If someone, outside our world, wanted to study, analyze and understand the last 2,021 years of our history, they should focus their interest on three books. Only three books would be enough to seriously approach the understanding of that historical strip. Those three books are of a moral-religious nature, the first; philosophical-logical-gnoseological, the second; eminently political, the third. First I clarify: when I say "our history" I mean what the reader of this Facebookean text experiences, that is to say, the western, catholic, anthropocentric world, and so on.

Those books are:
a) The New Testament, 370 AD.
b) The discourse of the Method, year 1637 d. C.
c) The Communist manifesto, year 1848 d. C.

Before continuing, I want to draw attention to the geography from which they were conceived: the first of them originates in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea, between present-day Europe and Asia. The second in the Netherlands, Western Europe. And the third in the United Kingdom, insular Europe.

Now I want to say the following: the three books that could function as a Great Map of world thought (and therefore of behavior, of global human action) of the last two thousand twenty-one years, all three were conceived near water : the seas as scenarios where Transcendent Ideas originate and flow. The ideas that upset everything and that found, in the most literal sense of the term, new times: the Mediterranean Sea, in the first book; the North Sea, in the second book; and the English Channel - a mixture of the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea - in the third book.

In other words, geographically, if we were to take a compass and slide it over the map, it would result in a relatively small circumference with respect to the entire planisphere: in that brief circle the Ideas with which we continue day by day, even ignoring it, were built. , living, arguing, being influenced consciously or unconsciously.
We come from those books, whether we know it or not: we are children of those three books.

The new testament (370) inaugurates a new morality, that is, a new normative system, of conduct, of behavior, a new religion is established: an absolutely different way of being in the world.

The Discourse on Method (1637) is not only an important book for the world of philosophy: its ideas stop, give birth, all modernity. As simple as that. He is a man who suddenly breaks with all dogma and dares to doubt everything, alone, alone, he against the whole world, and against all metaphysics. Descartes is the subject who really dared to resort to his reason alone to know himself and to know the world around him. When someone, today, lightly, as in passing, says, for example: "well, hey, that's my way of thinking, I think like that, period", that apparently simple phrase, that phrase would be impossible without The Discourse of Method. Not to mention the ideas of Free Thought, Critical Thought, Thought of deconstruction ... and all that it originated.

The Communist Manifesto (1848), written by Marx and Engels, is a text without which the world of today would not be thinkable. We would still be in the universe of abstractions, in the naturalization of poverty and wealth: we would still think that commodities are angelic entities that come into the world from who knows where: that book was the opening of eyes of the world that was born to the light of economic, industrial, political revolutions.

Another peculiarity: they are extremely short books. I remember, without wanting to, a dynamite phrase by César Aira: "the longer a book is, the less literature it contains." Perhaps, paraphrasing Aira, the shorter a book is, the more Transformative Ideas it contains.

Without those three books, the West would not have been the West. And me, and you, who are reading me, neither: maybe we would even speak another language and everything that surrounds us would be more frightening or more beautiful, that is a matter for Science Fiction.
Three books, the same History. The history of Ideas.