Culture and History

Music and visual arts and performing arts and literature, from poetry to storytelling, are essential tools for expressing one's soul.

The existential tools are eg. violins and drums for music, paintings and canvas and sculptures for visual arts, drama and comedy for performing arts and novels and staccatos for literature. Themes and constraints are other names for existential tools.

Modes of expression are not as important as the age in which they were expressed. Give me all the political treatises, paintings, songs, poems, propaganda, religious edicts and policies made in 1971, and I'll tell you what 1971 was like. But don't ask me to write on Dutch painting or Chinese politics over 10 centuries, as that won't reveal much about the Netherlands or China, as compared to all of the expression-forms from China and its neighbors in the year 1949, for example.

Even history is an art, of telling what happened back then, or what really happened, or why such things happened etc. History, like storytelling, must be subservient to an essence-of-philosophy if it is to mean anything at all. The most primary sources are either well-kept data, or "first-hand accounts", known more commonly as real-life stories. And history is more important than any other subject of study, as the answers to the future are contained in the past.

A true historian has crystal-clear vision. Ask him, "what does the future look like?" He'll give you an answer that will turn out to be surprisingly true. In 2002, Ron Paul made a series of predictions of what will happen in the future, in the US and the Middle East. Not one prediction was wrong; all came to be true.

Let's take a certain year period, eg. the Republic of Sudan from 1969-1982, a very important part of history. Then, year by year, read every thesis, listen to every song, watch every play, read every treatise, leaf through every document, look at picture after picture of that era, and so forth, and you will become a historian.

The historian is like no other teacher. He'll tell you to throw away your textbook and look for answers and devise study plans that can't be made by any ministry of education, or any teacher committee.