A (0:00)

Let me paint a scene for you. We're in the Mayan Yucatec heartland in the 10th century AD. For centuries, the Maya had thrived at the center of their known world, creating civilizations with millions of people in enormous cities. And from archaeology we found they practically denuded the Yucatan of trees. When I drove across the Yucatan today, the only thing I could see was an infinite line of trees, more so than even Canada. The Yucatan had possibly double the population a thousand years ago than it does today. Their entire region was filled with proud city states, much like the ancient Greeks, which all had their own identities while being stuck in rife war. Their ancestors had built enormous temple complexes to honor the gods. But as time passed, the world that allowed that to happen seemed more and more distant. The the world was ending. The entire region was embroiled in intensely bloody wars, more so than before, in which the conquerors would frequently an entire city, practically salting the soil after destroying it. The region was experiencing the worst drought in as long as anyone knew. And barely any rain has fallen for decades. People are starving and their currency, which is literally chocolate, can't buy anything. The nobility built their right to rule by consulting with the gods, most primarily to bring rain, a climate in which it was scarce. The sacrifices had been growing larger as the government became more desperate. The Maya, whenever times became desperate, would ceremonially cut the blood out of their testicles and burn it with paper as an offering. The sacrifices accomplished nothing. As the rain stopped coming, the peasants had stopped cooperating with the nobility, looking for any excuse to stop gaming in a system in which they knew the priest class didn't actually have the favor of the gods. The wisest priests already knew their civilization was doomed. This wasn't the first time this had happened before, in that their civilization had already risen and fallen multiple times beforehand. Their hypercomplex calendar had already worked this into the system and they were able to predict the collapse up to a certain point. What could you say against the gods? They were the ones who had final say, not us mortals. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. It's a bull market. It's a bear market. Rates will rise or fall. Can someone invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 42,000 businesses have future proofed their business with Netsuite by Oracle, the number one cloud erp bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one fluid platform. With one unified business, there's one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions with real time, insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I had needed this product, it's what I'd use. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to your immediate challenges and seize your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com 102. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com 102netsuite.com 102 People and Civilizations alike develop habits. Some are harmless, but others lead to destruction. Smoking and vaping are habits that have brought down many over history and still do today. But with flavored air, there's a path away from destruction. Fume is an award winning flavor device that delivers great taste without any harmful chemicals. Instead of inhaling vapor, you simply breathe in natural, non toxic flavors that satisfy the craving without the downside. So whether you're looking to keep your hands busy or curb an urge, Fume's premium wooden design is built for both flavor and function. The magnetic fidget features add an extra layer of satisfaction, making it perfect for relieving stress or staying focused. Fume feels great in your hand and is easy to take anywhere whether you're at work, traveling or just relaxing at home. My go to flavor is Crisp mint because it's super refreshing and keeps me feeling sharp throughout the day. But Fume offers tons of different flavors, so there's something for everyone for a limited time. If you order the Journey Pack using my code woodifalthist, you'll get a free Fume Topper, an awesome accessory to level up your experience. So click the link or scan the QR code on the screen. Over 500,000 people have started their journey away from addiction. Start yours today. Part 1 the Devouring Earth I put that intro in there since when you're dealing with civilizations which share practically nothing with the west, it becomes intensely difficult to get into their minds and understandings of life. This is since our frame of reality and how we perceive the world is more socially constructed than we like to believe. For example, in Islam, studying the physical world is inferior to reading the Quran. In an Indian culture, reality is an illusion spun by the gods. Not worth studying. Studying Mesoamerica is probably one of the societies that is the most distant from the west culturally, and thus it's profoundly interesting to see the world through their eyes, just as a reflection of the potential of the human condition. There are certain societies which are fascinating in that they show how human nature can be warped in one way or another. There's a sort of baseline to human nature which all societies share on an anthropological, statistical basis. Ironically, modern Mexico is the closest to the natural human average, while their native Mesoamerican ancestors are one of the most different. However, when you're looking at a society which is closer to the average of human nature, or they call an anthropology the universal person, in a society like India or Africa, you'll find that they're religious, clannish, taboo oriented, traditional and hierarchical. In fact, the modern west is one of the most bizarre aberrations of any society ever, in that every single element of our culture is the diametric opposite of the universal person. For reasons I explain in this text wall and a bunch of other videos I've made. Another example of a society really far from the universal person is Imperial Japan, which was so consumed by nationalistic groupthink as to kill itself by both as societies and individuals on purpose. The Mesoamericans are another example of this being incredibly different from the average. But also they're different in their own way that's distinct from how other societies are different. A culture stems from the geography it was formed in, which is something Spengler talks about very cogently. Mexico is one of the strangest geographies of any country on earth. Mexico is a very large country stretching from England to Syria. If placed over Europe, this is something Americans never talk about. But Mexico is also a profoundly diverse country with hundreds of distinct native peoples in a wide variety of terrain. Mexico has deserts in the north, jungle like savannah in the south, temperate highlands in the middle, and hot grasslands all around. Certain areas of Mexico can be 65 degrees in the summer and others are 90 degrees in the winter. If you go to the Mexican Museum of Anthropology, you'll get a sense of how many different cultures there are in Mexico. America is more diverse on one level in that my hometown in rural Pennsylvania sometimes feels like a completely different civilization from California, while the south can reasonably argue that they're their own ethnic group or nation. Mexico is more diverse in that there are legitimately dozens of different languages and cultures. Unlike America, where our natives make up something like less than 0.5% of our national genetics, in Mexico it's a half white, half native country. Genetically and full blood natives comprise downwards of 20% of the population. There are still enormous native communities with millions of people inhabiting entire provinces with their own distinct cultures. Today. Today, there are two core facts of Mexican geography which span the entire country from north to south. The first being aridity and the second being mountains. Mexico is an incredibly dry country. Almost all of Mexico has levels of rain comparable to a desert climate. I was careful to say the Yucatan isn't a jungle earlier, although it appears like one to an untrained eye, since jungles are called rainforests, since they soak up an enormous amount of rain. The Yucatan is dead dry, where it's a wonder it's a forest at all. As you'll see, this aridity or dryness is possibly the most important variable in Mesoamerican history. Fun fact. The Mesoamericans practically genetically engineered corn thousands of years before the birth of Christ. The original plant that later became corn was a tiny seed which due to generations of crossbreeding so many generations that the first people to do so probably knew that it would take centuries for the plant to become edible. When you look at the visualization, the contrast is just insane. Corn later became one of the most productive crops in the world. The second major variable of Mexico's geography is the mountains. Most of Mexico is mountainous. In some ways, this is a positive. A vastly disproportionate amount of Latin Americans live in the mountains since they provide a temperate climate in the otherwise inhospitable tropics. The Central Valley of Mexico, where the Aztecs or Toltecs were based out of, has a temperate climate where it never really gets hot in the summer. Some of the forests outside Mexico City kind of look like they could be in my homeland of the American northeast. On the other hand, these naturally divide Mexico. The exception to this is the north of the Yucatan, where the later Maya civilization flowered. This is part of the reason why the Mesoamerican culture tended to congregate in city states with distinct ethnic groups. Mexico has practically no navigable rivers which were the bread and butter of pre industrial trade. Historians have said that the reason the Mesoamericans had the wheel, which they used for stuff like toys, but never applied to practical things, is that with the mountains, wheels were just not that useful. Part of the reason the Mesoamericans never used the wheel is they also had no domesticated animals besides the turkey or dog. This was the case across the Americas before European colonialism. It hobbled the development of native civilizations in that the reason the Mesoamerican civilization was stuck in such a small region, probably around half of the scale of the modern country of Mexico is that without horses, transportation was difficult. It's also why it was so hard for them to vault out of a city, state level of development or or to cross the desert except for trade purposes to the modern US because without horses the mobility got difficult. It also meant that the natives never developed the immunity to diseases which the Europeans had developed, mostly due to proximity with domesticated animals. In some ways this was a positive in that the Americas moved faster from agriculture to building cities and civilization than Eurasia did. Since they didn't experience millennia of horrific diseases stemming from domesticated anim animals, however, this one variable effectively doomed the Amerindian race. When the Europeans arrived, the natives died at a 90% rate from European diseases. The Europeans conquered the New World less from guns and steel than germs I've been all around Mexico. It's a country that has its own issues that are very obvious, but I've grown quite fond of the country. I've lived there for six months and and I've been to like half a dozen provinces inside Mexico. Read this textual from my reviews of the different subregions of Mexico I've been to I've always been struck by how big and diverse Mexico is. If you're of a certain social class, Mexico is a vastly nicer country to live in than America, and in some ways it's more peaceful. You know, I only said in some ways I'm not that much in denial to not see the obvious failings. The reason I'm writing this video and the thing that sparked my interest in this recently is that I spent a month in Mexico with a friend of mine who's a GOP consultant, which got me to get through reading a lot of Mexican history. I read two incredibly good histories of Mexico. One is Fire and Blood by Ferenbach, while the other is Epic Mexico by Rugeley. It's funny, I can subtly pick up one of them is written by a conservative and another by a progressive, which you can see bleed into the same underlying historic historic narrative from different sides. Both of which are really good books. But I would say Fire and Blood is better, irrespective of my conservative bias, of course, being one of the best history books I've ever read. Blood and Fire is a civilizational look at Mexican history from the perspective of how the native and Spanish civilizations mix together. His main thesis is that Mexican history has been the attempt to break away from the negative elements of their context, which is what every successful society has asked to do. In turn, that The Mexicans were incapable of doing that and are stuck with the consequences. Watch the video I release in my second podcast, History 102, and that's just a podcast I love. If you want to learn more about Mexican history in general, however, he divides Mexican history into three parts. The first is the Amerindian period, which he calls the tyranny of the land. In that, Mesoamerican civilization was marked by resistance to a harsh and brutal reality. The second is the tyranny of the Spanish and after them, the tyranny of the past, in which, after Mexican independence, they were incapable of breaking out of the downstream effects of the tyranny of land and the Spanish. Spenkler's analysis of Mesoamerica is that at its core, its soul is based around the concept of the devouring Earth. When the Aztecs sacrificed millions of people to the sun God, they literally thought the sun would not rise the next morning. Didn't. Since the universe was innately cruel and predatory, to get an entire civilization to believe that something really bad has to have happened. One of the sad elements here is that this was a society that was not already very well recorded. And on top of that, the Spanish did whatever they could to destroy the rest. I was talking to an archaeologist of Mesoamerican history and I asked her what was the principle about Mesoamerica that the experts would understand but it would be very difficult for a lay person to to figure out? She said that we knew very little about their internal mental life and philosophy. From what we have gathered, their philosophy was relatively advanced in that before the conquest, their wise philosophers believed in monotheism and abstract concepts. This means that the most important events in the development of Mesoamerican civilization, the sorts of things that set the tracks for their entire civilizational trajectory, are things we can't know. Especially so since the definitive moments of a civilization's development tend to occur in its childhood, which is even harder to figure out with this civilization. However, to read between the lines a little, this society's worldview was so insanely terrified that I imagine inside their history there must have been some truly horrifying or traumatic events. I've been to probably like a dozen Mesoamerican sites, and for a lot of them I get a sort of very eerie feeling I haven't seen anywhere else in the world. When I was at Monte Alban, the native site in Oaxaca, it felt like it was practicing industrial grade black magic. And black magic is magic that comes from forcing others to suffer and taking their energy, which is human sacrifice by definition. And when I climbed to the top of Teotihuacan, I got a horrific migraine. And I've had migraines for most of my life, but not recently where I have four hours of stabbing head and stomach pains as well as I go blind. And I had that after class climbing to the top of Teotihuacan. Mesoamerican art is very overtly demonic. Their gods look like demons, with one of the greater Aztec gods being either the God of flayed skin or the many armed Cthulhu, like God of wisdom, Tlatelolco. The God Huite, the top of the Aztec pantheon, demanded millions of sacrifices. The Aztec elite would eat the flesh of those they sacrificed in sacred feasts. They would wear the skin of defeated enemies as a sacred ritual. The Mesoamerican sense of beauty was to deform as much as possible with shoving wood through your lower lip, elongating heads like a Martian, or forming sacrifices by cutting open. It was a common Maya ritual for their priest class to bleed their own tongues with barbs and for women, their genitals, and then get high off the blood that came from it, which they mixed the fumes with tree bark, ganja. In order to enter a spiritual state, the Mayans had an important spiritual ritual where they would throw men into cenotes or deep ponds and wait to see until they nearly drowned. Having a spiritual experience before pulling them out to see what they saw. This civilization was practically made for heavy metal. Fehrenbach made the point that these gods are not abstractions, but legitimate spiritual experiences they had when they did these spiritual rituals. They saw these gods which were genuine reflections of their collective subconscious. This was completely normal and in fact moral or noble for them. The thing to keep in mind with ancient peoples is that when they talk about this stuff, it's not an abstraction. It's literally how they process the world. Since this is how the neurology of their society wired them. Ancient gods are traditionally petty and cruel. Gods have tended to become more advanced as societies become so. Since the gods are partially reflections of the collective subconscious of said society. Our society tends to see Christianity as overly harsh. But from the perspective of other world religions, especially the pre axial age ones, Christianity is so unbelievably nice. And it's kind of hard to believe these people saw the world in a dark, realistic way while worth 3,000 miles off in delusion. I think the Mesoamericans were at a roughly comparable level of development to something like the Middle East 7,000 years ago, or around the development of ancient Sumeria, the Mesoamericans were still a Stone Age society. But they had 20 million people in the year 1500, or roughly comparable to the population of France at that time. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, was larger than any city in Europe. Besides Constantinople, they had writing, an advanced calendar, government and philosophers. It wouldn't surprise me from the small amount of evidence we have, if they were the closest to the Indus Valley civilization out of any Old World society. The Sumerians or Mesopotamians, like Mesoamericans, similar words also had very brutal gods, perceiving the gods as hating them and punishing them with bad weather. This was since both societies experienced brutal climactic shifts which the society was not advanced enough to realize were not caused by them personally. In Sumerian mythology, the gods made humanity to be their slaves since they were too lazy and us mortals should be grateful to kiss the toes of the gods. The Mesoamericans had similar attitudes. That being said, even with this, the Mesoamericans were more brutal than any Old World civilization I know of by at least one standard deviation. The reason they thought the gods hated them is that both major civilizations of the New World have a very strange climactic mechanism. That being the El Nino in the South Pacific, you see these enormous variations in oceanic sea current which occur rhythmically. It's kind of like Game of Thrones with these multi decade patterns in which the climate radically changes. One side of the El Nino causes flooding and the other causes mass drought for decades straight. I think part of the reason that the Mesoamericans thought the gods hated them was that the climate was so brutal, alternating between extremes. In most cases. When you're seeing the rhythmic failings of Mesoamerica, it's at least helped along by the El Nino droughts. I also think at least part of the reason the Mesoamericans were so obsessed with their calendars, which were arguably the most advanced ever, is that they were trying to model the rhythmic El Nino's weather patterns to predict for the worst. On top of this, Mesoamerica got into this pattern of behavior in which a civilization would arise, then it would fall, then it would reformulate somewhere else in Mexico for the cycle to restart. Let's talk about that a little bit more. Part two. Rise. Fall. Rise. Fall. We alluded to before how Mesoamerica has one of the strangest civilizational cycles in which they constantly stopped and started in this horrific system in which they were aware of how the climate would destroy their civilization. The Aztecs in the late medieval period called this the fifth sun in which they knew they were the fifth and final cycle of their civilization. Fifth sun is a title of a book that the mainstream really hyped up as a groundbreaking telling the Aztec narrative of the Spanish conquest. But I read it and it wasn't that good. A big reason the Aztecs did practically industrial grade human sacrifice far in excess to the early Mesoamerican civilizations was that they were begging the sun God to survive. What they believed to be the last cycle. The first Mesoamerican civilization started around 1200 BC at the latest. And this civilization continued for nearly 3000 years with a remarkable degree of continuity in artistic styles between the feathered serpent, the pyramid or jade. This makes Mesoamerica one of the most long lasted civilizations ever, I would say, since it was never able to hit critical mass enough to transmute to a higher form in the same way that classical civilization mutated into the Christian. I'm going to throw this in and I know everyone who actually has a background in Mesoamerica is going to dislike this, but I think academics arc too curmudgeonly. While I'm unclear on the accuracy, but there is evidence for two different influence on Mesoamerica from different continents. The first is the Chinese, which reputable historians like one of my favorite McNeil has spoken about. Firstly, the Chinese have multiple records of explorers saying they crossed the Pacific to a far off continent that sounds a lot like Mexico. While it also explains certain particular artistic connections like jade or the dragon especially. So there was a Chinese monk in the 8th century who sailed across the Pacific finding a civilization that was operating on completely different premises that worshiped the dragon. And he talks about certain plants that only exist in Mexico. McNeil especially thinks that the seafaring Vietnamese Dong Song civilization influenced Mesoamerica, which is not completely crazy because we know the Southeast Asian Polynesians did reach Chile and California in the medieval period. The second is my kind of schizo theory I have that I don't take that seriously, that Quetzalcoatl was the Vikings. When the Spanish arrived, the Aztecs had a pre established prophecy that Quetzalcoatl, the God of the feathered serpent, would return from the eastern ocean and bring about a sort of apocalypse. They said Quetzalcoatl was pale and had extraordinary abilities, which is how this kind of society would process technological advancement. We know Quetzalcoatl was a historic figure who lived around a thousand A.D. he was violently against human sacrifice, allying with the Mesoamerican state of Cholula, which launched a crusade against the old priest class and gods, conquering a region of eastern Mexico which stretched down to Chichen Itza and the Yucatan. In Chichen Itza, we have a stelae which shows dragon ships with men who look like Vikings, with pale hair and skin made around 1000 AD. Once again, reputable historians think that this shows Vikings, while I've spoken to a Mesoamerican expert who vociferously denied it, saying it's an insane theory. A thousand AD was also the time when we've proven the Vikings reached North America or modern Canada. And Vinland's closest approximation geographically is actually New York City. The currents from Canada could take a Viking ship down to the Gulf of Mexico. So it's not impossible to imagine. I looked up what Quetzalcoatl was the God of, and it was the exact same things as the Norse God Odin, or strategy, mysticism, kingship, healing, and sort of advanced hidden knowledge. The Vikings sailed in Drakkar, dragon ships. What I think might have happened is some Vikings made it to Mesoamerica allied with a local state, much like the later Spanish, which spoke to a sentiment many Mesoamericans had against the oppressive priest class. They launched a series of wars. Then, after it was defeated, the prophecy remained that the Europeans would return. However, that interesting aside notwithstanding, Mesoamerican civilization started in many different places. But the biggest were the Olmec, who were based around the Gulf of Mexico in the state of Tabasco. They practiced a form of shamanism which was the origin of the Mesoamerican religion, which was later standardized into the monster that was Aztec human sacrifice. Mesoamerican civilization had multiple polarities of core territory, one of which was the Central Valley, another in Oaxaca, the Mayan Yucatan and the Gulf. Mesoamerican civilization stopped and started. And so the general pattern is, say, the Olmec founded a culture which later failed, and then those cultural technologies were implemented in the Central Valley. There was a broader consciousness while still having enormous regional differences. People normally divide Mesoamerican civilization into the pre classical, classical and post classical periods. The pre classical period was around the time period before the birth of Christ, which was surprisingly advanced. That was concentrated in the Maya highlands around Guatemala and El Salvador, Oaxaca and the Olmecs along the Gulf Coast. Then the classical period was around the time of the European Dark Ages and was the high point of Mesoamerican civilization, for example, of the two greatest Mesoamerican civilizations in the classical period. Let's look to the Maya and Teotihuacan for the first. The Maya were a distinct ethnic group that still exists today where they inhabit the Yucatan region of southern Mexico alongside Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador. They were kind of the Greeks of the Americas in which they had a highly advanced city state culture in which each city like Palenque, Chichen Itza, Tikal or Calakmul all had their own personalities. And these city states were able to cultivate a degree of cultural and technical advancement not seen anywhere else in the rest of the New World. They also had comparable faults to the Greeks or a tendency to degeneracy and seeding their own destruction with constant interstate warfare. It's adorable that the consensus among academics was that the Maya were a peaceful theocracy run by spiritual experts for decades, while the reality that we discovered in the 21st century is that they loved war. This is a mistake academia constantly makes with indigenous peoples as they try to project our own fantasies of the noble savage onto them. This is actually profoundly condescending in that these were societies which saw themselves as hyper masculine warriors who would scoff at our pity for them. When we deciphered the Maya Alphabet, it was mostly about war. The fall of the Maya around the 10th century AD occurred heavily due to genocide wars in which as the cities conquered others, they just butchered the other cities in toto. This is much like the Peloponnesian wars which killed Greece. Also like the Greeks relationship to the Romans, the Maya were more chill in general than the Aztecs. As a funny example of this, in Maya culture, the universe was created by the gods getting out of boredom, much like in ancient Egyptian mythology. While the Aztecs were strictly no festival step. This is a sort of symbol for how the Maya prioritized creativity and individuality, while the Aztecs prioritized discipline and conformity. The Yucatan had nearly doubled the population a thousand years ago than it does today, while the Yucatan was nearly completely deforested. Maya constructions are so advanced we barely even know how they did a lot of it today. Well, they made possibly the most advanced calendar ever in history. The Maya were doing incredibly advanced mathematical equations. Mesoamerica wasn't stupid or primitive, even if it was a Stone Age society. The Maya fell around 1000 AD, which interestingly was a really bad time period around the world for different civilizations. And around that time period you saw the fossilization of the Great Asian civilizations like Islam, India and China, which used to be the most advanced in the world. The high medieval period around 1000 and a little bit later for some other civilizations, was the high point of civilization around the New World, where in the late medieval period leading up to the European discovery in the 1500s, the mound builder civilization of modern America, the Puebla and some of the Andean civilizations all went into decline. I would guess partly for climate reasons. At the same time or around a thousand ad, you started to see the rise of the west to greatness. I don't know why. Something was just in the air around a thousand ad. We don't really know why the Maya fell, but all empires tend to fall for roughly the same reasons. Whether the barbarian invasions that came down from the central Mexican Toltecs, who seized control of one of these last surviving Maya states of Chichen Itza, as well as social breakdown, a huge drought, and we have lots of evidence for environmental degradation as well as wars of genocide between the Maya. A major variable here is much like the Bronze Age collapse, in which when the sea people smashed a hole in the eastern Mediterranean system, the peasants never really liked the central government much anyway, since it was an oppressive temple priest theocracy. And so once the elite was gone, it just didn't recover. And you can see the same process for how cities were wiped out in Syria, Anatolia and Greece in the 12th century BC as the city's getting wiped out in the Yucatan due to the absence of major rivers, all cities in Mesoamerica existed predominantly for government purposes. And then the trade left. What this meant is that when there was a regime shift, it just meant the cities died out, which was why you saw such difficulty consistently inhabiting the same cities in Mesoamerica for centuries straight. The Maya remained an ethnic group after the fall of their civilization, and one which actually fought very hard. While the last Maya state was defeated by the Spanish in 1697, 200 years after Cortez conquered the Aztecs. Afterwards, the Mexicans beat the last Maya tribe in 1903, since they rebelled again. Even today there are Maya rebels in Chiapas. The other great classical civilization was Teotihuacan in the Central Valley of Mexico, outside modern Mexico City. This was one of the largest cities in the world at the time of the European Dark Ages with a hundred thousand inhabitants. Teotihuacan likely had a large empire which spanned possibly down to the Yucatan, controlling most of central Mexico. I've been there before and it's truly enormous. The other Mesoamerican peoples called Teotihuacan the land of the gods, in that they couldn't believe that men had built it. That suggests the dark age which came after the fall of Teotihuacan was a pretty big event, much like the fall of Rome. Teotihuacan has this very eerie feeling to it. Fehren Bach likes to say it wasn't built for humans and that the mammoth structures don't come across as appealing or comfortable. Teotihuacan was the high point of Mesoamerican social and artistic development, with the Aztecs afterwards operating in a larger scale with a degraded social structure, which is often the case with civilization. Teotihuacan experienced an enormous earthquake which then resulted in nearly the entire population emptying out almost immediately, which suggests something happened that we don't know about, probably relating to religion. Part 3 the Mexica here comes the age of Aztecs, or as they called themselves, the Mexica, who had a pretty heroic rise from obscure bandit people stuck in the islands and swamplands in Lake Texcoco. The entire shore of Lake Texcoco was surrounded by different kingdoms from the pre established, stronger Toltec civilization. The Aztecs were migrants from further north, possibly the modern US given the Aztecs speak a language related to Comanche. Upon entering the region, they had to settle some barely habitable swampland from which they made the city that would become one of the greatest in the world, Tenochtitlan. At their peak, Tenochtitlan would be the second largest city in Europe after Constantinople. The Aztecs were a brutal society, probably best paralleled by Assyria in the Old World. They conquered the whole region from sea to shining sea. The first Mesoamerican civilization we know that did so. The Aztecs were very much a closed society in that they had a clear understanding of what was right and wrong with the ruling class, which enforced strict social norms onto the population. This makes complete sense since in the greater Texcoco region they were the poorest and most barbaric people, so toughness was their only asset. It's interesting that you can see glimmers from the past of the society the Aztecs were before they rose to greatness, even at the time of the Spanish conquest. The Aztecs started out as some kind of aristocratic democracy, which was surprisingly a relatively frequent norm in the New World, in that the two greatest native powers of the modern US the Cherokee and Iroquois, were both federalized republics. I wonder if there's some kind of innate character to the land or something. Like that that made the modern Anglo Americans become a federated republic. The Native Americans were also the society which gave women the most rights in the world, although the Aztec text didn't. So I wonder if that bleeds into how the Americans are the society in history which gives women the highest social status, at least on a civilizational level, which I explain in this text, wall the Aztec confederacy, or as they called it, the Triple alliance, since Tenochtitlan was working with two other city states in the region, which they superseded, was incredibly powerful. The Aztecs became ruled by a figure they called the speaker, or in other words, dictator. The speaker gradually turned himself into a sort of God emperor, while still having the vestigial traits of the aristocratic republic. Much like the Roman Principate. The empire was formed through a bond between the Aztec leader, who was a strong war leader, with the prince of a neighboring state, who was a strategic genius and philosopher. Interestingly, this philosopher king had a project of popularizing monotheism, in that Mesoamerican philosophers were sometimes monotheistic, but it hadn't trickled down to the general population yet. It's more useful to see Mesoamerica as a sort of oriental society rather than a Western one. As a general rule, Western societies kill the dragon in their myths, while Oriental ones worship them archetypally. All human societies have myths of dragons, while dragons almost certainly never existed. And that's because the dragon is the ultimate monster in the human mind. I explain in this text, wall the west, and I'm actually including Persia and Islam in here, have an adversarial relationship with reality in which it's something to be conquered. Oriental societies worship the chaotic force of the world and view harmony or surrendering to life as the highest good. The Aztecs were a highly collectivist clan society, like Mesoamerica in general and much like Asia, while opposing them are the west, and interestingly, the Native Americans of the modern US are strange for being individualist. Every element of the average person's life in Mesoamerican culture was controlled by their clan, whether their work, social status, mate, religion, or anything else you could imagine. Aztec culture was controlled by highly rigid social structures in which, for example, the nobility would live in separate barracks for their entire adolescence. Men were expected to show courage and loyalty, while women were to be submissive. If they were caught engaging with the other sex prematurely, they'd be killed. When the Spanish went to Mexico, they were shocked by many of the moral traits of the Aztecs between how loyal, how clean, how brave, and how polite the local Aztecs were. The Aztec culture of obedience to leader, religion and tradition is why when the Spanish seized the speaker in their conquest, using him as a tool for what was practically an alien invasion, the Aztecs followed the captured speaker loyally for a while. It's also why less than a thousand Spaniards were able to seize control of a region with 20 million people. And since they just used the previous Aztec imperial apparatus, including the conscription or tax system, to control the region, the Aztecs had already been beaten into submission by their own state. So that made foreign conquest easy. The Aztecs did have a highly advanced market economy which did shock the Spanish. But they weren't capitalist and had no concept of private property. Land was held in common by the clan and divided up between each generation. This means there wasn't really a concept of the individual. The land was divided between the clans who held the core Aztec home territory and then the nobility who lived off conquered lands. Around thousand A.D. mesoamerica switched from a society run by theocratic priests to one run by the nobility, which is also what happened in the Bronze Age civilizations like Mesopotamia and Egypt. However, also like those civilizations, the intellectual life of Mesoamerica was not strong enough to break out of the domination of their minds by the priest class and the spirits they served. Much like Mesopotamia, a city's gods were seen as synonymous with the city itself. And so in the same manner that when Babylon conquered the entire Fertile Crescent, their top God Marduk became the king of Mesopotamia's pantheon. While in the same way this occurred with Huitzilopotli and Tenochtitlan's conquest of the region. For the Aztecs, they had their own warrior nobility, which they called the Jaguar and eagle warriors, which lived off the lands conquered from other nations, while the clans lived off the home territories. The Aztec social structure was a priest class warrior nobility and tribal leadership unified under the God emperor. This is most approximated by the social structures of the Middle east, which is a theme we keep on finding. This speaks to how predation was such an important part of the Aztec social structure. The Aztecs needed to raid and conquer other peoples in order to maintain their own internal social structure, which is frequently the norm for great nations and speaks to their original nomadic barbarian roots. This was institutionalized at a pretty terrible level in which most of the Aztec empire were tributaries which maintained their previous ruling class class, but just gave the Aztecs tribute, including millions of humans. This is why when the Spanish arrived, so many Aztec subjected states immediately betrayed the Aztecs for them. Since they had a pre established ruling class which hated the Aztecs. The Aztecs waged something called the Flower Wars. The best equivalent I can find to this would be as if the US waged artificial wars with Canada which the Canadians were not allowed to win. Through these, the US took the flower of Canada's youth for human sacrifices to the spirit of George Washington. This was since the Aztec social structure was dependent on human sacrifice, but they didn't have enough genuine wars to produce the humans involved. This was also a way of humiliating conquered peoples and keeping them weak. There's a certain element to Mesoamerica in which I wonder if humans are so innately predatory, which we are. At least our men are predators like wolves. That the only civilization with no domesticable animals, in that even the Andes had llamas and alpacas, resulted in humans eating each other. Elites are always naturally predators and that the fundamental purpose of an elite is to be the best hunters possible for that society's genetic self interest. Thus elites have to consume meat to maintain masculinity. The Aztec elite ate the flesh of the sacrificed at their religious feasts. I don't really view history in academic terms since that's not how people in history actually lived. So it's not true to the nature of history itself. People in history saw the past and their world the way we see the Warhammer fantasy universe as this beautiful magical, mythic place with enormous stakes in drama or death depth. We're so innately nihilistic as a society that we can't even imagine a society that isn't. Thus. I do a certain type of literary musing when I look at history. One of my musings is whether the Mesoamerican gods were trying to push their followers to see how much they do before they snapped and had the Masculine Revolution. The Masculine Revolution was an event that my favorite historian Amaury Duriancourt talks about, which occurred around 1000 BC and which Greek rationality, Jewish monotheism, Persian dualism, Chinese imperialism and Indian mysticism all formed as ways for humans to stand up against the will of cruel gods. This was an idea that human agency existed in its own right. The thing the Mesoamericans really needed was the Masculine Revolution. They needed to realize that their survival was their responsibility and to not put so much stock in mystical sacrifices. This was the mental break the old world went through in the Bronze Age. We forget how cruel the old gods were and they frequently played tricks or engaged in paradoxical events, torturing mortals until they grew to be better Part of me wonders if the Mesoamerican gods tried to see how much they could get out of the Mesoamericans in snapped to be responsible for themselves. Meanwhile, the Mesoamericans were so traumatized by their Game of Thrones water issues that they were incapable of taking the breakthrough towards having faith in themselves. It's funny how the Vikings keep coming up as a theme in this video, since they're another very heavy metal society, but with the exact opposite aesthetic, climate and philosophy. In Norse mythology, men could fight the gods and periodically win. Man was destined to fight heroically against a monstrous world, frequently knowing he was destined to lose. The more I study Mesoamerica, I've had two different reactions. The first is that going into this I knew that this would be a brutal society, but after reading more on the topic, I realized it was more so than even I realized. What frequently happens is that the more you study a topic, you find the iceberg of info you didn't even know about leans one way or another. For example, with studying Marxism and its descendants, I've consistently found it was always worse than I imagined, which is why I coined Lynch's Law, which is no matter how bad you imagine the left to be, they're worse. Secondly, I grew to develop a profound sense of empathy for this society. Mesoamerica is pushing the limits of the most alien civilization I've studied in the world. However, even with this huge cultural gap, I can feel for the Mesoamericans and see them as a people behind the layers of heavy metal demons. There is a soul here. The more I study this society, the more I start to feel the weight of its suffering and trauma. That's either between struggling against the climate, the horrific demonic religion and the constant wars, or I want to give this society a hug. And I can understand it to a certain degree since unlike almost any other civilization, they had no other civilization they really knew about who could realign themselves to a greater degree of self awareness in the broader scheme of things. If this reality is a dream by the gods to try strange stuff out, which was what almost everyone in history believed. Mesoamerica is one of the strangest psychedelic dreams. Mesoamerica is one of the edge cases of the human condition, a society better understood through magic than religion, science or human history. As you'll see, this will become even more pronounced in how mesoamerican civilization died. Part 4 War of the Worlds Most civilizations die out gradually and tragically. There are multiple tiers of civilization and as civilization grows beyond a certain threshold, it frequently takes on a greater life of its own as its own kind of emergent phenomena. This is how China, Islam, the West or classical civilization all had their own distinct worldviews which were kinda incomprehensible from the rest, which were driven by their own logic. The largest civilizations are destroyed by their greatest strength, as always happens, as best articulated by the Greek genre of tragedy. In each case, the civilization by its very success grows bloated, then weak, then bureaucratized, secular and stagnant. After centuries of stagnation, barbarians tear the empire down and the cycle restarts. Smaller civilizations, which you frequently see in places like Southeast Asia or the ancient Middle east, kind of follow their own logic, but they never hit critical mass enough to forge their own destinies. They're stuck in the stories of greater civilizations which forge the new realities. Mesoamerica has its own very strange trajectory which is only seen a few times, in which a civilization is a completely self enclosed worldview and sense of reality that's just wiped out overnight. A complete break in world or apocalypse. When I was In High School, H.G. wells was one of my favorite authors in one of his most famous books as War of the Worlds. It was written at the end of the Victorian period and is about Martians attacking and destroying Earth's civilizations. War of the Worlds was based off the European Age of Exploration in which European explorers showed up overnight, destroying the local civilization in toto immediately. The Europeans knew that if they could do it to others, it could happen to them too. The irony is that apocalyptic thinking was completely instrumental to Mesoamerican civilization for centuries before the Spanish, as we spoke about before, one of the things that the Aztec records talk about is that apparently their priest class knew that this would be the final iteration of their civilization and also predicted the exact year it would occur in from strange comets, as well as half a dozen other omens. I'm completely open to this stuff being a fabrication after the Spanish's arrival, but we've consistently found that ancient priest classes were able to figure out things about the world they had no right to know without science. As I explain in this text, textual, it's a good story either way. They prophesied how Quetzalcoatl would return from the eastern ocean to destroy their civilization. The radical increase in human sacrifice was to beg the old gods to avoid this, since they believed in human sacrifice while Quetzalcoatl was against it. The old Spanish narrative was the Mexica saw the Spanish as gods this has become controversial recently, but I don't think it really has a right, right to given in the worldview that the Mesoamericans had. Everything can be divine between a creek or a mountain. Their concept of technology was magic. So when the Spanish's armor and science was magical and divine by definition. When the Spanish arrived, the Aztec speaker invited him to the capital to speak to them. The Aztec speaker, Montezuma and Cortez, the Spanish leader, played a board game together. The Aztecs believed their entire concept of reality hinged on the success of this board game. So they played desperately, even letting Cortes bet his cloak. And then nothing. They obsessed over the game for symbolism, how to survive. Montezuma lost the game and the Spanish took him, commanding the Aztec empire through him. It's insane how the Spanish conquest of Mexico went down. And furthermore, it's even more insane how they replicated the exact same strategy in Peru, the other great New World civilization a few decades later. In both cases, they marched to the capital, seized the emperor in a desperate dash, and then governed the empire through him, using the emperor to extort gold. Then what happened is that both empires were deeply unpopular among the conquered peoples, who then rebelled, providing 90% of the conquering Spanish's armies. In Mexico, 500 Spaniards conquered a region of 20 million people, and in Peru, 200 conquered a region of 11 million. For both the same voyage as the Spaniards discovered the Aztec or Inca empires, they conquered them. And that's one of the most insane things in history from both the perspective of the Spanish who conquered and the huge empires that were conquered in that within a matter of a few years, they went from discovering these foreign lands to conquering them. In the entire worldview of these peoples was just destroyed. I think the Aztec conquest by the Spanish was one of the most traumatic events ever in human history. Something which has basically broken the spirit of any indigenous population still left in the New World today. It was as psychologically difficult as physically, although it was physically difficult to an insane degree, since they realized their entire worldview was a lie. The sun kept rising after they stopped the sacrifices. As we spoke about before, the biggest variable in the Spanish conquest of the New World was disease. When the Spanish first arrived in Tenochtitlan, they were pushed out by Aztec resistance, forced to flee to allied Tlaxcala. After they wintered in Tlaxcala, the plague hit the Aztecs, killing 90% of their population. The Spanish wiped out an entire Aztec army that vastly outnumbered them at the Battle of Otumba, through a cavalry Charge which the natives had no resistance to. When the Spanish attacked Tenochtitlan again, the population was a minority of what it was. In the first attempt attack, the Spanish built an enormous barge army and took Tenochtitlan in an epic water battle on Lake Texcoco. For centuries into the 19th century, a majority of Mexico's population were Indios, while today most are mixed race mestizos. The native culture survived among the peasants, which you can see ripple into different parts of modern Mexican culture for food. As an example, the invention of the tortilla was a huge breakthrough in their military history, since armies could march further with tortillas as better supplies, meaning they didn't have to mash corn as they walked. Alternately, the cult of the Virgin Mary was a direct descendant from the earlier Aztec fertility cults. Much of Mexico lives in clans, not nuclear families like western countries. Even today, however, the native ruling class was completely wiped out, which is generally what matters on a civilizational level. Even full blood indios who later got power in Mexico had to operate within an almost entirely Spanish elite culture. This meant that over time, the Spanish culture permeated Mexico and Now Mexico is 5050 native European ancestry. A major issue that keeps coming up in Fehrenbach's history of Mexico is that Mexico is neither native nor European, but both. Mexico has tried to rely on its native or European heritage at different points to form an identity, but the problem is that neither fits. The Spanish fit on top of the Aztec system, but also broke it through inhabiting it. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans died in the Spanish silver mines in the middle of the country, which powered Spain's centuries of European wars. In the early modern period, the Spanish used Aztec style labor conscription for the mines, which were practically a death sentence. The Spanish conquered the Aztec core really quickly, while the rest of Mexico was harder. The Chichimeca, a Mesoamerican people north of the aztecs, fought for 40 years, eventually getting very good reservation treaties with the Spanish. The Tlaxcala, the main allies of the Spanish in their conquest, were practically a new nobility having functional independence. Until Mexican independence, the Tlaxcala colonized the rest of Mexico with the Spanish. Spanish. The Yaqui and Apache of north Mexico were only conquered at the end of the 19th century, while the last Maya state was defeated by the Spanish. 200 years after they conquered the Aztecs, the Spanish established a system called incomiendas, in which the Spaniards were gifted estates of native serfs who often verged on being slaves. Much like feudal Europe, Mexico is a Serf society like Russia or Poland. Watch my video on Mexican history if you want to know more. The Spaniards had enormous harems of local women, which is why so few Spanish make up half of the genetics of Mexico today. In most Latin American countries, about a dozen families own most of the economy, and those families are frequently the descendants of the first conquistadors. Even today, Latin America is practically a feudal society. I already made a video on Latin American civilization, so check it out if you're interested. This was the process through which the indios went from the proud masters of their continent to slaves. They were infantilized by the stifling bureaucracy of the Spanish empire, which did genuinely try to protect them from abject slavery by the landowners. However, they were emasculated without any real ability to rise above subsistence. Any native who succeeded became culturally Spanish. Now to end the story of Mesoamerica is the rise of Christianity. Mexico is an authentically Christian country. Demographically, Mexico is one of the most Christian countries in the world, and it's the country with the most Catholics in the entire world. Mesoamerica was a worldview that was completely crushed by Catholicism. This was in large part since the public itself preferred a God of love over the Sun God demanding sacrifices. The church did have a tendency to insert the native, but it was the only major institution which saw the Indios as human with any degree of worth. Thus it attracted enormous loyalty from them. Later on in Mexican history, the things which the central government did that hurt the indios the most was hurting the church, since the church was such a positive force on them. The death of Mesoamerica was deeply traumatic on almost any level. As just an example, the population of Mexico in the year 1600 was 10% of what it was a century earlier. Mexico went from 20 million to 2 million. This is a Mad Max nuclear war level of devastation. Mexicans must have constantly lived in the ruins of their ancestors. However, at the same time, Mesoamerica gives an example of an aborted civilization. I'm not sure how much trajectory they had when the Spanish arrived. They were past their artistic or philosophical peak. There were no neighboring civilizations to provide competition, which meant the Spanish just wiped it out. Are centuries of stagnation really better than a sudden death? In some ways, the latter is more noble than the first. The Mesoamericans prayed for a heavy metal civilization, and in classic fashion, they had the most heavy metal ending of any civilization ever. You know what they say? Don't cry that it's over. Be happy. It happened I'm sure most Mexicans today, in the bottom of their souls, are happy the Spanish arrived. Hopefully the Mexicans were able to pull together the contradictions of their history to make something original and great. They can tell a story as different and as beautiful as any people.