We have created this website as an effort to tackle the absurdities of today. We firmly believe that sound history and sound philosophy are the antidote and medicine for healing mental illness. After all sound mental health is having your mind at rest.
When the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1980s were looking for a historian who will record and present history for the general common people at large, the Americans in their homes on their family living room televisions, there went on an extensive search across the various American universities. Up and down the vast American landscape they went. The search committee also included the Annenberg Foundation and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Annenberg Foundation was established to advance excellent teaching. Metropolitan Museum of Art located in New York is the largest Museum in the world.
The search committee finally reached a decision. Among all the historians in America they ended up with Eugen Weber.
Eugen Weber is the greatest historian of all times. There is no historian in the history of man that has published so many textbooks, and most of this books being more than one thousand pages. The Western Tradition program that Eugen Weber presented for the Public Broadcasting Service was really an innovation in the presentation and study of history. It was encyclopedic in its reach. It was perhaps the first ever digestible, where Eugen Weber in his simplicity and brilliance reduced complex mountain of history from the Dawn of humanity to the Present and grabbed with the future history of men and women.
So that gives you an answer why this website about the value and importance of history is anchored and keyed in the works of Eugen Weber. He was professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles, and was to later become Dean of the Social Sciences and Dean of the College of Letters and Science.
He also led the expansion of UCLA beyond the borders of America into France. Within the UCLA Eugen Weber is known a a great leader, one of the leaders who shaped and developed UCLA as an ordinary public university to where it is now as one of the top most respected and cherished universities in America and the world.
Eugen Weber’s style of teaching is accessible. His focus is not about the theory of history and approaches to history. He sounds more like a news reporter. A news reporter just tells you what is happening. A masterful news reporter will try hard to capture not only the news as they happen but also the mood, the feeling and the background to tha news happening. That is where lays in the greatness of Eugen Weber. History is essentially philosophy in practice. Philosophy is about approaches to life and history gives us insights about how people lived and how they approached common everyday problems.
We believe that kind of history and philosophy as taught by Eugen Weber should be made available. Going through the works of Eugen Weber it is like entering a huge library. So what we did is that we acted the role of a librarian, we distilled vast field and mountain of knowledge.
Never in the history of humans from the Dawn of history, stone age have human beings sunk so low in a horrendous bottomless pit of depression, anxiety and stress. The answer for this grave deadly problem is not far fetched to get. Anyone with an eyes of historical reflection will see where the problem stems from.
The 20th century saw the rise of modern psychology and its applications, it several branches, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, personal tests, existentialism, psychiatry and so on.
The term psychotherapy means any effort to change the processes of the mind, to change the individual’s pattern of thinking, from one manner to another.
Psychotherapists are usually psychologists and psychiatrists.
There are many psychotherapies, from Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis to Alfred Adler’s psychoanalysis, Carl Jung’s psychoanalysis, Skinner’s behavior modification, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Behavior Therapy, R.D Laing’s existential psychotherapy, Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychotherapy and many, many others.
All these psychological breakthroughs happened in the 20th century. That means before the 20th century we did not have them. Now what is the results of all these efforts? They have cut us from our evolution, history and philosophy. That is the reason after their development and applications here we are, the world is drowning in mental degradation, mental illness and mental disorders. Mental illness for the very first time in history dominates the news.
In the Western world, something happened about 2500 years ago at Athens, Greece. There, people tried to answer the various why questions of life. Human life is tragic. For our present purposes, Greeks tried to use pure reason and observation to explain the human condition and their world.
We all must raise our hats for the ancient Greeks; they tried extremely hard to understand things rationally.
What is needed is a return back to history and philosophy. And that is the reason for this website. So where should you start? We have distilled this audio program from Eugen Weber. It offers a solid background, and history of Stoicism philosophy from Plato to Christianity.
Order it here. You order in a way is about supporting the work we do in creating world where the tranquility of daily peace. A world devoid of mental illnesses, depression, anxiety and stress.
