“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!”
Literally me, fr fr
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… >_>
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.
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It’s not plagiarism if you plagiarize yourself! 😎👉👉
(Disclaimer: this is a joke, pls don’t tell hbomberguy I said the p word) (that was also a joke, no offense hburgerguy)
Yeah. Enjoy the meme. Don’t buy the book.
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I didn’t know Amazon review score of books can get so low
Love me some Steven Pinker. Should probably read one of his books. Does he do the reading of the audio books, does anyone know? He has lovely diction.
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You can be angry, but being angry at things out of your control is not good for you.
There’s little that’s legitimately out of your control. Of course, I don’t mean 1 person can topple Capitalism or anything, but 1 person can set up a union, join a protest, or set up a co-operative farm, educate others, or make meaningful grassroots change.
1 person can make a big difference in the lives of the people around them.
One person can do something, but one person can’t do everything. If you are already running a farm co-op, leading a union, or so on, you simply don’t have the time to address the hundred other things you can see in the news in a single day. The point still stands, you can’t control everything, so even if you are making change on one or two points, you have to avoid being angry about the hundred other things you cannot.
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It is, because nobody is willing to do what’s actually necessary. People talking about voting and protesting, that doesn’t do or mean shit.
Now if you set up the gallows and the BBQ to cook up the rich, I’m all for it and ready to help. That’s how you gonna get any real change.
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.
Not really
You tell stories of people who could have it recorded and preserved
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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.
Amphetamine and morphine is my love language. Call me.
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.
Some people today practice self-trepanation
“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!
And yet it ends talking about going to a far better place than any before, so it must not have been all that ‘best’ after all.
Nope. Just the worst.
And yet, life is called a gift.
“Gift” is a German word that means poison
And Norwegian!
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.
Curses can be gifts
Yeah how’s that return policy on white elephants going
I like my entertainment violent and educational.
Was just having a conversation recently on whether things have always been this close to a complete existential crisis for humans or is the current global situation unique. Most people felt like things have always been bad but I still feel like, with everything going on in terms of global conflicts and climate change, things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past.
things are uniquely, complexly and extremely bad on a global scale compared to the past
I’m with you. But also, has every generation said exactly this?
Yeah, I imagine a lot of people alive during the world wars thought things were going to collapse any second as well. But I just feel the added background anxiety of the status quo causing the Earth to heat up catastrophically but slow enough to be ignored adds a novel layer of messed up to everything.
Ugh. I totally get it. And I feel like my older family felt the same way about the Cold War. Like can you imagine sitting through Bay of Pigs listening for potential incoming annihilation?
Ancient Horrors Beyond Comprehension
Modern people are smart and everybody in the past was dumb.
All that religion and mysticism. All that stuff about gods, little people, spirits, elves, afterlife, etc. Stuff that all the smart people talked about for thousands of years.
It’s all wrong. They were all just dumb.
Does that count as romanticizing too?
The problem is modern people are in fact not smarter. We’re in fact doing the exact same thing we’ve always been doing
Time is a circle
Ka is a wheel, gunslinger.
Time is a progression. I hope we’ve gotten smarter but we still do often fall for the same tricks.
(Abstract narrative that everyone can agree with without agreeing what tricks we’re all falling victim to.)
I agree. And every time a new way of thinking comes along, everybody hates all the other ways of thinking.
