that these beings can pull through this mess.  We are on a path through time.  If we understand where we are on this path, and understand what lies behind us, we will have some idea what we must do to move to a better future.  That is what this book is about.