For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal. ---John F. Kennedy.
The historian’s business is with fact; and there are no future facts. The whole past and present universe is the field of history, to its remotest parts and in its most distant beginnings. Over this field the historian is absolutely free to range in whatever direction he will, limited not by his ‘authorities’ but by his own pleasure. For the maturity of historical thought is the explicit consciousness of the truth that what matters is not an historian’s sources but the use he makes of them.
When the mind is mastered by the will, then may new territory be conquered.
Anxiety disorders occur when autonomic systems bypass the mind and hijack the stress response. The emotions that created neural symbols in the first instance were so powerful, and tied together so tightly, that they hardwired stress into the patients’ systems.
It is important not to overestimate our understanding even of simple agrarian societies. Applying history’s lessons to the present day presents even more difficulties because we live in a different world from the one of the Assyrians, the Romans, and the Mongols. Abundant food and energy, rapidly developing technology and science, mass media, the World Wide Web, and the mobile phone make any direct comparisons between historical agrarian empires and the modern industrial states problematic. On the other hand, modernity did not remake human nature.
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