/lit/ - Literature

At what point do we cut bait on Modernity? The project of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is, by every conceivable metric, a failure. The entire purpose of it all was to make a more broadly free, broadly prosperous society where the average person had roughly as much power as the old aristocracy and everyone was more equal from the perspective of wealth and rights.

But 500 years later we can see that we're right back where we started. The average person has as little relative wealth, as few relative rights, and as little relative power as any Medieval peasant. We once again have a small group of people controlling most of the wealth and most of the power in the world, and they can ruin the lives of the average person as surely as any ancient nobleman could destroy his serf.

So what was it all for? All that effort, all those wars waged and lives lost and blood spilt, just to end up right back where we started. And to add insult to injury, our new aristocrats lie to us and pretend they're just average people and the things we notice are all an illusion.

It was all a waste. We might as well bring back the old landed gentry. At least they had a sense of aesthetics.