Takeaways: Lessons of History, by Will Durant

Geography: Stay close to the fresh water.

Biology/Evolution: It’s a ruthless competition. Equality is a noble lie.

Race: Every single racial “scholar” has concluded, without fail, their own race is the one that should be at the top of the hierarchy. Amazing coincidence.

Character/morality: Being a good person means different things at different times.

Religion: Broadly suffers from the epicurean paradox. However, since we have not figured out the “is/ought” distinction in meta-ethics, we occasionally have to withdraw from strictly rationalist beliefs.

This is because rationalism tends to rely on consequentialist belief systems, which eventually falls apart as processes become more complex/chaotic/uncertain. We crave an underlying framework that is deontological in nature, so we inevitably turn back to religion to give us some guiding framework as to how to live.

Economics: Wealth (capital) will always accumulate easier to people/groups who already have it. Labor, by contrast, is reliant on skills, and skills do not easily transfer from person to person.

Socialism: Mixed bag. Regulation by the state is beneficial and positive to some degree (national parks, fire departments) but any social/political faction which attempts to take control of the government is subject to the same forces of inequality that regularly captures a free market society. People are different, and collective action never remains “collective” for any extended period of time because of these differences.

Government: Democracy is a chaotic exception of governance, not the rule; most of history is defined by one form of patriarch or another (emperors, kings, sultans, etc.)

Much like with economics, there is inequality which gets exacerbated over time. This leads to broad scale polarization within a society. Eventually a person/faction will leverage the polarization to promise the world. They fulfil this promise with various degrees of success — that is to say, various degrees of failure.

War: It’s the simplest form of competition that we have. When nothing else works, we resort to the same evolutionary principle that brought life itself into existence: might makes right.

Further, it appears that only a common enemy can bring large groups of people together for an extended period of time. Let us hope our alien invaders are incompetent.

Growth and decay: Societies are much like people. When we are young, we are hungry, ambitious, motivated. We work hard, striving to capitalize on the opportunities presented to us. As we hit middle age, however, we become increasingly comfortable, having satisfied most of our basic desires. While this presents a sense of equilibrium, it makes us fall behind. We do not have the same hunger and drive as before, and we can no longer move and think as we once did.

Unfortunately for us, there is the next generation of hungry and ambitious and talented people waiting in the wings  — and they have the benefit of learning from our mistakes. The old champions/societies are overtaken by the new.

Progress: As it relates to material aspects of “success” we have indeed gained a great deal in the last 10,000 years. As it relates to happiness, it is more questionable. Unfortunately, the “is/ought distinction” is a bridge that we have yet to cross, leading to an ever widening gap between the power we hold and the wisdom required to hold it properly. We are chimps who can do math — and now we have nuclear bombs.