One of the Pervasive Bad Habits of Western Thought

Rita, it's one of the pervasive bad habits of Western thought to assume that all other societies are on a track that leads to us -- this is what's implied by claims, for example, that Afghanistan is "still in the Middle Ages" (our Middle Ages, of course) or that hunter-gatherer tribes are "still in the Stone Age." Thus the insistence by Western elites that everyone else ought to use the same political forms we have, whether they work or not. - John Michael Greer