History rhymes

While on a quest to learn more about economic cycles in history, one cannot just trod with the numbers without seeing the catalysts of societal change. The below is a small off-take of this endeavour, to remark on the anecdotal evidence given by Burckhardt of how a certain ruler suppresses the rights of his servants.

One can witness as to how intellectual individualism clashes with the collective madness, how the scholasticism – while unifying individual logic of Greek philosophy with the body of collective faith – per Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa Theologica” cannot stop the humanistic writings pushing the worldview afar from the church (one pillar being a treatise by Pico Della Mirandola or the scientific approach elaborated by Bacon in his “Novum Organum”.

One can also argue as to how hundreds of years forward the belief for individual reason and personal development clashes with one of blind faith and submission.

Where the interest of a selective few are beyond comprehension for the mass, the cynical step made by them is to either erect around it an aura of holy duty – or to (brutally) suppress the alternative views altogether.

So happened during the (short) reign of one (brutal ruler) Giovanni Maria Visconti of Milan in early 15th century:

“In May, I409, when war was going on, and the starving populace cried to him in the streets, “Pace! Pace!” he let loose his mercenaries upon them, and 200 lives were sacrificed; under penalty of the gallows it was forbidden to utter the words “pace” and “guerra”, and the priests were ordered, instead of “dona nobis pacem”, to say “tranquilitatem”.

Jacob Bukckhardt – “the Civilisation of the Renaissance Italy”