The Da Vinci Choad

If you stare long enough at a liberal, the squiggly lines often resolve into a picture of a newborn kitty cat.  Vide infra.  It's a crackpot teleology that inevitably ends up as a martial technocracy--Starfleet as the natural end state of a very boring social metamorphosis.  We must all join forces to solve insert pressing issue.  Isn't it neat that joining forces is itself a phrase with a martial origin?  David Atkins, the dimmest light at Digby's Discount Bulb Emporium:

It's how tribes grew into villages, how villages grew into city-states, city-states became kingdoms, and kingdoms became empires. It's how empires fell of their own weight, how dark ages grew into feudalism, feudalism centralized into nation-states, and how nation-states gradually adopted democratic reforms through fits, starts and revolutions.

The "it" of the "is" here is "the story of the power of civilization and complexification to mitigate the worst tendencies of human nature while expanding universal rights and unlocking the secrets of the universe."  Oh dear.  Of course, the universalism of tribes growing into villages (oh is that how it happened?) pretty swiftly resolves itself into a bad history of the European peninsula.  Did the Western Roman Empire "fall of its own weight"?  What would that mean, actually?  The dark ages "grew" into feudalism, fortunately without the intervention of a single Carolingian, less yet Vikings! Magyars!  Al-Andalus!  Feudalism, whatever that was, "centralized into nation-states," nevermind Germany, Italy, or the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Then everyone became a democracy, through fits and starts.  Is this passage meant to be illustrative but not literal?  I find it hard to read as a metaphor.  My favorite Jewish homosexual, Michael Weiner-Savage, says that liberalism is a mental disease.  A charming thesis, but, I think, wrong on the particulars.  It seems to me that liberalism is a learning disability.