When understanding things to come, one must first master the past.

Will you make history? Maybe history is just too big, too impersonal, too unwieldy, to be made by you at all. Rather, history has made you.

In my view, the landscape of history is like a mountain. Although the origins of life and humanity are disparate, geographically scattered, filled with conflict, pain, confusion, wandering, and purposelessness, it is for a pinnacle of perfection and purpose that history has refined us all. If one is to understand the nature of that summit awaiting us, one must comprehend the past.

For example, is the world shaped by great individuals? Or by nameless, vast impersonal forces and conditions affecting the world? Or to ask the question differently, will you make history, or will history make you?

I believe in the latter. Pressures of technology, culture, economics and society give rise to world events. Our insignificant personal wills count for very little. It is only by rallying behind those vast impersonal forces that one can ever be the “victor”, at least in the sensational ways history is written. If this is consistently true of the past, it holds that it must also be true of the future.

Along with all my readings of futurist books and works by experts in fields of emerging technologies, I have read books that look at the vast influences shaping history. They add an interesting perspective, one about the demise of the current profit-driven social system spanning the globe. I didn’t just read these, however. I published my reviews of these books, so everyone can see and challenge the interpretations I made. Ask me “will you make history?” and I will only say that I will author my small part of it, but I will be satisfied with the rest no matter how it turns out.