Most people who lived, live, and will live on the earth will never make it into the history books. As much as I once thought it otherwise, that includes me. “The tired poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse” is the way Emma Lazarus described us in her poem The New Colossus which is engraved into the Statue of Liberty.
I am ok with that description of my historically meaningless existence. It means that I am part of an ocean of people who seek creature comforts to raise happy families and share laughs with friends. It is very Biblical in an Ecclesiastes sort of way. We may not be known to history but, in our aggregate, we have been, are and will be critical to the making of that history. History did not, does not and will not move until we move. And it takes a lot to move us which is a point of extraordinary frustration and insuperable strength. No one wants an aircraft carrier that can change direction on a dime.
I make this point about the huddled class in my history classes by asking the students to focus their attention for a few minutes on the life of this young Peruvian grandee. I don’t know his name, but he and I swim in the same ocean of nameless people - he with his soccer ball and me with my keyboard.
For what it is worth, then, here is my theory of everything.
Humanity is made up of three significant groups; roughly 80% are the huddled masses already described, 20% are those formerly from the huddled masses called into fame or infamy by forces beyond their control (I do not include sports and pop art heroes unless their fame/infamy transcends catching a ball or shocking with face paint etc.). They are hard to spot until the event that launches them into history. Did Jordan Peterson stand up against Bill C-16 because he wanted to be in a history book or was he called to take a stand on an issue that wouldn’t let him not take a stand?
It is hard to find correlations that make the 20% identifiable prior to the event which launches them. Some individuals move into the 20% as the result of their event and then sink back into the huddled masses. Of these 20% are 5% who are sociopathic and see the huddled masses as sheep to be exploited. Most of history is the "fight" between the 5% who are sociopathic and the remaining 15% who are called out by a launching event. History is the story of that fight and how the remaining 80% have been ritually abused by the sociopaths. Some say that history is the story of 5% of humanity. This is a different 5% than the sociopaths. Some of the recorded 5% are sociopaths and some are not.
Some have overlaid on this rather dismal model a mantle of biological and psychological evolutionary change. My reading of history does not include the notion that our ability to stand tall comes from 350 million years of lobster evolution. I think that attribute comes from being made in the image of a metaphorically, tall standing God. The social changes that have changed our lives through recorded history have been abrupt in a Thomas Kuhn-like fashion. Kuhn wrote persuasively of the nature of scientific revolutions, and I have broadened his argument to include social paradigm shifts. In fact, the largest paradigm shift (from a Western perspective) is, in my view, evidence for God's fingerprints on history.
At around the year 700 BC, Isaiah wrote his book that made it into the Bible. In two places he predicts the arrival of a guy named Cyrus who, as a friend of God, would free God's people. In 539 BC Cyrus II conquered the Babylonian empire (at their request strangely enough) and freed the Jews and other captive peoples brought to the city of Babylon. So, Isaiah anticipated and predicted this release into freedom by 150+ years.
Scholars dismiss Isaiah’s unusual trick by arguing that there were two Isaiahs - one who wrote after the rise of Cyrus. But those scholars don't have answers to Isaiah 53 which is a precise prediction of "... unto us a child is born..." - an event which came 550 years later still. Nor do they have answers to the precise predictions of Daniel about the rise of the Medes, Greeks, and Romans. Nope. Isaiah, in his mention of Cyrus, wrote an ancient prediction involving freedom.
Cyrus created an enormous empire, and in 331 BC, Alexander conquered it in a winner takes all battle at the river Gaugamela. There had been two prior battles, but they were warm-ups to the big event. Darius III, descended from Cyrus, even swept the battlefield so his chariots would not be upended by rocks. The stakes were high, and it seemed a reasonable thing to do. But he lost.
Alexander proceeded to pacify his new empire and, as he did so, seeded it with a common language and culture. The world became Greek. Everyone wanted to name their new city Alexandria and if you could spell “Macedonian” you became rich. The new empire also attracted traders and was soon peppered with the synagogues of a new Jewish diaspora.
The new Hellenistic empire was soon broken into four constituent kingdoms each ruled by a different family dynasty. The families took on the outward trappings of those they ruled but, for 300 years they remained remarkably and essentially Greek. Specific events of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV were predicted by the aforementioned Hebrew Daniel who was a high-ranking civil servant in the Babylonian empire - another remarkable and detailed prediction made hundreds of years before it came to pass. Possibly the wealthiest inheritance of recorded history was when King Attalus III willed his Anatolian kingdom of Pergamon to the Roman Senate. Maybe, as Attalus feared, the Romans were going to take the kingdom anyway. Maybe his will saved the lives of thousands of his citizens. But all this misses the point - it was an incredible gift.
Due to the constant fighting among the Greeks, Rome was able to conquer all the kingdoms before almost collapsing itself under the weight of its civil war. But one man, Octavian, defeated his opponents, destroyed the longest lasting republic in history, and bequeathed to the world an unprecedented event called Pax Romana.
Into this Pax Romana came the birth of Christ and the rise of the Christian church. For forty years evangelists moved safely around and beyond Cyrus' former empire bringing their message to the thousands of Jewish synagogues which had been built in the Greek cities. They travelled to the source of the Nile River, up to the Hindu Cush, and across the Indus into the Indian subcontinent. All within a generation of the birth of Christ.
I find it hard not to see chess pieces being moved around in this scenario. Cyrus is invited to take over the Babylonian empire. Alexander wins it in a winner takes all battle and bequeaths a common language and culture. Rome begins to take over the empire when Attalus III leaves his kingdom to the Senate. This then was the unusual nature of the set up. What was the paradigm shift?
It was the revolutionary message of Jesus. We are all made in the image of God and therefore
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
“The first will be last and the last will be first.”
“the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many."
This implies that if we give each other freedom to be creative as God himself is creative then the world is no longer a zero-sum game. The pie can grow. If I want more, I don't need to steal from you. I need only grant more freedom to you and others so that you will create and enrich us all.
It is hard to over emphasize how revolutionary Jesus’ teaching was. Women had value, children had value, slaves had value, Black, White, Red people all had value. An explosion of freedom that has transformed the world and created Western civilization.
But... the underlying structure still includes 5% of people who are sociopaths and impatient to fill their money belts. Think Julius Caesar or Nero.
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”
“Let us make a name for ourselves”.
The revolutionary ethics of Jesus has not vanquished the god-assuming hubris of the sociopaths. Occasionally, their narcissism flares up.
I think that today this narcissism is manifesting in at least two ways... in the fascist aristocracy of the Chinese communist party who want wealth, and in the equally fascist aristocracy of the WEF folks (Schwab, Soros, Gates et al) who want power and eternal life. The WEF folks sought an association with the Chinese so that they could effect a take-over but that is not going so well. Mr. Soros is no longer singing the virtues of “the Chinese way”. Now the WEF folks are using the stimulated fear of climate doom, viral demise, and technocratic rule by machines to overcome freedom and thus conquer the middle classes of the western nations. When the middle class is alive to what is going on, however, the sociopathic game will be over. Remember, the middle class, the 80% may be hard to move but once the sleep is rubbed from their eyes their movement is crushing.
There are a million ignored details in this thumbnail sketch and lots of unanswered questions about why God would choose to have history unravel in this way. Those questions will remain unanswered because I don't have the mind of God. But, given the predicted and yet totally unexpected nature of the events of the period 700 BC until 71 AD I find it hard to deny that God unraveled and continues to unravel history. This is the model and lens through which I make sense of both history made and history in the making. There are some ragged edges that give me trouble but, for the most part, it hangs together. The important take-away for me is that God controls the chess pieces which define our history and not Klaus Schwab.
For completeness, I also teach my history classes that there is another paradigm shifting hinge point in history. It was identified by several writers starting as early as Adam Smith and more recently by economic historian Niall Ferguson. Dr. Ferguson described what he called the Great Divergence as a moment in the early 16th century when the European economy moved dramatically ahead of the economies of other parts of the world. In his honour I called the history book written for my students, The Great Divergence. Dr. Ferguson queried.
“What could have happened to cause such a radical increase in economic activity?”
The obvious answer is the theological revolution of Martin Luther. His views were a paradigm shift in medieval religion and ethics, but they were hardly new. Wyclif, Hus, the Cathars, and perhaps Savonarola were earlier, proto-Protestants who were killed for their efforts. (Wyclif was exhumed and his bones were burned.) Why not Luther? Perhaps he survived because he was a prolific writer who had access to a new printing technology that allowed him to keep his ideas ahead of Charles V and the popes who set out to persecute him. The political situation in Germany was also ripe for some revolutionary thinking. But why were Luther's predecessors killed? Perhaps Luther needed to learn lessons from the experiences of the Lollards, the Hussites and the followers of Savonarola in northern Italy.
What cannot be disputed is the paradigm shift in religious practice and worldview that followed the sometimes-violent wave of Protestantism. As Max Weber argued, this new worldview resulted in a wave of enormous creative energy which gave us capitalism. It even renewed the Catholic faith as the wave of creativity crashed against the meeting halls of Trent, Italy. Once again, it is God, and not the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or any other state palace, that controls the chess pieces which define our history.
But what of the sociopaths? The pronouncements of transhumanists like Yuval Harari and Ray Kurzweil scream that we can be gods and live forever. The sociopaths have convinced themselves that artificial general intelligence will give them the tools they need to create the singularity and the machines will then give eternity to those who control the machines. Devil take the hindmost.
It is very reminiscent of the Tower of Babel and other notorious moments in history. One wealthy sociopath is reported to have harvested fetal stem cells from the aborted babies he had fathered. Why? So that he could live forever - his words apparently. Some allege that Jeffrey Epstein was making similar extravagant claims, and it was these extravagant claims which allowed him to get so many wealthy people to compromise themselves at his island bacchanals. Who knows if this is true?
But this is why I call them sociopaths…
Who but sociopaths would justify creating weaponized viruses so that they can build the antidotes? Who but sociopaths would convince the military age males of another country to die fighting a war that only the sociopaths wanted? Who but sociopaths would open up the borders of their country to 8 million men of military age who are unknown and undocumented? Who but sociopaths would argue that men can menstruate and have babies merely by saying they are women? Who but sociopaths would try to convince children that their dysphoria warrants dangerous and unproven medical interventions? And who but sociopaths would bring 85,000 undocumented and underage children into their country and then lose track of where they are?
History is littered with such moronic and hubristic nonsense. Unfortunately such idiocy kills the unsuspecting in morally shocking numbers. But…
… it is God who controls the chess pieces and, the finality of all things under the sun is a happy ending. Well, maybe not so much for the sociopaths.
Always worthwhile to pull back and see the past and present in a bigger picture than our own lifetime. Just looking around at this point in time it's easy to think that there's no hope and no reason to look for it. God has always known what would happen at this time in history. He's not surprised by it. He's not afraid of the sociopaths. And He, not the sociopaths, is still in control.
All time exists simultaneously. Therefore, all events are fixed and knowable in advance as well as during and after the fact of their apparent happening.
Even so, the knowledge of any event depends on our ability to enter into the plane or moment of that event. Therefore, knowledge of events outside of conventional memory and perception depends on our ability to transcend the body-mind in its present space-time state or configuration, or definition. And true knowledge of what is not contained in the present space-time limits of our experience depends on self-surrender, deep consciousness, ecstasy or self-transcendence, and resort to that Condition of Being that transcends all past and present knowledge.
In fact, then, the same requirements exist as a condition of perfect memory, foreknowledge, and total knowledge that exists as the Ultimate Condition of Transcendental Ecstasy. Such is the Paradox or Equation of Reality Itself. The same Condition pertains at Zero, Everything, and Everything.
At another level all actions by both individuals and collectives are controlled by the immutable laws of our psycho-physical universe, namely: Every action simultaneously creates an equal and opposite reaction which will inevitably create/cause an event/manifestation of one kind or another either in present time or somewhere in the future (maybe even decades or even centuries hence). Which is to say that every body and all collectives inevitably get or create their own immutable Karmic come-uppance or destiny.
Things are also complicated by the fact that manifestation is essentially fractal in nature
At a more mundane check out the book by Jeremy Rifkin titled Time Wars The Primary Conflict in Human History. And the book by Ira Chernus titled Monsters To Destroy - The Neoconservatives War On Terror and Sin
Speaking of narcissistic sociopaths Donald Trump fits that definition perfectly. Me, me, me. me is his entire message!
He most probably has never done and other-serving thing/gesture in his entire life
The current Prime Minister of Israel fits that definition too.