Rule 3: Teach More History

Part 1

Once upon a time American politicians feared the impact of mass quantities of slightly foreign immigrants arriving at our shores. In order to keep America American, they passed compulsory education laws in order to Americanize the immigrants. And by Americanize, they meant more than instruction in civics and the English language; they meant to impose the values of Protestant Christianity as well.

Very naughty!

But fear not! Today, our top public schools indoctrinate against Protestant as well as Roman Catholic Christianity. Progress! All Christian values are out! Critical Race Theory and teaching the Alphabet of Abominations is in. Respect for religion is for Moslems only. It is the job of the natives to integrate with the newcomers -- not the other way around. It's almost as if the public school system has been taken over by a foreign power, intent on destroying the American Way.

My inner libertarian says "Defund the public schools! Let parents pay for their own children's education. Let charities pay for the education of those whose parents cannot afford it." But my older, reactionary, self worries about what those charities would be. Funds from Facebook might fund something even worse than local school boards. And then there is the possibility of schools funded with Saudi Arabian money. The recent history of much of the Moslem world indicates that this is a Very Bad Thing.

So how about we look into fixing the public schools? Many of our states and localities still have sane -- and even Republican -- governments. How about we force the public schools to do what we are paying them to do? How about having the public schools teach students how to be good citizens and to thrive our rich country? How about celebrating the fact that we abolished White Privilege over a half century ago instead of teaching Critical Race Theory? Teach the formerly oppressed minorities how to take advantage of freedoms and privileges (aka affirmative action) won by Martin Luther King and Co. instead of inflaming divisive bitterness. We have the votes to make this happen in well over half the states in this country. Use them!

OK, you didn't need me to tell you that. The Republican Establishment is on the job, surfing the waves newfound fury over Critical Race Theory. What you might need me for is knowing what to do when the school bureaucrats claim with a straight face that they are not teaching Critical Race Theory. Some of those bureaucrats are simply good liars, but some of them are telling the truth -- as they see it.

Here's my first tip for when your local school board goes into denial. Ask them if they are teaching Intersectionality. For most of you reading this, there is no difference between Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality. Both are divisive doctrines designed to turn the United States into a whinocracy, and weaken us sufficiently for socialist or foreign takeover. But for those who have Borg'd into academia groupthink, the two concepts are completely distinguishable, to the point that your local school superintendant can pass a polygraph test saying there is no Critical Race Theory being taught all the while the school is hooking up kids to the rotary agonizer if that's what it takes to make reluctant kids believe in Intersectionality.

But suppose you purge your local/state schools of both Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality. Suppose you manage to fire the advocates of such. Have you won?

The answer, alas, is No. The Anti American Left has a fallback weapon. It isn't as fun as CRT or Intersectionality for the same reasons that mere modern liberalism isn't as fun as full-on Marxism. But that fallback position is much more persuasive, durable, and hard to fight directly. For that weapon is...The Truth.

The United States of America is not quite as exceptional as once advertised. Yes, we have done some amazing things. But along the way we have pulled some of the same dirty tricks that China is is pulling now. We are the second country to industrialize, and we made capitalism really work. But we industrialized in part by stealing a lot of intellectual property from Great Britain, as well as receiving huge amounts foreign investment from Britain. We kept the gap between working class and industrialist manageable by having lots of frontier available as an alternative to working in factories -- at great cost to the First Nations. Our early industrial corporations enjoyed light taxation from the central government because the South was footing most of the federal tax bill. The slave owning plantation owners were acting as Roman publicans. Black slaves were paying most of the federal taxes.

The most durably dangerous book in America is not some tome of mutated Marxism or compostmodern gibberish. The book we need to counter is clearly written and sincere -- at least as far as I can tell. Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen is not a call for hating America; it is a call to stop sugar coating our history. And we've been sugar coating our history ever since Mason Locke Weems made up the story about George Washington cutting down his parents' cherry tree.

The heroes of our history books were indeed true heroes -- in the ancient Greek sense of the word. They were brave badasses who did mighty deeds. But they were not the goody goody sort of heroes who could get the stamp of approval from the old Comics Code Authority. They had human, and even superhuman, flaws. Our cast of heroes include money-grubbing insider traders, limousine liberals, slave owners, and even...lawyers.

Tell the real stories of American heroes and history class becomes much more interesting. George Washington began his career at sixteen, as a surveyor. Ben Franklin began his career as a child, starting as printer's apprentice. He went on to become an inventor, scientist, businessman, business guru, diplomat, and [maybe] a playboy. Or here's one to really grab the attention of the kids: back when I took American history, I was taught that the Puritans wanted to "purify" the Church, whatever that meant. Only many years later did I learn this entailed. The Puritans wanted to get rid of all images in church buildings, eliminate doctrines not found in the Bible, and do away with repurposed pagan holidays -- including Christmas. Yes, the War on Christmas goes way back. And there was even an actual military battle. George Washington was able to do a sneak attack on Hessian mercenaries on Christmas Eve because Washington had Puritan troops who weren't into celebrating Christmas.

The problem we run into when we try to teach the full stories, is that many of them are pretty ugly. The U.S. became a continent-spanning imperial republic through a mix of purchases from other imperial powers and outright wars of conquest -- which we initiated. At worse, this weakens patriotism, but also bad, it makes a cargo cult case against any reactionary agenda. Liberals love to conflate historical trends, so they can give credit to their social programs benefits which mostly came from technological progress.

An eloquent patriotic conservative well versed in American history -- such as Glenn Beck -- could teach an honest American history course and still turn out patriots. Expecting the median American history teacher to do so requires even more wishful thinking than Supply Side Economics.

American history has parts that are brutal by modern standards because all history has parts that were brutal by modern standards. Today, we are stupendously rich; we have fat poor people! [Tim Slagle] This gives us lots of slack for inefficiency and injustice. When a nation is living near its Malthusian limit, the poorest suffer badly. When an entire society is living close to the edge, rent-seeking and other unjust forms of inequality can push the poor into starvation, serfdom, or slavery. On the other hand an inefficient social safety net can push even more people into starvation. Like it or not, some inequality is require to make work worthwhile, and in the old days there was a whole lot of work to do.

Speaking of slavery, unless you are Amish or some kind of backwoods survivalist, you have slaves. And by "you" I include any liberals who happen to be sneaking a peek at these pages. Fortunately, your slaves are not humans; they are machines. Instead of a chambermaid to clean your chamber pots, you have a flush toilet. Instead of a washerwoman, you have an automatic washing machine and dryer (or access to same at the local laundromat). In the old days if you wanted to be warm on a winter's night, you had to build up a fire, using hand cut wood. Some people still do this today, though the majority at least have a chainsaw for the woodcutting. But most people simply need to turn on a furnace or heat pump, and some of them are so lazy that they will sacrifice their privacy to an Internet connected thermostat which adjusts the temperature between day and night.

So how much of our modern revulsion for slavery is from empathy and moral goodness? And how much is due to slaves being replaced by modern appliances? To answer that question, we can turn to services which are not easily replaced by machines. For example, there are still slave markets for sex slaves around the world, including underground markets in first world countries. These are illegal in most countries, so we can claim some moral credit. But let us turn to a couple of other services that require much human labor: health care and higher education. There are plenty Democrats who think these services should be free. Neither nature nor machines provide these services. Either we need slave professors and medical doctors, or we need to forcibly extract the labor from somebody else to pay said professors and doctors. Not exactly slavery, but there are some shared features.

And then there are those who call for Mandatory National Service. That is slavery, albeit temporary.

To judge the historical US with any objectivity, we need to compare the U.S. with other nations with similar levels of technology and natural resources. To teach US history honestly and still have any patriotism, we need to teach world history, and lot's of it!

And, by the way, this principle extends to more than the U.S. If we teach Western Civilization by itself with any degree of honesty, we can engender a hatred of The West. To preserve our civilization, we need to teach the history of other civilizations.

And for all the Christians in the audience, beware of teaching your children too much of the Bible without also teaching enough ancient history in its full brutality. The Old Testament records some pretty brutal events. But how were the non Hebrews behaving at the time? (I'll have much more to say on these matters in Rule 12.)

It's All in the Stories

I suspect that teachers in the audience are freaking out at this point. We have already overburdened the schools with Common Core, No Child Left Behind, standardized tests, etc. Already, we are depriving children of adequate art, music, unstructured play, and outdoor recess. And here I am calling for upping history instruction by a factor of five.

Something has to give!

That something can be the excessive testing, measuring, grading, and factoid memorization that so characterizes the modern classroom experience. I don't want the children to have to memorize a gazillion battle names and other disjoint facts. I don't even want all that much in the way of essays and reenactments. I just want them to hear the stories. It's His Story, after all.

Unlike many academic endeavors, listening to stories comes naturally to humans. Humans have been passing along wisdom across generations by telling stories for thousands of years. Millions of parents teach tidbits of medieval history to their four-year-olds by reading them fairy tales. OK, so the lessons aren't entirely accurate, but they are nearly as good as the picture you get of current events by watching CNN.

"Stories" can include legends, myths, ballads, epic poems, biographies, diaries, government records, old propaganda, old newspapers, and plain old narrations by historians. Yes, literature and history can and should be mixed. I want the kids to know how people in other societies lived and thought. I don't want them to master any grand over arching theory of history. And I certainly don't want anyone to be forcibly taught to shoehorn the data into some narrative popular among current academics. One purpose of studying history and old literature is to see the world from a variety of perspectives, not just the sneering perspective of some Post Modern pervert like Michel Foucault.

If 80% of the additional history lessons consist of a lazy coach working a video projector, I'm cool with that. There is a huge body of good historical documentaries which have been shown on PBS over the decades. Use them. Indeed, I think the lazy coach model can be better than the diligent teacher model for the early lessons. Students should have a large body of raw data to draw upon before doing analysis and essays. (With that said, ideally the brighter students should read some primary sources. And, by the way, old newspapers can be really fun! Check out the stories on "Financing Titles" and "The Sweet Witchery of Smoke" in the 1908 newspaper I just linked to.)

Tidbits and Takeaways

World history is big. Really, really big. So big that there is absolutely no way any school can give it full coverage. So what should be covered?

One answer would be to give teachers and students a lot of leeway. Turn our society into a gigantic Stochastic Gradient Descent intelligence for crafting the ideal society. Let different citizens carry their different tidbits of history into the public square. Useful and interesting ideas will propagate through society as long as a critical number of people get exposed to them initially.

The other answer is to include some important tidbits and takeways I have picked up over the decades. (A key word is decades. I'm going to be using some rather old memories, and America doesn't have time for me to reread all the sources and do proper fact checking and citations. America is dying and I have a day job. I leave it to you to do some double checking.)

Let's start with a bit of judo. James W. Loewen claims that when American history is taught as a heroic saga of White people subduing this continent, the subject is off putting to the not so White, and they thus do poorly in the subject, more so than other subjects. Fair enough! I experience similar emotions when history books create a Narrative of Progress for events I consider negative. Was it progress when Germany went from a loose network of principalities to strong central government? Was the expansion of the Roman Empire a good thing? Was the growth of the federal government in the 20th Century a form of progress?

So let's turn to ancient history. Inconveniently for the Political Correct, written history does begin with White people. Civilizations first arose in places like Turkey, the Middle East, and Egypt. We still use Babylonian numbers for telling time, and our children play with blocks just like Egyptian pharaohs. The ancient Babylonians also invented finance and insurance.

When the ancient Greeks got civilized, they did some cool things with civilization. They managed to mix civilization with localized government, with more accountable kings and even at times democracy. They added vowels to the alphabet, developed axiomatic geometry, and made explicit logic itself. Greek thinkers began a dialog which continued in Western academia for the next two millennia. Greek myths have been borrowed by poets, storytellers, and screenplay writers up through the present day. If you are serious about philosophy or the humanities, you cannot skip the Greeks. And yes, the ancient Greeks were inconveniently white.

But they weren't as white as I am! My ancestors were still barbarians while all this fancy Greek thinking was going on. My ancestors were still barbarians when civilizations arose in what's now Pakistan, India, China, and other parts of the Far East. (And, by the way, one of those Indian civilizations would later invent zero, making modern mathematics possible. This is a big deal, on par with Greek contributions to human thought.) My ancestors were still barbarians when King Solomon was having diplomatic and romantic relations with Ethiopia.

Once upon a time this fact was part of the standard grammar school curriculum, back when grammar included Latin grammar. Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars was frequently assigned as an example of good Latin in action. I haven't read it myself, either in Latin or in translation, but I've read many references over the years, stories about naked Celtic warriors with their hair frizzed up with lime, stories about truly massive body counts when said undisciplined naked warriors crashed against disciplined Roman formations. The tales resemble those of later Europeans going up against Africans during the era of colonialism, or White Americans fighting against the First Nations.

The ancient Romans not only killed and conquered masses of Northern Europeans, they also used Northern Europe as a source of slaves. The ancestors of Hitler's Master Race were a source of Roman servants.

And speaking of slaves, the very word "slave" is a racial term, much like the Unspeakable N Word. Slave comes from Slav -- the ethnic grouping which includes Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Poles, etc. The non racial Anglo Saxon term for an owned person is thrall. Slavs were used as thralls by both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Indeed, the Slavs enslaved each other bigly. Unlike Western European serfs, Russian peasants could be bought and sold. And the Russian peasants were emancipated about the same time as America's Negro servants.

Slavery was not a uniquely early American institution by a long shot. Nor was it particular to capitalism. Karl Marx called for "industrial armies" in The Communist Manifesto and the Soviets had brutal slave labor camps which made early American plantations look like vacation spots. Indeed, I challenge both the readers of this book and all Social Justice Whiners to research and list the pre steam engine societies which didn't have slavery.

I am not trying to completely excuse my ancestors here. They knew they were being naughty. The contradiction between the soaring rhetoric of liberty in our founding documents and the reality of Negro servitude was apparent from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence had a clause condemning slavery. And some of the Virginia planters, such as Robert Carter, emancipated their slaves after the Revolution. Thomas Jefferson, however, kept his slaves. He was unwilling to make lifestyle downgrade equivalent to going from modern McMansion to Amish farm. Jefferson was a typical politician whose rhetoric exceeded his personal skin in the game. He was in the same tradition as limousine liberals and jet-setting global warming activists.

What I am trying to say is that American traditions of limited central government, private firearms, etc. were not "just about slavery." The high minded ideals were real. Full enaction took time. Rather too too much time. Throwing those ideals away just as descendants of America's slaves achieve full rights of citizenship and social equality is a double plus Bad Thing.

Let us turn to our other big crime, the genocide of the First Nations. Very bad, but not unique to the United States. Julius Caesar was behaving similarly towards the Gauls. The Saxons displaced the original Britons. The pre ancient Indo Europeans displaced the earlier Europeans, with a few pockets of non Indo Europeans such as the Basques and Etruscans. Bantus displaced many other African tribes.

Conquest, genocide, subjugation, slave raiding, and recreational pillage are common throughout history. Racism in the form of tribalism is the default setting for humanity. Most such tribalism was between tribes more genetically similar than our modern categories of White, Black, etc. but that's because the broader racial categories were geographically separated for the most part.

Sometimes the nastiness was on the part of the more civilized, as was the case for Julius Caesar and the Gauls. Sometimes it was the other way around, such as when the Goths looted and conquered the western half of the Roman Empire, or when the Mongols set the world record for speed of conquest. The Mongols made some pretty impressive pyramids of human skulls.

When humans multiply beyond the carrying capacity of their tribal boundaries, they get hungry and start looking for food elsewhere. Raids happen. Then retaliation. Sometimes the retaliation led to conquest and empire building. Other times, brutal depopulation was used to create a state of temporary peace. But populations can bounce back. They can bounce back in a generation when a society practices polygamy. (This is also a reason why war is generally men's work. It's not just about physical strength.) But when polygamy is allowed during peacetime, you quickly get an incel problem. If some men have multiple wives, in times of prolonged peace there aren't enough women to go around. Time to go raid the neighboring tribe to get some more women... Polygamy and peace do not go together so well.

Instead of listing all the instances of war and brutality, let's focus instead on some of the exceptions. What are the bright spots in human history and what made them happen?

Some of the bright spots are connected with sex. The ancient Persians got their soldiers to behave better by bringing along their wives. This allowed relatively effective and humane conquest. The Persians could take their time besieging a city, and the besieged citizens had assurance against rape and pillage.

Another bright spot was ancient Greece. The Athenians had several solutions to the overpopulation and incel problems. They didn't allow polygamy, but they did allow prostitution. They also had that yucky man boy love thing going on...

Some of these traditions were adopted by the Romans, which gave their empire some stability. They also had an interesting innovation for enforcing peace on their frontiers. They would hold the sons of barbarian chiefs as hostages, very well treated hostages. As long as the chiefs behaved, their sons would live as upper class Roman citizens.

The later Roman empire had another tool to enforce peace. They built walls. The walls protected the empire from barbarian raids and they protected the barbarians from further expansion of the empire. Some historians sneer at the walls because they marked the end of imperial growth. I differ. Bigger empires aren't better. Part of the magic of ancient Greece came from Greece's natural walls -- i.e., mountains. Between the mountainous barriers and travel by sea, Greece had that sweet spot balance between city state independence and cultural connection. They had something like federalism.

When the Roman empire went Christian, the yucky man boy thing went out of fashion -- at least officially. Celibacy and mysticism went into fashion, and remained for over a thousand years. Through the Middle Ages the mysticism was supplemented with mass quantities of alcohol, an easier substitute for sex. When functional empire gave way to feudalism, the military remained professional. A warrior class of expensive knights replaced mass armies for the most part. Have a look at the body counts of medieval battles compared to the battles of ancient Rome or the wars of the Reformation and beyond. In the European Middle Ages there was also a practice of ransoming captured knights. Contrast this to the recreational torture practiced by many of America's First Nations or the Japanese practice of ritual suicide in order to avoid such tortures.

And contrast all of the above with certain varieties of Islam, such as the recently attempted Caliphate in Iraq. They allow polygamy, outlaw alcohol and homosexuality. It's almost as if they have declared a long term war of conquest on the rest of the world until Submission is achieved...

I would note that Shia Islam does have a constraint on the incel problem: Shia Islam allows prostitution in the form of temporary marriage. Maybe we shouldn't be allying ourselves with the Wahabists against the Shiites. Maybe we shouldn't be meddling in Islamic conflicts at all.

Speaking of ancient Athenians and their yucky habits as well as the Islamic world, let's talk Patriarchy. I recall hearing somewhere that by the time you get to Plato and Aristotle, the Athenians had built up an unhealthy disdain for the ladies, considering them defective or not quite human. Maybe all that man-teenage boy stuff was killing natural romance. Also, women wore veils and required male escorts just like in some Middle Eastern countries today. These things need to be kept in mind before accusing Christianity of being part of the Evil Patriarchy. Even though St. Paul told the women to shut up in church and to obey their husbands, hoards of women were converting to Christianity and dragging their husbands along. It might have something to do with cutting out the boy buggering. It might also have something to do with the another part of Paul's admonition: men were supposed to love their wives and sacrifice themselves for them.

What did Mohammad say on such matters? I don't know. Could be an interesting research project. Indeed, history class should include a broad survey on the role of women in societies across time and space. Is the modern U.S. a patriarchy or a feminist utopia by world standards? The study should cover arranged marriages, sex slavery, harems, suttees, Chinese foot binding, purdah, etc. The study should look for high points as well. Ancient Persia might be worth a look.

Ditto for the ancient Celts. The Romans reported female Celtic warriors, and ancient Celtic figurines of women were anatomically complete, unlike Greek statues. The Arthurian legends also hint at a long ago feminist society. The tales are include much unpunished adultery. Uncle-nephew relations were featured more than father-son, hinting at a female line for inheritance. And not all the damosels were distressed. Many were bitchy or downright dangerous. And there were some serious cougars on the prowl.

I'd recommend subjecting more students to chunks of Thomas Mallory's Le Morte D'Arthur. It's not great literature. It's comically bad, actually [* at least the first half. I still have the second half to wade through]. The early chapters read as if they were dictated by a ten year old boy. Later chapters read like the transcript of some text based adventure game from the 1980s, albeit in early Modern English. Literature class should be more than saying, "This is great literature. Now read it dammit, and then we'll take it apart and I'll show you why it's great." A very important reason to read old literature is to glimpse at the world through the words of someone from a very different society. Le Morte D'Arthur does this. It's also a good warmup for reading Shakespeare; the vocabulary is smaller and it's in prose. And the students get to learn cool words like orgulous, hove, and bigly.

Old pop literature shows us what people in that era found entertaining. In this case late medieval knights were entertained by stories about a time when knights were bold, brave, and stupidly violent. We're talking really, really stupid here. Have a battle coming up? Hold a tournament! Have your knights bloody and kill each other a few days before facing the enemy army. All through the book the knights of the Table Round fight to the death for the stupidest reasons or for no reason at all save to determine who has the "most worship." The morals of the Round Table were very lax; just a hair above modern street gangs.

But that hair was extremely important to Thomas Mallory. There were rules to the pointless duels. Both knights had to be suitably armed and horsed before the duel even it it meant lending horse and weapons. If one knight was unhorsed, the other was to dismount and continue the duel on foot with swords. Sneak attacks were considered murder most foul. The medieval equivalent of a drive-by shooting was beneath the honor and dignity of a true knight.

To the extent that there is truth to these legends -- either about the actual kingdom of Arthur or of the life of knights in the thousand years between Arthur and Sir Thomas Mallory, there are some interesting takeways.

1. These were stories about the leisure class of the time. The knights did no useful work. They used their spare time to engage in recreational violence with "good cheer" in between as their wounds healed. Those who dream of a robotic future where humans have little work to do should take these stories to heart. Yes, some people will be happy hippies smoking pot, putting flowers in their hair and energizing their chakras. Others will use their leisure time to think Deep Thoughts. But most will behave more like Arthur's knights or the residents of our inner city housing projects.

2. The knights were upper class and pegged out the White Meter. Leftists need to stop blaming poverty and Alt Rightists need to stop blaming Blackness for the high crime in our welfare ghettos.

3. Rules of engagement were extremely important to Thomas Mallory. Etiquette and proper rules for duels were the ways that the aristocrats of old slowly rose above well paid barbarism to become the well dressed models for modern chick flicks. Maybe we should re-legalize dueling instead of filling up our prisons to the point where prison time is a right of passage for certain subgroups. (The other option would be to bring low skill jobs back home and end welfare for the able bodied so we don't have a large class of poor aristocrats/barbarians to deal with.)

Yes, I am comparing barbarians to aristocrats, and I am not the first to do so. Mark Twain's protagonist in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court called King Arthur's knights "White Indians." "Noble Savage" is a valid term as long as you keep in mind that "noble" doesn't mean good; it means like the nobility.

Let's wind up this section by going back my barbarian ancestors. Yes, they were uncouth, undisciplined, poorly dressed, and they had bad hair. They left few buildings behind for archaeologists to dust off, and had no written literature for professors to parse. But they also didn't grovel to god emperors. The ancient Goths and Vikings practiced a fair amount of democracy. Kings were elected, and kings would call for votes before acting. The men would bang on their shields when they liked an idea and should down ideas they didn't like.

I know less about the Celtic barbarians of old, but I would note that Austrian School anarcho-capitalist thinker Murray Rothbard cited Medieval Ireland as an example of his ideas in action. Chicago School anarcho-capitalist David D. Friedman cited Medieval Iceland. I highly recommend the latter; his Machinery of Freedom is well worth reading even if you are neither anarchist nor libertarian. But for the conservatives in the audience who scoff at any libertarian writings, let me point you to Winston Churchill's History of the English Speaking Peoples. In the first volume he describes England under the Saxons. England was not feudal prior to William the Conqueror. Saxon thanes charged money in return for protection, but unlike feudal lords, they had to compete with other thanes for business. (BTW, this is what libertarians mean when they talk anarchy: applying antitrust thinking to government services. Whether this is practical today is, of course, debatable...)

Northern Europe is not unique in mixing barbarism and democracy/small government. Many of the First Nations of this land practiced democracy in varying degrees. The Iroqois Confederation had a constitutional arrangement well worth studying to this day. Native tribal government arrangements provided some of the inspiration which led to our Constitution. Some of the chiefs of other tribes had very limited power; they had to lead more through charisma and ongoing acts of bravery than through pure authority. Sitting Bull sat still as bullets flew past him as he led a battle.

The First Nations had much to laud and emulate, but let's not get carried away. There are the downsides to barbarism, regardless of race. The Iroquois cheered themselves up with recreational torture. The Comanches could be incredibly brutal. For many tribes military service was not optional unless you became a transvestite.

Also, the barbarian way of life is not sustainable in a world of 7+ billion people. Civilization is inevitable. And as a nerd, I like living in a society where wealth and status through productivity is possible. But I don't want to live in a society which is completely civilized, where everyone is placed in a caste and grovelling to bureaucrats and god-emperors is the only way to get ahead. The U.S. Constitution is an attempt to balance the values of civilization and barbarism. We have capitalism and rule of law to let the potentially productive produce. And we have federalism, democracy, and private firearm ownership to allow ordinary citizens to be a little bit noble/savage.

[I have more suggested history in Part 2 of this Rule. ]