Well, this is my first blog post ever and all it took was a mandatory class assignment. I've never really done something like this so I'm not sure how to approach it, so I'm just going to go for a stream of consciousness sort of thing.
So a few things about me. I'm a white, upper middle class, nihilist, libertarian/anarcho-capitalist, 19 year old male. I was born and raised in San Antonio by a mother with a lot of disposable income. Suffice to say it was a fairly lavish lifestyle and I've never known hardship. Yet in that environment I was never really sheltered, I was allowed to watch what I wanted and my mother made no attempt to shield me from seeing. The thing I remember loving the most as a child was a book full of maps my parents gave me. It fascinated me for some reason and I just looking at all the countries and all the different and weird names that I never saw before. As I got older I was always aware of there being this wider world out there and I was always curious about it. I ended up watching a lot of CNN and the History Channel because I just found it cool. That interest carried over into debate where I was exposed to a lot more things and a lot of very different philosophies, perhaps too early. I was probably not ready to read as much post-modern literature as I did in high school. As my debate coach told me, I've got the Post-Modernism bug really bad.
When I started writing this, I really didn't know what non-material thing I could not do without. It's a rather odd question to be asked as a materialist (I mean that in the classical sense, although I am an unrepentant consumer as well.), but I think I actually know now. If there's one thing I could no do without it's the ready access of information. To be able to look up and at least get a basic understanding of almost anything in a few seconds, to be able to see almost any movie, listen to almost any song, read any book with just an internet connection and the will to is perhaps the single greatest achievement of modern man. To be able to be so easily exposed to so many facets of the world, that is the glory of the information age.
But enough blathering about myself, I'm supposed to be blathering about history. I've always defined history as the series of events that led to our current situation. Because to really understand why things are the way are they are now, you have to look at how things were before. This is of course rather laborious considering how vast human history is, let alone the vastness of cosmic history. But still, by knowing history you better understand the events of the present and their significance and you're better able to predict the course of the future.
The history book we're required to read, does have a bias to a certain extent, but this is true of all works and I find that it tends towards more objectivity than previous history books. Truth be told, I found it refreshing. I expected there to be some liberal bias, but chapter 30 actually did a pretty good job summing up much of the modern world. It said things flatly, and I think people tend to read in too much emotion into their history books which really isn't present. But as they say, history is an argument. History has always been written by victors, and how history is presented very much affects the cultural consciousness and the thinking of people. The fact is, all history is struggle. Interests are nigh infinite and the resources are limited, so competition is constant, fierce, and mostly unavoidable. History has been something written in blood, and most people like to forget the unsavory elements of how we got here. But that's why I always found my nihilism rather liberating academically. Once you stop looking at things through the lens of modern perspectives and just accept things as they are and as they were you can truly understand them.
