(October 21, 2012 at 4:01 pm)Rhythm Wrote: I think what you may be doing here is using our society, and including our current notions of gender equality as the standard for "advanced".
Our society is FAR from egalitarian. There was a chance for it to actually happen in the early 1900s with Virginia Wolf etc. But then it sort of didn't go all the way. For example - women can earn their own money - but they still end up in arranged marriages and their income is used to pay the cost of raising children - at least in my country. Little girls have still their confidence and defiance destroyed and made into submissive slave-like creatures. It's a long way to the real egalitarianism. What we have now I would call "fake egalitarianism".
(October 21, 2012 at 4:01 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Another interesting example (that might tickle you pink, considering) is that the cautionary tale of Atlantis is such that the reasons for it "sinking in a single day" was a decline of virtue followed by an attempt to invade the lands of the ancestors of the narrator and listeners.
Of course we do not know much about Atlantis. What I meant was simply some kind of civilization where people would actually start to think at some point instead of repeating the same "rituals" in a cycle and making each other unhappy. A society which would appreciate a teenage genius and allow such person to thrive and develop further or one that would not "socialize" girls into submission but allow them to be a full-blown person who lives an independent life and can contribute to whatever she wants to contribute. Such cases exist now but this is more of an exception than a rule.
