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History constantly repeats itself because human nature never changes.
The moral decay of society and seizure of power by authoritarians is a story as old as humanity itself.
Our ancestors saw this happen over and over again across thousands of years, hundreds of generations.
They told each other stories about the good times and the bad times and in doing so, they collectively divined wisdom, tempered through the accumulated experiences of millions of lives.
What worked. What didn't. What happened when good gave way to evil. What it took for evil to be conquered by good.
They spread their wisdom using stories, generation after generation, and through trial and error they honed their craft, learning using first-hand experience over entire lifetimes which stories were most effective at keeping society on the straight and narrow path upwards, warding off evil and preserving the good.
The distillation of their work was written down on paper, an intricate web of interrelated stories that compressed impossibly complicated teachings about human nature and behavioral dynamics into stories so short and so simple a child could read them and follow along.
An instruction manual crowdsourced by an impossibly large number of people across an impossibly large expanse of time, teaching its readers how to live a good life and how to run a prosperous long-term society.
The Holy Bible.
"Evil" was their abstraction for every human failing that ever tempted societies away from the good, "demons" the agents of these temptations.
The evils we're seeing today are the exact same evils our ancestors saw and learnt how to defeat, and they've equipped us with the instruction manual so we don't need to rediscover lessons that have been learnt already.
In that sense, it is unequivocally true that we're facing literal demons today. If you don't believe it in a physical sense, you only need to extract the meaning from the metaphor to see that it is literally true.
History constantly repeats itself because human nature never changes.
The moral decay of society and seizure of power by authoritarians is a story as old as humanity itself.
Our ancestors saw this happen over and over again across thousands of years, hundreds of generations.
They told each other stories about the good times and the bad times and in doing so, they collectively divined wisdom, tempered through the accumulated experiences of millions of lives.
What worked. What didn't. What happened when good gave way to evil. What it took for evil to be conquered by good.
They spread their wisdom using stories, generation after generation, and through trial and error they honed their craft, learning using first-hand experience over entire lifetimes which stories were most effective at keeping society on the straight and narrow path upwards, warding off evil and preserving the good.
The distillation of their work was written down on paper, an intricate web of interrelated stories that compressed impossibly complicated teachings about human nature and behavioral dynamics into stories so short and so simple a child could read them and follow along.
An instruction manual crowdsourced by an impossibly large number of people across an impossibly large expanse of time, teaching its readers how to live a good life and how to run a prosperous long-term society.
The Holy Bible.
"Evil" was their abstraction for every human failing that ever tempted societies away from the good, "demons" the agents of these temptations.
The evils we're seeing today are the same evils our ancestors saw and learnt how to defeat, and they've equipped us with the instruction manual so we don't need to rediscover lessons that have been learnt already.
In that sense, it is unequivocally true that we're facing literal demons today, exactly the same ones our ancestors warned us about.
If you don't believe it in a physical sense, you only need to extract the meaning from the metaphor to see that it is literally true.
History constantly repeats itself because human nature never changes.
The moral decay of society and seizure of power by authoritarians is a story as old as humanity itself.
Our ancestors saw this happen over and over again across thousands of years, hundreds of generations.
They told each other stories about the good times and the bad times and in doing so, they collectively divined wisdom, tempered through the accumulated experiences of millions of lives.
What worked. What didn't. What happened when good gave way to evil. What it took for evil to be conquered by good.
They spread their wisdom using stories, generation after generation, and through trial and error they honed their craft, learning using first-hand experience over entire lifetimes which stories were most effective at keeping society on the straight and narrow path upwards, warding off evil and preserving the good.
The distillation of their work was written down on paper, an intricate web of interrelated stories that compressed impossibly complicated teachings about human nature and behavioral dynamics into stories so short and so simple a child could read them and follow along.
An instruction manual crowdsourced by an impossibly large number of people across an impossibly large expanse of time, teaching its readers how to live a good life and how to run a prosperous long-term society.
The Holy Bible.
"Evil" was their abstraction for every human failing that ever tempted societies away from the good, "demons" the agents of these temptations.
The evils we're seeing today are the same evils our ancestors saw and learnt how to defeat.
In that sense, it is unequivocally true that we're facing literal demons today, exactly the same ones our ancestors warned us about.
If you don't believe it in a physical sense, you only need to extract the meaning from the metaphor to see that it is literally true.
History constantly repeats itself because human nature never changes.
The moral decay of society and seizure of power by authoritarians is a story as old as humanity itself.
Our ancestors saw this happen over and over again across thousands of years, hundreds of generations.
They told each other stories about the good times and the bad times and in doing so, they collectively divined wisdom, tempered through the accumulated experiences of millions of lives.
What worked. What didn't. What happened when good gave way to evil. What it took for evil to be conquered by good.
They spread their wisdom using stories, generation after generation, and through trial and error they honed their craft, learning using first-hand experience over entire lifetimes which stories were most effective at keeping society on the straight and narrow path upwards, warding off evil and preserving the good.
The distillation of their work was written down on paper, an intricate web of interrelated stories that compressed impossibly complicated teachings about human nature and behavioral dynamics into stories so short and so simple a child could read them and follow along.
An instruction manual crowdsourced by an impossibly large number of people across an impossibly large expanse of time, teaching its readers how to live a good life and how to run a prosperous long-term society.
The Holy Bible.
"Evil" was their abstraction for every human failing that ever tempted societies away from the good, "demons" the agents of these temptations.
Do I believe physical demons walk the Earth? I don't know. But I do know that the evils we're seeing today are the same evils our ancestors saw and learnt how to defeat.
In that sense, it is unequivocally true that we're facing literal demons today, exactly the same ones our ancestors warned us about.
If you don't believe it in a physical sense, you only need to extract the meaning from the metaphor to see that it is literally true.