Comment by rayiner
You're moving the goalposts. You made a good point earlier: "for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers."
We know what "politics and institutions" created the CO2 scrubbers (i.e. our present technologically advanced and prosperous society). It was the ones that displaced and killed the native americans and celebrated it in movies. By your own logic, we should be teaching how to maintain those politics and institutions, so we maintain our prosperity. Insofar as there is any point in learning about history, surely it is learning about what has worked?
This is silly. The 'society' has done very, very many things over the centuries (including other awful ones - slavery, Japanese-American internment, segregation, oppression in Latin America and elsewhere, climate change, etc etc). To pick one and say it's necessary to CO2 scrubbers is just a rhetorical/philosophical game.
That can be fun - we're on HN after all - and even informative to explore, but is not tied to reality.