ANSWERING A COMMON CRITICISM OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION
—“Whenever I read something like “disproportionate success of western civilization in the ancient” I think of the cult of Dionysus and their ritualized cannibalism, the Athenians and their practice of choosing -by popular vote! – a human “scapegoat” for their collective sins to banish to certain death, the fact that the Romans only *rarely* performed human sacrifice in situations like the wars with the Carthaginians, the fact that one of the most revered figures from the Ancient Greek philosophical tradition was a man – Diogenes – who masturbated in public and slept in a barrel, that the Spartans used to leave infants to die in the wild of exposure if they weren’t deemed “fit” as future soldiers, that Plato was a proponent of – in his “The Republic” – a totalitarian dystopia as the ideal society, that pederasty was considered a good thing by many of their “greatest” thinkers, and that they – Romans – then deteriorated into a state where the main public pastime was watching slaves murder each other and be eaten alive by animals, it makes me wonder how this could possibly be considered a success.”—-Abu Ayoub
Someone on my management team defended me once by saying
—-“Curt fails like the rest of us, the difference is we do a few things and some fail, he does ten thousand things, and some fail.”—
I do not confuse perfect with THE BEST.
Meanwhile most civilizations cannot produce anything resembling a western commons or polity, because they cannot cull or rule the underclasses, cannot produce a competitive aristocracy, cannot produce truth, trust, commons, defense of commons, and break the limits of family, clan, and tribe to produce goods. Only japanese and Koreans.
They applied truth, they created naturalism and reason culminating in roman law, and by archimedes were on the verge of the industrial revolution in just a few hundred years – and we dragged mankind out of superstition, ignorance, hard labor, poverty, starvation, disease, child mortality, early death, and vicisitudes of nature. Why?
They preserve competition in all walks of life, and deem it heroic.
All the great civilizations of the ancient world are lost but east asia. Europe was rebuilt itself from the north. Harappan didn’t make it, but did it’s best from the east. And Judaism, christianity, and islam are a cancer that destroys all before it by reversing eugenic progress.
The secret to success for a people is shrinking the lower classes until the middle classes are productive enough to carry what remains, without constant decline. the problem is it is preferable for rulers to keep people poor can concentrate wealth – everywhere except for far east and far west.
China had Reason-lite and order before face but face before truth, the west had Reason, and truth before all and markets. With christianity as the cancer that we are still (some of us) struggling to escape. Africa, the pacific, and america had too little time. The middle east over extended and islam destroyed all the great civilizations as a cancer of uncontrolled underclass growth. ANd we simply see this in the data.
That said, your criticisms are legit. they are just immaterial in relation to the successes.
If you were ruled, were you better off under any rule than you are under western? There is no comparison of rule between civilizations even between chinese rule and western rule.
The the greatest mistake my people made was expanding aristocratic egalitarianism (aristocracy of everyone) beyond the possible. The second greatest mistake my people made was the white man’s burden. It is true. But we should never have tried to carry that burden. The third greatest mistake my people made was trying to preserve the ‘market’ of the balance of powers, rather than letting the russians retake constantinople, and the germans eastern europe. The fourth greatest mistake my people made was the sequence of falure to return the slaves to africa, liberating our ancient enemy the jews, not prosecuting the communists with an inquisition, and the postwar immigration act – these are christian errors.
All of these are the same mistake – optimism about mankind – and virtue signaling.
Source date (UTC): 2019-02-24 09:37:00 UTC