Apart from its peninsula and island rich coast Europe also has an unusually fractured terrain.  This makes it virtually impossible to politically unify this part of the world.  Even the Romans only managed to unite about a third.  Europe is for this reason a patchwork of more or less independent states.  I think it was this factor which made it possible for Europeans to cross the oceans in one go.  Say someone comes up with the idea of doing it. This person’s problem then becomes finding someone willing to pay.  In the case of Cristoforo Colombo, this succeeded on his third attempt.

So begin the age of discovery when Europeans connected the continents.  True, this lead to colonialism which is a form of one-sided exploitation.  But it also led increased trade with the cities of Western Europe.  This accumulated economic resources in a larger fraction of the population.  Some city-dwellers were no longer forced to see their children exploited as manpower.  Instead, they could let them go to school so there were groups of pupils.  Members of such groups did not grow up with the expectation of inheriting absolute power.  Neither did they have to grow up isolated from the rest of society.  Instead, they got the chance to learn to know others around them.

In contrast, I don’t think boarding schools had given people much insight into others.  The first ones were modelled on monasteries.  Boarding school pupils did not expect to spend the rest of their lives there.  However, they were still almost entirely isolated from the rest of society.  Moreover, older pupils were given free rein in their treatment of younger pupils.  Older pupils did not ask themselves if the demands they placed on the younger were sensible.  If younger pupils could not hide not living up to demands they risked physical punishment.  Not to talk about the risk of being raped by someone of higher social status.  This way the myth of human nature being evil lived on.

During the latter half of the 17th century cafés started to turn up in Western Europe.  They were open to anyone able to pay for a cup of coffee.  (Due to the low standard of living of the time this meant the upper and middle classes.)  In practice these cafés functioned as open places of discussion.  No-one expected to be physically punished for contradicting any official doctrine at all.  As such it become possible to express a larger number of ideas.  I think it was in such an environment a fantastic thought was eventually born: that society can be changed for the better.  In other words, life does not have to suck.

Uploaded on the 5th of July 2023.