> Western corporations have done as much harm as they could get away with to make a quick buck as well.

I'm in agreement (for the most part)--historically speaking. I never said that this was purely relegated to China, although the topic of the article is indeed China.

I'll also take this opportunity to remind you about HN commenting guidelines [1], specifically when disagreeing to try to "reply to the argument", as opposed to calling names--or in your specific case implying emotional states or assumptions on worship.

I will share that I find it unfortunate that you seem generally opposed to Dr. Peterson's works: his Maps of Meaning (1999)[2], for instance, contains powerful ideas that cannot be easily dismissed.

Finally, humans are complex creatures. We can easily find an argument intrinsically stimulating and academically fascinating whilst simultaneously not feeling disillusionment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Pete...

I find that history is best viewed as a phenomenon of consciousness—the mind's awareness of itself. With awareness of oneself comes awareness of the eventuality of death, the discovery of the "future" and its opposite, the past. In this sense history is a discovery of conscious beings of which humans are the most advanced by probably orders of magnitude (which is a difficult thing to quantify to say the least).

It's not so much that history is "about" humans; it only really applies to humans in the first place. To have a history of "elephants" is just to have a history of elephants as understood by humans—unless it's elephants that are communicating it.

The best explanations I've heard of this concept are in Jordan Peterson's Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories lecture series, available on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22J3VaeABQD_IZs7y60I....

His book Maps of Meaning is also fantastic: https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Pete...

Jung's writings do often give the impression of importing mysticism into science or of mysticism for its own sake, an impression sustained by some of his critics, supporters, and this (fairly good) article.

However, after reading most of his collected works, the overall thrust of his work seems the opposite -- to grapple deeply with the mystical and have it yield to the conscious, probing tools of analysis (if not quite science).

In the Jungian view, myth, folklore, archetypes, scripture, and dreams are common artifacts along the path towards understanding unknown, threatening things. Rigorous analysis (the article overstates this when comparing this to solving quadratic equations) can yield insights into what unknowns an individual, culture, or organization is grappling with and the progress that has been made.

Unfortunately, Jung did not lay out this kind of explanation in an accessible or concise manner. Some followers have improved on the situation: http://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Peter...

Hacking and startups repeatedly put people on the edge of what is known; a hacker's daily trade is in conjecture and hypothesis. When things work well, conjectures can be tested definitively, safely, and in small pieces; therefore the unknown can be conquered routinely. When that is not possible, hypotheses solidify into myth and legend, and progress can still be made. But a startup has to be able to break down and understand those myths over the long run, salvage what is useful, and discard what is not.