What is the common feature in these terms which we often encounter in history and philosophy books: “State of Nature,” “Primitive Barter Society,” “Noble Savages,” “Primitive Cannibal Society,” “Aryan Invasion,” “the Fertile Crescent,” “the Classical Age,” “the Renaissance,” “the Scientific Revolution,” “the Enlightenment,” “the Dark Continent,” “Aryan Race,” “Classical Liberal Society,” and “Capitalist Free Market.”
Answer: Each of these terms represents a myth—they represent intellectual hoaxes and geopolitical propaganda. No historian or explorer has discovered the kind of people, societies, or movements that these terms seem to represent. There is no evidence that such people, societies, or movements ever existed. In many cases, the nature of the society, movement, or cultural system is fundamentally different from the impression that the term attributed to it creates.
When you come across such terms in any text, the questions that you ought to be asking are: Who created these terms? When did they create these terms? What was their political ideology? What was their political agenda? Why did they select this particular term? Why not some other term? Is it possible that they selected a particular term because they wanted to prejudice the reader by planting a certain kind of impression in his mind?
Exposition of history and philosophy is not the true purpose of these terms. These terms are aimed at establishing European supremacy. European scholars created rates terms in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because they wanted people in all parts of the world to believe that Europe was the ultimate cradle of civilization, that the Europeans were mankind’s apex achievers, and that they were fit to rule all of humanity.
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