By destroying the big religions, perhaps we've ended up back right where we started.

From 2022 Roundup by Erik Torenberg.  The subheading is Best posts, books, newsletters, podcasts, TV—and a look into 2023.

The Ancient City

TLDR: For 99.9% of our existence, Western society has been a fascist-communist cult that joined ethnicity, religion, culture, and space. Any variation off of that is abnormal and easy to lose.

The main conclusion I drew from the book is that we aren’t intensification of the past, we are dilution. Our modem concepts of politics, religion, ethnicity, etc are significant dilutions of what people experienced thousands of years ago. Same patterns, incredibly attenuated.

The religions in medieval times were a combination of ancestor worship and nature worship. This leads to the enticing theory that this is also where we've ended up today: ancestor worship = identity politics; nature worship = environmentalism.

By destroying the big religions, perhaps we've ended up back right where we started.