>>17832938
Carl Sagan was right. The baseline is mindless brutality that evolves toward greater consciousness in a linear direction. Drawbacks -such as accidentally discarding useful branches of knowledge, more generally the destruction of everything beautiful in the past to create new- are tragic but inevitable. In this sense, history reflects an emotional progression of entire societies, feeling out what works and trying to start higher cognition rather than planning ahead from our current understanding. That leaves you simultaneously at the mercy of "great men" (anyone with a large contribution to the psyche) yet only choosing what path to take to highly probable conclusions.
The challenge is a simple one: how do you bring any community from point A to point B in history? Considering only 50% want to go and people reset every 60 years. Somehow the human superorganism and its great agents have to walk everyone forward in small enough steps until they reach a better future, all while people are dying and multiplying and insisting on dignity for their special individual lives. The difficulty is such that emotions and morals, great representations of the as-yet-undescribed, are still our best guiding light on a large scale.
