Starvin Larry

There seems to be in human civilization a great seesaw like movement between forward movement and a great forgetting, a shedding of the fetters of civilization.

Normally this takes extraordinary measures by the country’s rulers.  China’s history is infuriating to read, because they advanced so far so fast and then got caught in this cycle of civilizational forgetting, of running away from everything they’d known and been.  Honestly the last one, the Cultural Revolution, was less successful than the others because the rest of the world remembered for them.

But when studying a civilization, you shouldn’t have to say “The Emperor who burned all the books?” and be answered, “Which one?”

Those emperors usually also set a death penalty on story tellers and grandmas who told stories were persecuted.

But the mania isn’t only Chinese.  The French Revolution not only tried to install all new things, but it was part…