A Brief History of Humanity: The Secret of Success

Q: Is the development of history inevitable or accidental?

Money, empires, and global religions finally brought every Homo sapiens into our global world today. This process of expansion and unification has not been smooth sailing, but looking at the overall situation, it can be seen that small cultures and minority cultures and finally global monocultures should be the inevitable result of human history. But which culture it ends up is not necessarily inevitable.

Every point in time in history is like a crossroads. Although there are only one-way streets left from the past to the present, there are countless forks in the road to the future.

The iron rule of history is that what seems inevitable in hindsight was always inconspicuous at the time, and that is still the case today, and that the least likely thing to happen in contemporary times is often the last thing to come true.

For many who wish to see historical inevitability, this statement is probably disappointing. After all, fatalism is all about the idea that the world and our beliefs are natural and inevitable products of history. To admit that history is not inevitable is to admit that nationalism, capitalism, and human rights are now the product of coincidence.

However, history is such a chaotic mess, and history is unexplainable and unpredictable. At the same time, there are many forces influencing each other and containing each other, as long as one side has a very small right to adapt, the result will be hugely different. The reason why we study history is not to know the future, but to broaden our horizons, to understand that the present is not "natural" and not inevitable. The possibilities of the future are far beyond our imagination.

While we cannot explain the choices that history has made, one thing is certain: history's choices are by no means for the benefit of humanity. Because there is no objective measure of interest, different cultures have different definitions of goodness.

Some scholars believe that culture is like a parasite, and humans are uninformed hosts. Humans will die from generation to generation, and culture will be passed down. The evolution of history does not care whether individual organisms are happy or not. As for individual human beings, even if they are affected by historical evolution, they are usually too ignorant and weak to change.

In this way, history goes from one fork in the road to the next, and the reason for choosing a certain road is always mysterious and unknown. Around 1500 A.D., history made its most important choice, changing not just the fate of humanity, but the fate of all life on earth. We call it the "scientific revolution."

History has many possibilities, and many of them have never come true.