Just read The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant. Man, what a timely book. It asks what can history teach us about civilizations.

TL;DR: they thrive in the balance between freedom & equality. Also, #bitcoin is a game changer.

Thread
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Civilizations are governed by nature's trials of evolution: competition and selection. They thrive in environments of 'freedom', where creative individuals "with clarity of mind and energy of will" respond to new challenges successfully.
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That's because an environment of freedom enables healthy, creative tensions where "the old challenge the young and the young prod the old". Out of these tensions and positive incentives comes innovation.
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But as civilizations grow through the freedom paradigm, economies become more complex, with premiums put on individuals & companies with superior abilities, which further intensifies the concentration of wealth and power.
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That's why freedom and equality are "sworn and everlasting enemies."

When one prevails, the other dies: "Leave men free and their natural inequalities multiply geometrically." Leave inequality unchecked, and class and racial antipathies will rise.
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But racial antipathies can be surpassed: Englishmen are a fusion between the Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Normans, Danes, and Jutes. Civilizations are a product of cooperation: different people coming together become 'a different people'
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But racial antipathies can also arise together with class inequalities. Through history, we've solved this by either:
1. redistributing wealth through taxation and legislation
2. redistributing poverty through revolution

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(Aside 1) The authors remind us that taking these redistribution systems into 'utopias of equality' is a doomed endeavor. Free societies, in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop, will have survival advantage over societies that are more equal but less free.
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(Aside 2) The authors also mention that the only true revolutions occur in the mind as enlightenment and improvement of character. "The only real emancipation is individual."
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In the past, religion served a powerful function in appeasing social inequality. Napoleon said that it has kept the poor from murdering the rich. Today when religion declines, communism (& other isms) grow, replacing religion as the vendor of comfort & hope.
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As inequality grows, democracy risks giving way to dictatorship.
In ancient Greece, aristocrats welcomed the Macedonian monarch to save them from the burden of a democratically-elected redistributive state. We've seen this in @Bquittem's thread.
https://twitter.com/Bquittem/status/1321814524417183745?s=20

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Plato's view was that politics evolved from monarchy to aristocracy, then to democracy, and back again to dictatorship. And that some of the most aggravated forms of tyranny emerge out of the most extreme forms of liberty.
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Dictatorships can fall on either side of the political spectrum, because social and racial antipathies have the potential to divide us into hostile groups. And when political arguments turn into blind hate, any one side can turn to the other with the rule of the sword.
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The destiny of civilizations lies in their leader's ability to deal with these internal challenges. In the balance of freedom and equality rests their future.
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As civilizations fall, their patrimony is handed down to their heirs "across the years and the seas." Human progress is real when these rich heritages, alongside their lessons learned, are recorded and handed over as our nourishing mother.
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In 2020, it is worth asking ourselves if we've learned from the lessons of history: Have we given ourselves more freedom than we can handle? Have we outgrown intolerance or transferred it from religious to class and racial hostilities?
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The Durants wrote this book more than 50 years ago. There is lasting wisdom in this book, but it's also true that world has changed in radical ways since its publishing.
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Firstly, since the 1970s, we've seen a soaring rise in inequality that is not solely due to excessive freedom but by the inflationary & expansive policies of central banks - the "socialism for the rich."
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It's the central banks, therefore, who have accelerated the growth of inequality whilst decreasing the degree of freedom in society.
19/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ 

Secondly, and most importantly, new technologies have changed the game considerably: The Internet & Digital have radically strengthened the position of the state to surveil, censor & control – revitalizing the 'utopias of equality'. See @Snowden
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Also, we're in the #Bitcoin era, which as a technology of freedom has implications:
1. it makes expropriation via taxation impossible
2. it makes expropriation via inflation more difficult
3. it can make war funding via inflation less effective
More on each of these points
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1. It makes expropriation via taxation impossible.

Imagine if those who put a guillotine under @JeffBezos' home elected a socialist government making being a billionaire 'illegal'. With #Bitcoin , his wealth would be 'inconfiscatable'.

https://twitter.com/slaterscandal/status/1299340345256415232?s=20
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2. It inflationary expropriation more difficult.

Inflation has been a way for the government to devalue its own debt via currency debasement. By holding #Bitcoin , a hard-capped decentralized monetary systm, people can be financially self-sovereign.

https://twitter.com/metamick14/status/1312467889044123648?s=20
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3. it can make war funding via inflation less effective

As @Breedlove22 explains, Bitcoin makes it more difficult for populists and war-mongers to wage war through the use of monetary stimulus – the most state-used fuel for funding war.

https://breedlove22.medium.com/masters-and-slaves-of-money-255ecc93404f
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#Bitcoin represents a paradigm of freedom in these times of political extremism.

It might be our greatest tool for keeping 'utopias of equality' in check.

It can allow us to dream of a future that isn't The Matrix or 1984. It's the orange pill.

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Many thanks to @paulamagal1 for reviewing this thread and for standing my convoluted thought process