Official history of the world

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... >_>

…and could afford houses and food

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 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:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo2gwS4VpHc
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwXV71hF7cs

And if you prefer to read: I'd recommend The Dawn of everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

Yeah. Enjoy the meme. Don't buy the book.

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.

I didn't know Amazon review score of books can get so low

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

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

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times."

"He drinks a whiskey drink, he drinks a vodka drink."

Nope. Just the worst.

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.

"Gift" is a German word that means poison

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

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?

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?

God, their clothes were so pretty. I can read about the horrors of the past all day, but I'll always be just a lil jealous of the clothes

The problem is modern people are in fact not smarter. We're in fact doing the exact same thing we've always been doing