In the mythical Backward Looking Story of Lionsberg, which will eventually become more True than the "factual" histories of the nation states, we have many terrible errors to avoid, many of which have already been outlined.
However one especially pernicious error we want to watch out for is the creation of a simple arc from worse to better, or from better worse.
In the Old World we heard it in two basic forms.
In the first form, God created everything in perfect Order. Then humankind sinned, and things were doomed to get perpetually worse and descend towards absolute Chaos until a Savior finally appeared who would set things back in perfect order.
In a second form, Chance created everything in Chaos / Randomness. Then humankind ascended, subordinated Nature to itself, and evolved towards ever greater Order and Progress.
Through a far more nuanced lens, we can see our Backward Looking Story as one of Conscious Agents Grappling with Nature and Nature's God, Grappling with Life and its Source, Grappling with the search for eternal Truth and Wisdom and Beauty against the temporal rise and fall of many different orders, many different experiments, struggling for survival, struggling to elevate and transform their lives and their world, struggling to thrive.
Many civilizations have risen and fallen. Many experiments have been tried. Many patterns have been enacted.
In our Forward Looking Story, we must Consciously Decide which Potential Pattern Of Action, out of All Potential Patterns of Action, we will choose to Enact and Embody.
To Inform this decision, we do not need our Backward Looking Story to try to tell us What Actually Happened. Which is good, because it cannot be known.
What we need is for our Backward Looking Story to illuminate and reveal, with as much Wisdom, Truth, and Love as it can, the lessons of history.
And in particular, what Patterns of Action are most likely lead us away from the Hell On Earth we are trying to avoid, and towards the Heaven On Earth we all long for.