one thing that i think a lot of modern people really cannot wrap their heads around when it comes to colonialism from the ancient world up until the second agricultural revolution, the shape it took and why it was so far reaching is that, at the time, those people were living in a world where you could not take for granted that your neighbor had the same values you did in regards to life, liberty, and the pursuit of personal happiness. That this was a period in which sometimes people who had values very similar to what we have today in the post christian colony world living directly beside people who held views much more similar to the Aztecs, who were hated by the country living and nomadic tribal peoples who lived around them for their consistent degradation of the working and peasant classes. but it's not very socially acceptable to say that when Abrahamic settler colonialism first sprang up on the scene the people peddling it thought it was a good thing that would save the world, and the reason they thought that was because some, again not all but some, of the groups living under different creeds did shit like eat people coerce human sacrifice and other horrible shit and so they didn't ask questions before attempting to impose their own concept of morality upon the peoples that they met when the world at home became so toxic it wasn't worth staying in (in the 1500s England was covered in open cesspits, a type of farm that used human waste as raw material to refine niter which is used in gunpowder and so during this period important for national defense this is the reason they took India, because the Ganges river does this naturally)
i am not arguing settler colonialism was a good thing. but once i fully understood this through studying the information that the Catholic Church in Mexico had under lock and key in their private libraries and realizing that the way they explained what was going on in the Aztec Empire to the Vatican was actually hugely sanitized from the reality as it existed on the ground because they did find a lot of value in many of the native cultures, it's mind boggling how strange reality truly looks, how suddenly the scales fall away from your eyes and you realize yes. the historical facts are far far more strange and terrifying than any fiction might ever be capable of reflecting, you come to realize again that the history of civilization is the history of fear and bogeymen and this ancestral drive to feel safe truly is the root of all evil.
the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
we planted the seed to feed our families not thinking of how it might deplete the earth some few thousand years later, we converted to christian state religions not realizing the momentum they would gain as a colonialist force and we urbanized not knowing how that would lead to global warming and all of these things made sense to our ancestors who were not evil or stupid or unaware but lacked the foresight to see the advent of cultural hegemony or diesel fuel or airplanes or the internet. each step on the path to where we are today was made with reflection and the belief we were probably doing the right thing.
and this is what tragedy is made of.
we were born into paradise. our species inherited a perfect earth but we could not live in the garden of our birth forever and there was no way to avoid the snowball effect that the march of time would insist should deliver us as a species whole into tragedies untold and nothing we ever might have done would unmake that.
