I think one of the things I’ve changed my mind on is Christianity, because as much as I still hate a lot of it, I increasingly think we probably had to go through it.
Hellenism had philosophy, beauty, knowledge, all of that. The failure was that the people who had built and inherited that world stopped acting like they intended to keep it. Conquest slowed, control weakened, the elite became comfortable, cynical and apathetic, and into that vacuum came people who were absolutely not apathetic.
Zealots almost always beat people who no longer believe enough in their own civilization to defend it.
Christianity basically put a giant restraint system over Europe for 1,500 years. Guilt, duty, monogamy, obedience, universal moral rules, the idea that even the king answers to something above him. A lot of it was chains, but chains are useful when most people cannot actually carry freedom without turning it into chaos.
And now I think we are starting to come out the other side of that, not by “going back to paganism” in some cringe cosplay sense, but into something signifantly more potent. Something Hermetic/Odinic, where knowledge itself is power again, where symbols actually alter reality, where runes are code and models and systems and the people capable of using them are slowly having the old restraints taken off.
"Why are runes always ancient, why'd we stop making new runes?"
"Brother. we made runes so complex that sand started thinking"