> if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeatin

> if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we not end up right back here “repeating the grade” so to speak? "Progress" doesn't occur because things are "better" it occurs because things are incentivized. A system can incentivize bad things, and at many points in life we may choose bad things for one group and good things for another. Progress is merely another point further down on the timeline, as is the past. Qualitatively judging these points in isolation is difficult, but when viewed in collective over time I think people will often reflect that some things have gotten better, some have gotten worse, and we also have new problems. I view the past less as a former grade and more as just a different state of things, neither better nor worse in totality, but I'm also not cynical enough to say that restoring a previous state is the right choice either. Somewhat anecdotally I hardly ever believe in software rollbacks, I almost always bias towards rolling forward but I understand why some people think rollbacks are something they'd want. > The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I think it’s all a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem better in the past because we are experiencing only those cultural artifacts of the past that survived, which tend to be the most memorable or interesting. Again, the present doesn't necessarily mean that things are better for people. We make choices every day to marginalize a group or way of life over another. A lot of times, this is just necessary but I can understand why people don't like it. > Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of revisiting the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional. You and I agree here, in that I understand the state of the past, even yesterday, can never be fully recreated. Again, I understand why that's difficult for people to wrestle with. It sounds like for you and I, life is mostly good, so it makes dealing with the present and optimism for the future quite palatable. For others, I think that's challenging, so the past looks favorable even if unviable. > The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They don’t even bother to propose an unworkable solution. Unfortunately this is most of our politicians. Pretty much anyone that media would call a "firebrand" from Matt Gaetz to AOC is a reactionary, and they're so absorbed in their own thoughts, world, and problems that they can't help but take it out on the rest of the world. It's a symptom of a broken, tired, and frustrated system that we put trust in people who are simply meant to agitate rather than build comprehensive, intersectional systems.