That's too bad, because the right lecturer can make history an exercise in vibrant storytelling, the right book can give history a sense of humor, suspense, the grotesque. But I'm not trying to sell history books. What I want to do is look at history from a unique perspective

What if we were to see history as a struggle between Good and Evil, between the Light Side and the Dark Side, between positive energy and negative energy, between the Yin and the Yang? We don't have to look for obvious heroes or villains, we don't have to erect monuments, heap praises on anyone, heap scorn on anyone, single one man out and blame him for the events of an era. Just as likely as not, your heroes are the by-products of a wave of positive energy sweeping the planet, your villains are the production of an age of darkness, of palpable negativity. The Dark Ages isn't called Dark for nothing, the Depression isn't just a meaningless term, the Enlightenment isn't without significance, the Renaissance isn't just a collection of letters. It's as if at times the world itself succumbed to evil and despair, while at other times it's as if a light, buoyant force lifted the world to heights it had never known before.

Of course, it's obvious that not every corner of the earth celebrates together at the same time, just as it's obvious that not every city on earth suffers in unison. Positive and negative energy waves, like cold-air or warm-air fronts, are sweeping across the earth, sometimes stationary, sometimes scattered, sometimes moving en masse at a great velocity..so history is a documentation of the symptoms these patterns produce.

Well, you may ask, if the history of humankind is in a sense a struggle between Good and Evil forces, what's the score at present?

Answering that question is difficult, perhaps too difficult, but it seems that one trend is fairly evident, and that is that as humans evolve, we seem more and more to want to "do the right thing", to embrace the Good, to promote a higher standard, a more positive set of values. What was once a struggle for survival, a struggle to dominate and conquer, has now become a quest for world peace, a desire for world salvation. Perhaps this is just the result of progress, of brain evolution, of great advances in technology.

On the other hand, the importance we place on competition in our daily lives, the importance we place on joining teams and glorifying an "us against them" mentality, the joy we seem to derive from watching and participating in different types of conflict....these manifestations of aggression will do nothing but hold us back, retard the advancement of Positive Energy and the Dissipation of Negative Forces, keep us at war with one another for a good while longer.....