A fascination with history. The font of stories par excellance. Chronicles of sequences, of causes and their effects. Events and their consequences. Decisive or spiralling outcomes. New chapters or processes incited and kicked underway. Old ways of life, or ways of thinking winding down. New dawns and dying falls. An alchemy of characters. The great leaders, the key players, the foot soldiers, and the ordinary people and their families caught up amidst the undertow. The generations, even after millenniums, that are influenced and affected. Stories in the form of great populist religions are given birth. Supplemented in more recent times by great political dogmas as substitutes. Part and parcel of the phenomenon of ideas that continue to run on empty far removed from their original context, taking on a life of their own. In the 'Idealist' (i.e. ideas) sphere that dominates our 'material world'. (Our senses deliver information, our ideas interpret it. And beyond - immediately sensorial information - all our 'big' or general views are abstract in their essential nature: ideas.)
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| the map is not the territory |
Such as 'The Story of The Jews' for example. A story that is the key to the survival of that ancient race with its genesis far before any European race still in existence today. A story that served as the seed and bedrock for the world's other two great religions to raise their own infant feet upon. And serving as the legacy that helped to give them themselves legitimacy; in their tentative beginnings at least. Only later to define themselves in oppositions. Tearing themselves away to stand apart and above the earlier characters and stories; after those had outlived their primary purpose, and been superseded or 'completed'. In borrowed rags now cleansed and purified apparently, defining themselves as the real message, the real mccoy. And the same process goes on repeated, in secular form building from the Industrial Revolution. With the advance of science contributing incrementally to our increasing knowledge about, and mastery, over our material environment. Defining ourselves in terms of what not, rather than being any wiser really; of whom we belong to, of whom against. Primarily motivated by the fact of our social contingency. A contingency plastered over 'otherworldly' in the obvious religious sense or else in the less obvious secular sense.
They say there is no fiction stranger than truth. And what many had thought impossible in previous eras had a habit afterwards of becoming now past; and in most part taken for granted and forgotten.
On top of this we see the great patterns. Patterns recurring in different forms, like the unification of nations from warring tribes, in Arabia for example or repeated everywhere globally in different forms throughout history, such as mighty rulers emerging to unite warring states as had been the case in China. A similar pattern in recent centuries leading to the creation of the nation Germany. And the emerging world defining themselves in terms of colonialism, liberation and independence.
