You probably knew that, but here’s more insight to consider.
The Tree of Woe contemplates the gross fraud of GDP. Read that, and then read this tie-in from professor Andrei Fursov (whose books I am slowly beginning to hunt down – по-русски). “The falsification of world History“, a real look at Western capitalism, the Enlightenment, and more.
Therefore, every systemic change comprises regression (to a greater extent) and progress (to a lesser extent). Progress and regression are different aspects of transgression. Let us remember this term, which neutrally captures the fact of systemic change, its, as Hegel would say, “pure being”. It is transgression that one usually tries to pass off as progress, thus demonstrating that the transition from one social order to another is a legitimate and justified transition to a higher stage of development that benefits the majority. In reality, only a certain minority benefits from the change in the social order.
A classic example of this is the interpretation of the emergence of capitalism. We should dwell on it in more detail, because this is where many, if not all, of the secrets and mysteries of capitalism lie, including the secret of its “death of the horse”. What image of the age of the 15th-17th centuries has been drawn by Marxists and liberals since the mid-19th century?
Once upon a time, there were evil lords, lazy monks, oppressed peasants and enterprising bourgeoisie – merchants and artisans. They lived in a gloomy medieval society, with a subsistence economy and Church rule, in almost total ignorance. But fortunately for them, an advanced section of the bourgeoisie (the future bourgeoisie) rose up to fight against the existing system and the Catholic Church. First it revived antiquity, then early Christianity. In the course of the bourgeois revolutions, sometimes in alliance with the monarchy and often also in struggle with it, it overcame the feudal lords and created capitalism, a much more progressive system than feudalism.
Almost everything here is false and falsified. Feudal society was certainly not perfect. However, it was by no means a stagnant society. The studies of the last 30-40 years, dedicated to the Middle Ages, refute the interpretation of feudal society as a period of triumph of the natural sector and present a completely different picture of the time than the one to which textbooks have accustomed us. This alternative picture is reproduced in the most concise manner in Wallerstein’s work.
History, economics, politics, science, money, and just about everything else in the postmodern Western world is either false or falsified. About the only things that are real in the West anymore are its hallmarks: usury, sodomy, and genocide. This may explain why the West is rapidly dying.