The Trap of Causality, Zero-sum Thinking, Just Wars

and the Fortified Walls of Revisionist History

Thesis:

History is a narrative, plain and simple, which is where the phrase, “the winners get to write history” comes from. Every year in November people celebrate the lie of American history. After the glow wore off and a few more boats arrived, people who arrived on the shores of the New World had no intention of sharing the land with the natives who had refrained from killing the new arrivals. Yes, the true narratives exist, but they are certainly not celebrated, so it begs the question: If you are a white male heterosexual Christian in America, do you really want to deal truthfully with your legacy? The answer, of course, is no. It was not you who stepped off the Mayflower. It wasn’t even your great-grandfather, but narrative has told you that you should nevertheless defend the revisionist history that they handed down to you. It is a narrative that has had hundreds of years to become entrenched, and by now it has built-in defenses that will kick in automatically if somebody challenges it. Narrative can do that, so the answer of course, is to refuse to challenge it. It is not as easy as it sounds, but it becomes easier if your focus is on displacing it, instead of deconstructing it and finding somebody to blame for past wrongs. This becomes critically important in nations across the globe because, in far too many cases, the past wrongs have been perpetuated as part of a religious belief. We need to recognize that we will never deconstruct faith, but we just might be able to install a new narrative that highlights the advantages of a more liberal interpretation of faith, and the idea of a personal relationship with God instead of the current one-path-to-God narrative that has inspired the killing of more than 400,000,000 souls (cite).

Organizational Statement:

This chapter will begin by highlighting how much evil has been justified and glossed over by narrative, and it will then turn to idea creating new narratives capable of displacing them. It will focus on the competitions that will be held through this new institution to get people in the mindset of “breaching without blaming.” From there a short discussion will be held over alternative methods of dealing with long overdue reparations for past wrongs, not only for African-Americans, but for literally millions of displaced peoples who now find themselves severely handicapped as a result of centuries of oppression and deliberate marginalization. The chapter will conclude with a summary of how this new institution will deal specifically with the problem of zero-sum thinking and religious wars being heralded as “just wars.”