There’s an idea among rulers of the past that their control was necessary and even better for the population than something closer to democracy.
It goes hand-in-hand with using religion as a tool to keep people ignorant and discourage them from learning about the world.
Now that it’s pretty clear which side won and we’re living in the aftermath, do you think it’s an improvement?
Part of me believes that we’re progressing way faster than we’re evolving and nobody is able to keep up with how fast things are changing around them. It seems like the forbidden fruit of knowledge is giving us problems instead of only solving them.
It’s doubtful. Perhaps not as miserable as one might initially suspect from material circumstances, considering that mankind has an immense ability to mentally adjust to our current environment, but the past is filled with material miseries that are hard to simply ‘adjust’ to.
When you read about children died in the first few years since they were born, and their aristocratic parents mourning those lost children for all of their life, it’s hard to imagine that losing five or six children that way is a net gain in happiness, or that it’s something one just ‘adjusts’ to. Perhaps you reach a point where it doesn’t ruin you, but where it’s marginal? No.
Hunger, malnutrition, disease, childhood mortality, broken families, banditry, lawlessness, state oppression that makes modern authoritarian states look merely ‘average’, endemic warfare, fear of the divine, repressive local community cultures…
Modern society is pretty structurally fucked. But past society was even more structurally fucked, and materially fucked in addition.