To Restate It–my General Theory Of History (ok, It’s More Like My General Hunch Of History)–is

To restate it–my general theory of history (ok, it’s more like my general hunch of history)–is that all apparent social progress is made as our civilization gets better at processing its trauma, bc cycles of violence/trauma/childrearing (and the normalization of these things) largely explain why the past so often seems so inhumanly violent to us–public executions, chattel slavery, massacres, etc, etc.

And there are people in this day and age who nonetheless glorify those days–the thing that got me reading acoup’s series on Sparta was his series on the Fremen Mirage, the illusion (delusion?) so often received in pop-history and in books like Starship Troopers that there’s this distinction between ““““decadent”““ non-militarized, peaceful societies and “morally pure” societies (militarily strong societies, i.e., societies that have value bc they are good at generating and exporting violence)

And–and I’m just spitballing here, I have very little evidence to back this up–I suspect that if you scratch contemporary subcultures where that kind of idolization of a militarized past occurs, where the atrocities–not even the atrocities in service of some cause, just the senseless, pointless, stupid violence–of societies like Rome and Sparta get brushed under the rug, you will find subcultures where people are much more traumatized than elsewhere by abusive, authoritarian, and outright violent upbringings, where the correlation of “authority figure” and “source of shame and pain” is much, much tighter.

Because if you are raised in, or still live in, a shitty, abusive environment, there are two ways you can deal with this: either you can say, this is awful, this is monstrous, no one should have to live like this (and if you do, so much the worse if the whole world is like that, or if it feels like the whole world is like that, because it is painful indeed to look at the world and think ‘oh my, it is full of pain and injustice and there is nothing I can do about it’), or “well, there’s a reason for all this misery.” The reason is ‘because it makes us stronger.’ Or the reason is ‘because it makes us more morally pure.’ Or the reason is ‘because God (or Lycurgus, or Odin, or the Emperor) commanded it.’ Sometimes–at least for some people–the worst possible outcome is that your suffering would have no meaning. It’s not just “well, I had to endure this, so why shouldn’t they?” Or rather, it is, but the core of that sentiment is, “how come I had to suffer?” and the desperate hope that, well, as long as other people are suffering, too, your suffering must have some kind of meaning. That’s Just The Way The World Is, After All. What’s the other possibility? You got fucked over, for no reason?

Sometimes when I’m reading about history, especially in its grimmer parts, I have this momentary feeling–not much more than a fleeting mental image, really. It’s an image of every human being since the dawn of time, as the tiny child we all once were at some stage, groping desperately in the dark for a way to understand the world we were dumped into. But we’re all, in one way or another, still one of those tiny children, with all that entails: a deep deficiency of understanding, a certain inescapable impatience and hotheadedness, cooperative creatures which nonetheless have a terrible fear of pain. In such a world, it feels like the only reasonable response is to try to cultivate a neverending source of compassion within oneself, to try to be as patient as possible with others, who are often just as alone and afraid as we are. After all, it’s what I hope they would do for me.