Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

@VDHanson is correct in his analysis of the Greek invention of scaling the indo-european tradition. But it began on the steppe of Ukraine and Russia where the only possible political organization is that of pirates: entrepreneurs – or their landed equivalent on the sea of steppe. https://twitter.com/curtdoolittle/status/1388499047493865472

Spartans provided the only surviving record of the western Indo-European tradition. Athens is what happens if they evolve into trade. Rome is what happens if it evolves into an empire. But as in all things, evolutionary necessity is the military then the law then the state.

America was intentionally created by puritans as a middle-class majority that left behind the priesthood and church, the state and nobility, and the base, lazy, and idle peasantry. It was an attempt at an evolutionary leap that continued the northern European eugenic tradition.

Well we don’t think of it this way but there are four criteria for success in western civilization:
(a) conscientiousness (vs unconscientiousness)
(b) Intelligence (vs slow)
(c) skepticism (vs gullible)
(d) neoteny (vs rapid maturity)
These produce agency – a full ‘human’.