jihadist's Journal: A History of Greatness

Literate people need something to read, and it pays, so we get a series of books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel to try to summarize history into a simple thesis. This enables us to look at it, find a nifty mental container for the horror and struggle, and then go back to some "progressive" sense of denying the obvious. Diamond isn't new; for thousands of years, people like Buddha and Jesus Christ and Robespierre have been trying to ultra-simplify the obvious.

Disturbingly, these histories don't make us happier. They tell us to keep plodding ahead along a moral path, using symbolic containers and easy explanations buried in tens of thousands of words of "proof," even though that path correlates closely to the path toward a more violent (frustrated), corrupt (truth-avoidant), commercialized (leaderless), vapid (polite lowest common denominator) and cheesy (pandering) way of life. It's a pathology that shows up in some extremist groups as well, but with the assent of the mainstream, it is considered sane.

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