Apparently when the adherents of an ideological movement seize political power, they put a lot of effort into rewriting the story of the nation state's recent past which casts the previous order of affairs in a bad light compared to the allegedly improved way the new rulers say they'll run things. That explains why, for example, American historical accounts of the Revolutionary War usually don't explore whether the revolutionists had reasonable grievances, or whether King George III had a defensible case for maintaining and asserting his authority over the American Colonies. Americans have come to a collective decision to cut off inquiry into those questions, at least as far as indoctrinating the young goes, because certain kinds of answers throw into doubt the legitimacy of the way things actually happened.

I wonder how much of that has happened on a larger scale to Western civilization because of the political success of adherents to the Enlightenment. Since I discovered Neoreaction and it has poked at the splinter in my mind, I have engaged in crimethink about whether we have an impoverished understanding of social alternatives because the Enlightenment's intellectuals and their heirs have worked very hard, and very successfully, at making sure that we get a heavily biased view of how things worked in the before-times which makes it look terrible compared to its replacement. Yet the splinter in our minds remains. Just ask questions about whether we really benefit from democracy, equality or feminism, and the emotional reactions from some people (David Brin, for example) show genuine anxiety on their part. These excessively emotional responses resemble how reminders of death, called "mortality salience" in Terror Management Theory, activate people's anxiety buffers to try to suppress distressing thoughts.

Did our ancestors in the West invent the Enlightenment, with its emotionally soothing message about human nature, to manage some kind of terror we should confront directly instead of trying to hide from it?