From a (currently anonymous) book review over at ACX
Probably the biggest thing I learned is that human history is little more than 5000 years of gang war.
Whatever the dates some particular tribal pissing match took place, whomever its participants were, it probably deserves to be little noted nor long remembered. It's only through story-telling that the actions of mortals become anything more than trivial data about primate behavior. And yet - once spun into a narrative, accounts of all-too-stereotypical gangs and their generic homicides can be transmuted into archetypes and national myths, inspiring poetry and heroism. History only becomes meaningful in the telling.
I'm quite sure I don't fully agree. But my own view is fairly close to that.
3 comments:
Somebody wrote a version of WWI as a bar fight.
So why would you think that countries being nice to each other, is a thing?
It is not.
Once military conquest became possible, thanks to the Neolithic Revolution, history has been little more than the story of warring states in a relentless competition for power, whose reverberations are with us still. shorturl.at/gHNO6
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