A different history of the world

Author: Fernando Trías de Be

🧭 Main Idea of the Book

Trías de Bes proposes a reinterpretation of universal history, not through great events or heroic figures, but through human impulses, collective needs, and repeated errors. His central thesis is that humanity’s most fundamental decisions have been driven more by emotional and psychological factors—such as fear, ambition, and the need to belong—than by logic or reason.

🧠 Key Pillars of the Author’s Perspective

The human being as a collective irrational creature:

Unlike traditional accounts that idealize humans as rational builders of civilization, Trías de Bes argues that many historical decisions (wars, revolutions, empires) stem from irrational impulses.

Error as a driver of progress:

Far from being negative, error is seen as an essential part of historical advancement. Humanity evolves by learning (or not) from its mistakes.

Narratives as historical constructions:

Much of what we take for granted about the past is shaped by hegemonic stories built by the victors. The author deconstructs several myths and offers alternative interpretations.

📚 Structure of the Book

The book is divided into thematic chapters addressing different periods and key events—such as the Middle Ages, colonialism, the industrial revolution, capitalism, and the rise of neoliberalism—always viewed through the lens of:

Collective motivations behind each era
The fears driving political decisions
The role of shared ignorance as a foundation of civilizations

🔎 Fascinating Points Raised:

History does not progress linearly, but rather through collective emotional imbalances
Power has never been a direct consequence of knowledge, but of the control of fear
Humanity learns far less from the past than we think: it repeats patterns in new disguises

🗣️ Key Quote from the Book:

"We are not children of reason, but of necessity, error, and shared narrative."

📖 Chapter 1 — The Emotional Homo Sapiens

This chapter lays the theoretical foundation of the book: human beings are not essentially rational, as so often repeated in philosophy and historical narratives, but are profoundly emotional creatures. Trías de Bes suggests that the history of humanity can only be understood if we accept that emotions and collective impulses have guided many of the key decisions that shaped our destiny.

🔍Main Points Developed:

💥 Emotion as an evolutionary driver

From the beginning of the species, humans reacted first with emotion, then with reason.
Basic emotions like fear, anger, desire, and joy shaped early decisions: how to hunt, form groups, or when to flee.
This isn’t an evolutionary flaw, but an adaptive survival mechanism.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Emotion as a social bond

Emotional bonds strengthen cooperation. Without them, tribes, clans, or civilizations would not exist.
Empathy, attachment, and shared fear create collective identity, more powerful than rational arguments.

🔥 Emotion as the foundation of narrative

Every culture needs an emotionally powerful story to survive: myths, religions, anthems, flags.
Reason doesn’t move crowds—but emotion does. That’s why great leaders appeal to the heart before the mind.

⚠️ The dangers of overvaluing reason

Trías de Bes critiques the Enlightenment tradition of idolizing reason.
He argues that most human decisions are emotional and collective, not individual or rational.

📌 Chapter Conclusion

The author proposes a paradigm shift: to understand humans as emotional beings who reason after acting, not before. Only with this lens can we begin to comprehend many historical decisions that seem irrational through a purely logical perspective.

🗣️ Key Quote from Chapter:

"We are human not because we reason, but because we feel."

📖 Chapter 2 — The Birth of the Collective Myth

This chapter explores how collective myths—that is, the stories a community shares and believes—have served as the glue that enables large-scale human coexistence. Trías de Bes argues that without such shared narratives, humanity would not have been able to organize, cooperate, or build lasting social structures.

🔍 Key Topics Developed:

🌍 From clan to civilization: the role of myth

In small tribes and clans, coexistence was based on direct personal knowledge.
But as groups grew, it became necessary to create shared stories that generated trust and obedience among strangers.
Examples: gods, royal lineage, manifest destiny, social contract.

🛐 Religion and myth as structuring order

Religions emerged as forms of collective myth, not necessarily to explain reality, but to organize society.
Gods were not just theological concepts, but narrative tools used to justify authority, morality, and power.

📜 Myth as a useful narrative

It doesn’t matter if a myth is "true" or not—what matters is its effect on collective behavior.
Examples given by Trías de Bes include:

The divine right of kings
Capitalism as a narrative of personal progress
Even the modern idea of "freedom" as an organizing myth in the West

🧠 Myth and emotion: a powerful alliance

The success of a myth depends on its emotional charge.
Myths that generate fear, hope, or belonging are more effective.
That’s why nations, flags, and even commercial brands function as modern myths.

📌 Chapter Conclusion

The collective myth is not a lie, but a necessary tool for the organization of large societies.
History advances not by truth, but by the stories we choose to believe.
And understanding those myths is understanding how power works.

🗣️ Key Quote from Chapter:

"A society without shared myths is a society without cohesion."

📖 Chapter 3 — "Error as a Foundational Principle"

Trías de Bes presents a counterintuitive thesis: the greatest historical advances have not been the result of reason or success, but of error. Errors—whether collective or individual—have acted as engines of change, forcing humanity to adapt, correct itself, and reinvent. Far from being accidental, error is foundational to the evolution of societies.

🔍 Main Axes of the Chapter:

❌ Error as a catalyst for change

History moves forward not through rational planning, but through crises triggered by prior errors.
Example: The fall of the Roman Empire was not planned, but it paved the way for new forms of social organization.

🔄 Systemic errors as opportunity

When systems collapse—economic, political, or religious—they create vacuums that invite innovation.
Many major historical turning points (e.g. the French Revolution, industrialization, world wars) are direct results of accumulated structural failures.

🧠 Collective learning is slow and partial

While errors teach, humanity rarely learns fully: it repeats patterns under new disguises.
What changes are the narratives we use to justify or reinterpret those errors.

📉 Failure as an evolutionary mechanism

🧭 Examples Mentioned:

The Crusades: strategic and religious mistakes that reshaped Europe.
The Russian Revolution: collapse of tsarism due to political errors and extreme inequality.
The 1929 crisis: a financial error that led to deep economic reforms.

📌 Conclusion of the Chapter

The author encourages us to read history without idealism: not as a path led by human wisdom, but as a story filled with missteps that paradoxically pushed us forward.
Error, more than genius, is what has brought us to where we are.

🗣️ Key Quote from Chapter:

“Every mistake humanity makes is a door that opens to the unexpected.”

📖 Chapter 4 — "The Empires of Ignorance"

In this chapter, Trías de Bes asserts that collective ignorance has been one of the most effective tools for building and maintaining power. Far from being an obstacle, ignorance—when shared and structured—allows empires to form, expand, and sustain themselves over centuries.

🔍 Main Topics of the Chapter:

🧱 Ignorance as the structural foundation of power

Power has always needed a population that doesn’t question, that believes before it understands.
Dominant elites have used ignorance as a strategic resource, not as a flaw in the system.

🕍 Religion, empire, and hidden knowledge

In great empires—such as Egypt, Rome, or medieval Christendom—knowledge was reserved for minorities: priests, scribes, nobles.
This created knowledge asymmetry, which legitimized control: if you don’t know, you obey.

🧩 Functional and shared ignorance

Trías de Bes introduces the concept of “functional ignorance”: not knowing can be useful to maintain order.
Modern example: millions of people use the internet without knowing how it really works. Shared ignorance keeps the system running.

🧠 Knowledge as a threat

Throughout history, when knowledge becomes democratized, power becomes unstable.
Example: the invention of the printing press challenged the power of the Church by giving people access to ideas.

🔁 Ignorance hasn’t disappeared—it’s just changed form

Today we still live in empires of ignorance, but with an appearance of freedom.
Information overload, fake news, algorithms, and mass media have replaced older forms of structured misinformation.

🧭 Key Historical Examples:

The Middle Ages: Church control of knowledge
Colonial empires: concealment of real knowledge about conquered peoples
The digital world: massive digital ignorance that supports the technological system

📌 Conclusion of the Chapter

Ignorance is not the enemy of power—it is its silent ally. To understand past and present empires, we must look not only at what people know, but at what they don’t know—and why.
Trías de Bes invites us to view ignorance as an active element in the historical architecture of power.

🗣️ Key Quote from Chapter:

“Where there are no questions, power sleeps peacefully.”

📖 Chapter 5 — "Fear as a Builder of Societies"

In this chapter, Trías de Bes argues that fear has been one of the most powerful and persistent forces in the construction of human societies. Far from being merely a paralyzing emotion, fear has served as a tool for cohesion, obedience, and order, strategically used by political, religious, and economic systems throughout history.

🔍 Main Themes Developed:

🧠 Fear as a foundational emotion

From the earliest human groups, fear of predators, enemies, or natural phenomena led to the creation of protective social structures.
This basic emotion allowed for the formation of alliances, hierarchies, and norms necessary for survival.

🛐 Religion: fear of divine punishment

Ancient (and modern) religions have used fear of hell, divine judgment, or eternal damnation to enforce obedience and control behavior.
Spiritual fear creates deep-rooted, long-lasting social submission.

🏛️ States and empires: fear of legal punishment

The development of the state relies on fear of legitimate violence: punishments, prisons, laws.
Trías de Bes emphasizes that all powerful institutions have required fear as an invisible support to remain in place.

🧾 Modern fears: economic, social, and existential

In today’s world, fear has evolved into:

Fear of losing one's job
Fear of public insecurity
Fear of being excluded from the system
These quiet fears maintain order and productivity without needing explicit repression.

🧠 Shared fear as social glue

Fear does not only oppress—it also unites.
When a society shares a fear (e.g., war, pandemic, the "other"), it becomes more homogenous and easier to govern.

🧭 Historical Examples:

Feudalism: fear of divine and military punishment
20th-century totalitarianisms: fear of internal enemies (Jews, dissidents, spies)
Contemporary politics: use of fear of terrorism, immigration, or poverty to justify authoritarian or restrictive measures

📌 Chapter Conclusion

Fear has not only served to protect—it has also structured and perpetuated power. Societies have been built not only on hope and ambition, but also on threats, punishments, and shared fears. Understanding how fear operates in any given era helps to decode the deeper architecture of power.

🗣️ Key Quote from Chapter:

“Where there is fear, there is obedience. And where there is obedience, there is power.”

📖 Chapter 6 — "The Illusion of Progress"

Here, Trías de Bes dismantles one of the most deeply rooted ideas in Western culture: the belief that history progresses linearly toward a better, more rational, and fairer state. According to the author, this supposed “progress”—technological, economic, or social—is a collective illusion sustained by comforting narratives that do not always reflect reality.

🔍 Key Themes Developed:

🔁 Progress is not linear—it’s cyclical or discontinuous

Humanity does not move upward in a straight line, but rather experiences setbacks, collapses, and repetitions.
Examples: the fall of the Roman Empire, world wars, modern financial crashes.

💭 The idea of progress as collective comfort

We like to think we're “getting better” because it gives meaning to our sacrifices, efforts, and social rules.
This belief is useful for maintaining hope and justifying the status quo.

⚙️ Technological progress ≠ Human progress

We’ve built extraordinary technologies, yet we still face fear, violence, inequality, and war, much like in centuries past.
Technical development has not resolved the core emotional or power-related issues of humanity.

🧠 The myth of development

The idea that “development” will bring universal well-being is a modern myth, often used to legitimize economic models that benefit a few.
Trías de Bes compares belief in progress to a new secular religion—it is not questioned, it is believed in.

🧩 Progress as a form of control

The idea that “everything is improving” keeps people submissive, hopeful, and consuming.
Even if false or partially true, this belief is politically and economically useful.

🧭 Notable Examples:

Industrialization: increased production, but also exploitation and inequality
The internet: more access to information, but also mass manipulation and loss of privacy
Health and medicine: great advances, but new fears (pharmaceutical power, pandemics, dependency)

📌 Chapter Conclusion

Progress, as we understand it, is a useful illusion more than an objective truth. Believing in it has allowed us to build more organized societies, but also more conformist ones.
Only by questioning this idea can we aspire to a truly human-centered transformation.

🗣️ Key Quote from Chapter:

“Progress does not always lead us forward; sometimes it just takes us further away from ourselves.”

📖 Chapter 7 — "Commerce as Redemption"

In this chapter, Trías de Bes offers an anthropological and emotional interpretation of commerce: beyond economics, commerce has served as a tool for pacification, integration, and collective redemption. He argues that throughout history, the exchange of goods has often replaced violence, eased fear, and channeled the human desire to belong.

🔍 Main Themes Developed:

🕊️ From conflict to transaction

As societies evolved, they discovered it was more beneficial to trade than to wage war.

Commerce became a symbolic substitute for direct confrontation, allowing the desire for dominance to be expressed through exchange.

🌍 Commerce as integration

Commerce has served as a bridge between cultures, creating networks of contact between very different civilizations.

Example: the Silk Road, where Asia, Europe, and the Middle East exchanged not only goods but ideas, beliefs, and technologies.

💸 Money: symbolic redeemer

Money emerged not just to simplify trade, but also to neutralize conflict.

Trías de Bes presents money as a structured peace instrument: he who pays avoids conflict.

🧠 Commerce as emotional stabilizer

Commerce reduces uncertainty, generates a sense of control, and allows planning for the future.

It also provides a way to channel greed without resorting to theft or violence.

🕰️ From barter to globalization

Throughout history, commerce has expanded from local transactions to a global interdependent network.

However, globalization has not eliminated conflict, only made it more symbolic and complex (trade wars, sanctions, dependency).

🧭 Historical Examples Mentioned:

Ancient Phoenicia: a society that chose trade over war

The Hanseatic League: a union of commercial cities as an alternative to warfare

Colonial era: commerce used as an excuse or cover for domination

📌 Chapter Conclusion

Commerce has acted as a form of historical redemption: a symbolic system that transforms human aggressiveness into mutually beneficial coexistence. But at the same time, it has also been used to legitimize inequality, impose dependency, and disguise new forms of domination.

🗣️ Key Quote from Chapter:

"Where there was war, commerce flourished; where there was commerce, domination was concealed."

📖 Chapter 8 — "Religion, Order, and Submission"

In this chapter, Trías de Bes analyzes the structural role of religion in history, not from the standpoint of faith or spirituality, but in terms of its capacity to create order, legitimize hierarchies, and generate collective submission. Religion has been one of the most powerful tools to give meaning, impose rules, and maintain systems of power.

🔍 Main Themes Developed:

📜 Religion as a system of symbolic order

Religions offer simplified and absolute answers to existential questions (Who are we? Why do we suffer?).
By establishing totalizing narratives, they reduce chaos and provide social stability.

🛐 Religion as legitimizer of power

Kings, emperors, pharaohs, and clergy have used religion to justify their authority as “divine” or “sacred.”
Religious dogma prevents questioning—what comes from God is not to be debated.

🔒 Voluntary submission through meaning

Trías de Bes points out that religious submission is not always imposed—it is often willingly accepted, because it provides:

Meaning to suffering

Promise of redemption

A place in the world
This soothing order helps calm fear and allows life within a predictable framework.

⚖️ Morality, punishment, and self-control

Religion introduces universal moral codes, often with symbolic punishments (sin, hell).
This allows for internalized self-control, where people monitor themselves, relieving the state from needing to apply constant force.

🧠 From religious dogma to modern dogmas

Though traditional religions have lost influence in some regions, they have been replaced by “secular religions” such as:

Consumerism

Work

Personal success
These function with their own temples, dogmas, rewards, and symbolic punishments.

🧭 Highlighted Historical Examples:

Egyptian Empire: the Pharaoh as a living god

Medieval Christendom: the Church as supreme authority

Colonization of the Americas: forced conversion as a method of domination

Modern era: “faith” in the market or science as new forms of unquestioned authority

📌 Chapter Conclusion

Trías de Bes does not criticize religion itself, but rather its use as a political and social control mechanism. Religions have been essential to build order, but have also conditioned individual freedom and helped justify unjust structures disguised as eternal truths.

🗣️ Key Quote from Chapter:

“True power is not imposed; it is accepted as divine mandate.”