Peter Turchin tries to quantify history in "secular cycles" using demographic data.

TLDR: As population expands, wages go down, which increases inequality (& too many elites), which increases social unrest.

The idea is his theory can predict violence:

Heinrich's book on WIERD cultures is the best account of the industrial revolution I've read.

Once WEIRD-ness gets going, it eats everything in sight, and completely reorders power, norms, and social structures.

"The Courage To Be Disliked" is Adlerian psychology meets stoicism, written by a Japanese classics professor who studied Greek philosophy.

The book is a fascinating fusion of the three, and a strong counterpoint to Freud and current therapy culture.

Inventing The Individual shows how Christianity set the stage for consciousness, agency, & moral equality

The church was corrupt, but God is within you, so go inwards so you can better serve God

Later we dropped the "serve god" but kept the other parts.

Faced with the post-Darwin necessity to invent new values, we ended up with the exact same values in new clothes.

Which explains why people act against their own interests: In the religious frame, demanding sacrifice makes a religion *more* attractive.

Charles Taylor traces how we became a secular society.

Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx stripped the world of its cosmic meaning through natural selection, metaphysics, & economics respectively.

We could no longer trust external authority, so we went inwards

Therapy replaced religion, and psychology institutionalized the rise of "your truth"

The purpose of inner-life used to be to serve society—now the purpose of society is to serve self-actualization.

The inner-self was the sinner/liar, now it's the Oracle

The Hegelian desire for recognition leads to identitarianism.

"I must not tailor my psychological needs to the nature of society, for that would create anxiety and make me inauthentic."

Gov't now played a role in serving needs for recognition.

Institutions ceased to be places for the *formation* of individuals

Instead they become platforms for *performance* where individuals are allowed to be their authentic selves precisely because they are able to give expression to who they are on the inside

This idea of authenticity was novel

When Socrates said "Know thyself", he didn't mean it like we mean it today, where you should get in touch with your true self and self-actualize.

“Know thyself" really meant "know thy place"

While it’s obvious the great things individualism has provided, for many, the single-minded quest for authenticity has turned out to be a disappointment, an endless hamster wheel

When we look for the "real me" in isolation, there is often no there there

In a world of empathy-based ethics, the moral sense is ultimately the aesthetic sense. And that means that when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth.

There are no morals anymore, it's all taste/aesthetics/~vibes~.