The 19th-century English writer Charles Dickens famously said, "This is the best of times, this is the worst of times." People are on the road to heaven, people are walking towards the gates of hell. For a hundred years, people have been responding to Dickens's question, what kind of era is a "good era"? One of the more popular opinions is: "Good times are walking on the streets, and we dare not underestimate anyone." Because today you ignore my love, tomorrow I will make you unattainable. However, is this really the case with the "good times"? At the end of Qin, no one dared to underestimate Liu Bang, the head of the Surabaya Pavilion; At the end of the Ming Dynasty, no one dared to despise the unemployed Li Zicheng; On the streets of Vienna in the 10s of the 20th century, no one dared to underestimate the unkempt Hitler who made a living by selling paintings. ——In the above years, walking on the street, I really didn't dare to underestimate anyone, but it was an era of war and ordinary people's lives. They are by no means "good times", rather "big times" to be precise. However, it seems that everyone loves the "big time". Politicians, military strategists and other big figures prefer the "great era" - the "great era" is a historical opportunity for them to make contributions and leave a name in history. Historians, writers, and other intellectuals have a preference for the "Great Era"—the passionate "Great Era," and they have been left with a wealth of material. Entrepreneurs prefer the "big era" - the drastic change in the market environment is a good opportunity for small companies to "ants overturn elephants". Ordinary people also prefer the "Great Era" - the "Great Era" such as the "Roman Empire", "the Great Qin Empire", "the Napoleonic Era" and "World War II", which have always been the enduring hit themes of games, film and television dramas...
Battle of Stalingrad: Soldiers survive for no more than 9 minutes, however, Lu Xun said: "The great era does not necessarily mean that you can live from it, but you can also die from it." It's not death, it's life, this is the big era. "An era of either life or death is not so much a "great era" as an "extreme era"—for the big people, this may be a good era for the big people, but for the little people, it may well be the worst of the worst times, and life is worse than death. The Great Age of Empires,It's mostly a good time for "big shots".In the era of agricultural civilization, land and population were the most important assets of a country. In the 18th century, the English economist Malthus accurately summed up the relationship between the two in one sentence: "The food produced by the land is far from keeping up with the rate of population expansion." So the extra population will always be wiped out in some way. This is known as the "Malthusian Trap". This disastrous inference, like a precise scalpel, dissects the underlying logic of the emergence of many imperial "great epochs" in history. In the age of agriculture, the "Malthusian trap" was like an invisible hand, tightly choking the throat of human civilization. Every country, in the cruel competition for survival, is trying to improve the country's ability to organize and mobilize and fight through changing the law, and at the same time have the ability to wage war to seize more land and population while protecting itself - the more efficient the country, the greater the hope of victory, in the face of this, the safety and freedom of the individual seem insignificant. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, all countries changed their laws with this as their goal. Due to Qin's "Shang Dynasty Reform" was the most thorough, and soon Qin rose from a weak and dangerous state in the west to the most efficient and cruel war machine at that time. Guo Jianlong described Qin's terrible war mobilization capability in "The Military Code of the Empire": "The turning point of World War II, the Battle of Stalingrad, the German army was annihilated by 330,000 people, which is the war mobilization ability of the industrial age. In the agrarian era 2,000 years ago, the Qin State was able to mobilize a million troops for a long war. In the Battle of Changping, the Qin army killed nearly 400,000 prisoners of war in the Zhao army alone. In the West, the rise of the Roman Empire followed the same logic. Rome was originally a humble farming city-state on the Italian peninsula. Although the Romans regarded the land as their life, Roman law did not recognize private property rights to the land. The Roman Republic at that time formed a "trinity" of state nuclei based on citizens, public land, and citizen armies. Rome, which was founded on agriculture, attacked from all sides and constantly launched wars to destroy the country. The Roman legions were so powerful that the entire Mediterranean was trembling. If the rise of the Qin Empire cannot be described without the "Changping War", then the rise of the Roman Empire cannot be described without the brutal Punic War. 
The Punic Wars: The Life-and-Death Game Between Rome and CarthageThe book "The Rise and Fall of the World: The Mediterranean World and the Roman Empire" describes the tragic fate of the Carthaginians as follows: "After three Punic wars, Carthage, which had once been prosperous and wealthy, was completely wiped off the face of the earth by the Romans, and the walls, temples, houses, markets and other buildings were all destroyed, and the ground with stones and piles of earth was ploughed and leveled. The most prosperous trading city in North Africa was salted by the Romans, and no grass ever grew there, and humans lived here again, about 100 years later. However, in terms of the great influence on the world and the cruelty of military conquest, it is more than the Roman Empire, the largest empire in human history, the Mongol Empire. Through The Rise and Fall of the Mongol Empire and Its Long Afterlife, we find that the logic of the expansion of the Mongol Empire, as a nomadic people, began with climate change known as the "Xiaoice Age". In the 12th and 13th centuries, when the global climate was unusually cold and dry, resulting in a large number of deaths of cattle and sheep and other livestock—the Mongol tribes who lived on animal husbandry had to go south on a large scale to plunder—the Mongol Empire rose rapidly, and soon swept across the entire Eurasian continent, slaughtering one great empire after another, creating a bloody "Great Era". How bloody is this big time? Take a look at the Baghdad that was the most tragic in the course of the Mongol conquest recorded in the "World History of the Rise and Fall", and you can get a glimpse of the leopard: in 1258 AD, the Mongol army captured Baghdad, the capital of the Arab Empire. Subsequently, the murderous Mongols burned the ancient capital of civilization to the ground, including the Palace of Wisdom in Baghdad, which represents the highest level of scholarship. In the once-glorious capital of Baghdad, the streets are filled with corpses piled higher than bridges, ruined walls and collapsed houses, and the smell of rancid smell fills the air. The whole land was covered with famine, pestilence, and death. The turbulent Age of Empires has brought endless disasters to mankind. The rules of the game of zero-sum games doom the heroes of this era to only those who kill the most. This set of "World History of the Rise and Fall" produced by Kodansha in Japan shows the three main reasons for the great turmoil of the "Great Era":injustice, becoming a machine for sowing hatred; The disparity between the rich and the poor is an accelerator that intensifies social contradictions; Greed, on the other hand, is the source of social unrest. Nowadays, when we praise the "great era" created by the Qin Emperor Han Wu, Bai Qi, Hannibal, Genghis Khan and other great figures, we must not forget that there are many white bones buried under the glorious historical stage. They are the silent majority of the Great Time. The "great era" created by science is a mixed bagHumanity has always been confronted with three major natural threats — famine, disease and natural disasters. Many thinkers at one time believed that they must be part of God's overall cosmic plan and that they could never be escaped unless they reached the end of time. However, with the advent of the scientific age, three major threats were gradually overcome - in addition to the well-known industrial revolutions, the rapid development of chemistry stimulated the rapid growth of chemical fertilizers, directly broke through the bottleneck of agricultural production, mankind completely got rid of the "Malthusian trap", and famine was no longer a major problem for human beings. Once upon a time, the Black Death, plague, pneumonia and other epidemics made human beings helpless, due to the backwardness of medicine, countries could only arrange large-scale prayers, but they did not know how to stop the spread of the epidemic. However, with the rapid development of biological sciences, humanity's fight against epidemics has gained the upper hand. Throughout history, natural disasters such as floods and tsunamis** have been considered "God's punishment". With the development of science and technology, people have been able to prevent large-scale personnel through various advanced measures such as network monitoring. As a result, science and technology have been regarded as the primary productive forces, and the world's most classic set of popular science books so far is called "the first push". Despite the dazzling achievements of science, unfortunately, the progress of science has been accompanied by the abuse of science by human beings, which has brought greater vanity and fanaticism to mankind -- a group of "scientologists" represented by Saint-Simon and Comte have tried to hand over all the problems of mankind to science, believing that the more scientific the world, the more perfect and benign it will be. The ideologue's admiration for scientific thinking was soon put into practice by politicians, and as a result, a "great era" that changed the world was staged in turn all over the world: the Nazis tried in vain to use scientific thinking to manage the country, improve the human race, and ** the evil in human nature - during World War II, Nazi Germany established a large number of concentration camps in the occupied areas, and in the form of assembly lines, large-scale ** dissidents, Jews, Jeeps, and Slavs. Nazi Germany became one of the most horrific totalitarian states in human history. Utopians try to use scientific thinking to manage the country's economy in order to construct a paradise on earth where "there are no economic cycles, no crises, no exploitation, and everyone is equal". After 1920, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, East Asia, and other places successively used the "scientific method" of "planned economy" to run the economy, and to carry out production and distribution. In the end, it was a bloodstained catastrophe - economic collapse, political turmoil, human destruction, and civilization regression...In order to curb the misuse of science, Hayek published The Counter-Revolution of Science, in which he presented a terrifying fact - the history of human suffering is a history of the abuse of reason, the root of the suffering of the entire 20th century, which seems to be a variety of radical ideas, but the underlying logic of error is the same: scientific thinking is abused.
In this "great age" inaugurated by science, in the midst of these dazzling and bewildering visions, only a handful of prophets can point out the truth and the crux of the problem - human beings may be just a bunch of blind people, but they are always thinking about operating on themselves. Hayek was one such prophet, who predicted in The Counter-Revolution of Science: "Human beings naturally have the impulse to advocate reason and utopia, and with the rapid progress of science and technology in the future, generation after generation of people will apply 'fatal conceit' to the organizational design of human economy and society itself, and mankind may never be able to get rid of the curse of utopia on individual freedom!" ”The big time is not very importantGood times matterWang Dongyue, an independent scholar, said: "The influence of a country is mainly due to the rise of new ideas. The virtual mind is always stronger than the physical geography, and the mind is always stronger than the economy and the growth of wealth. Many ancient civilizations have declined because of a lack of new ideas, which has led them to become guardians, shields, and fetters of old cultures. Without new ideas, no matter how long the history of the country is, it will be poor and weak. "Visible,An era without great ideas, no matter how prosperous the economy and how developed the technology is, it cannot become a real "great era". In turbulent times of crisis, ideas can gush out irrepressibly. In the era of peace, the emergence of ideas originated from the "free marketplace of ideas" - in the Age of Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment represented by Hume and Smith, and the French Enlightenment represented by Descartes and Rousseau emerged one after another; The emergence of Kant, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Hayek, Mises and other thinkers who have influenced human history to the present day is no exception. The birth or victory of a free marketplace of ideas is not necessarily a good idea, but without a free marketplace of ideas, there will certainly be no emergence of good ideas. Data at the level of artifacts, such as economic development and technological progress, are often regarded as one of the standard configurations of the great era. However, the progress of artifacts actually comes from the system that can reduce transaction costs, and the system comes from new ideas and concepts. However, we often fall into two major misunderstandings:
Ignorance and short-sightedness: valuing utensils and despising thoughts; They are interested in the bad ideas that have caused disasters – the "great era" brought about by radicalism, scientism and utopianism in modern times, but the good ideas that "expand the boundaries of the freedom of ordinary people" – the "freedom under the rule of law" advocated by Montesquieu and Gonsdown; Smith, Hayek, Mises, and Hope adhered to the "concept of protecting private property and free market"; Burke, Tocqueville, Kirk, the consistent "conservative thought," and Isaiah Berlin's idea of "negative liberty," among others. Historically, these good ideas have shaped the "good times" of one small person after anotherUnlike the passionate "big times" of bad ideas, the "big times" of good ideas are bland because they lack grand narratives, and they are not legendary because they lack charismatic leaders like Karisma. Therefore, it is not very important whether an era is a "big era" or not, but whether it is a good era or not. What is the good times? In fact, it is very simple: in good times, people don't have to be afraid all the time in life, everyone has the right to choose freely, everyone's property can be protected, and everyone can have a basic right to know about public events related to their own safety; In good times, the law of heaven is equal to the law of kings, and everyone only needs to obey the conscience in their hearts and the laws of the world; In good times, people who wave "goodbye" in the morning can return safely in the evening, with their backpacks thrown in the same corner and coats hung on the same hangers...I believe there is no one who does not yearn for such an era. However, great times of disasters often fall from the sky, and good times of freedom and prosperity never come unexpectedly. To embrace the good times, we must first understand the most important great eras and good times in history, and we need to select the good ideas that create the good times. To this end,We've curated a list of books that are needed to embrace the good times, a selection of Kodansha's "History of the Rise and Fall of the World" (nine volumes), as well as classic works by thinkers such as Smith, Burke, Mises, and Hayek. Click on the product card below to purchase.