Truth - everyone is doing better here than anybody has ever done

I'll admit to finding Jordan Peterson a little irritating (and maybe a tad puritan) but this is absolutely true:

"Everyone is doing better here than anybody has ever done on the face of the planet throughout recorded history, and the whole West is like that!" he told me. "To call that all a tyrannical patriarchy is indicative of a very deep resentment and ahistorical ignorance that's so profound that it's indistinguishable from willful blindness."

Amidst all the cries of poverty and austerity, we should keep reminding ourselves - as Barak Obama observed - that if someone in the West is given the whole of history to choose the best time to be born, they should choose now. We have become trapped in a sort of depressive ennui about our societies, focused only on their failings and, worse still, blaming those failings on the success.

Every problem from teenage pregnancy through drug addiction to problems with train timetables is blamed on capitalism, neoliberalism or austerity. It's probably not true that any of these things are to blame but it sets a tone that, if we smash the golden egg that made us rich (free market capitalism), all these things will go away. The problem is that the people waving the hammers at that egg want to replace it with a different, rotten, egg called socialism - something we know creates inequality, division, death and starvation.

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