"But I read a book written by one of the few people who were privileged enough to read and write, and things didn't seem so bad!"
this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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This is a real issue though. A lot of the writings on the actual lives of random people are from the perspective of "look what these weird foreigners do, instead of being normal like us". And that's not the most objective source.
This is what I dislike about most historical dramas. They focus almost entirely on the pampered (thought no doubt dramatic) lives of the rich and privileged, and lettered, ignoring the great majority of humanity that 1) were engaged every day with the drama of survival, 2) did all of the labour that allowed for those frilly few to write their letters all day.
EDIT: I write from the comfort of my home office on break at my WFH job... >_>
Back in my day we worked 28 hours a day and didnt complain!!
(They put cocaine in coca cola and lead in the water)
…and could afford houses and food
But now I sound like I’m wearing the same rose-tinted glasses as the folks I was making fun of
And the… non-WASPs knew their place. They loved it too in fact!
(I’m paraphrasing some actual things that actual people have actually said about the good old days (but I can’t remember their actual euphemisms (dysphemisms) for non-WASPs))
The Amazon reviews are really bad. If anyone is looking for a book with this same idea, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker is really great.
The other comments are quite sarcastic and I want to give you a bit of a less antagonizing response why Steven Pinker is kind of a hack.
He more or less "cooked the books" when it comes to explaining how much good capitalism helped the people around the world by doing very selective data analysis. In the end he really advocates for being complacent with the status quo and basically argues for the argument of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (which has been disproven a lot by anthropologists.
These videos are quite long but go into more detail:
And if you prefer to read: I'd recommend The Dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.
Thanks for the information, I had no idea that Pinker had such an anti-following. I've not read or even thought about him in years. I just vaguely remembered that that book did a lot to make me more thankful for the current state of things compared to how they used to be. I appreciate you letting me know that he is such a questionable fellow.
Yep, I have found that just accepting one person's words alone, especially in a field as politically charged as economics, is a terrible way to gain knowledge and understanding, just more misunderstanding. Pinker does a great job of being technically correct, but like the other commenters have pointed out, he is very careful of showing only some numbers and ignoring others, in order to massage a narrative that the status quo is flawed but ultimately not to be challenged.
The main things that stuck in my head after all those years was that stuff like assault, rape, murder, torture, entertainment-based animal abuse all used to be much worse. He said that people used to nail cats to posts around town so they would flail around until they died, just for the hell of it. I never fact-checked these claims.
I certainly believe it! Colonization and Imperialism in particular have an absolutely brutal history. Japanese soldiers occupying China and Korea used to catch babies on bayonets, and had quotas for how many ears they cut off. Dutch occupiers of the Congo would cut off the hands of underperforming workers, including children, and give the hands to their parents.
The thing is, generally, humans are guided and shaped by material conditions, and material conditions improve with democratization and industrialization.
Cool that you weren't scared away by all the Toxicity in he other comments.
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Yeah. Enjoy the meme. Don't buy the book.
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In the past everything was better, even the future.
Karl Valentin
There's a reason most historical fiction focuses on nobles and land-owners. You can tell interesting stories about them, and modern people can sort-of relate to their lifestyles. If you told stories about the common people, modern people wouldn't be able to focus on the story, and would get distracted by how brutal and awful their day-to-day lives were.
Now fairy tales, that's where the brutality comes in. Ever heard of "The Death of the Little Hen" collected by the Grimm brothers? The last line is, I kid you not, "and then everyone was dead". Gotta get those kiddos used to pandemics and family sized tombstones.
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Remember, they used to prescribe real drugs instead of placebo bullshit. Those were the good old days.
Yeah nothing wrong with a bit of prescription mercury to clear up the old syphilis
I mean my wife sure is more productive around the house on amphetamines and morphine, and my kids sure are easier to deal with at bedtime when they take their heroin.
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To be fair, if you take a sufficiently high dose of mercury, syphillis will no longer be your biggest problem.
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I’m reading The Way We Never Were and it’s amazing how much we get wrong about the good old days.
Ah the good ole days when children and infants were dying left and right, a splinter could mean a slow painful death by infection, and the local doctor prescribes drilling a hole in your head to release bad spirits
Don't forget the "bloodletting". Got to get that bad blood out along with the head spirits.
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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times."
You stupid monkey!
"He drinks a whiskey drink, he drinks a vodka drink."
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And yet, life is called a gift.
"Gift" is a German word that means poison
Yeah how’s that return policy on white elephants going
Curses can be gifts
Life seems like the result of such an unlikely complex Rube Goldberg machine where everything was just right to let life start then survive for a very long time. Plus we are made of various elements that had to be created in some of the universe’s biggest explosions.
It seems then that life should be something to be cherished while we briefly have it. I try to do just that.
…then we get to watch people around the world working hard to make life worse for those around them.
Hawaii was great until the haoles fucked it up. So was a lot of pre colombian america. And parts of pre colonization africa.
Just because Europe was shit doesn't mean it was shit everywhere. Europe is pretty unique in that it has been total warring itself for over 2000 years straight. The streak ended in world war 2, but goes back to the bronze age.
Could those places I listed be improved by modern medicine and trains? Sure. Doesnt mean they were terrible.
Those areas are also wildly romanticized. Let's not forget that one of the ways that some Europeans got established was by trading guns to indigenous people so they could go off and kill other indigenous people for their land.
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