Rambles on fate - American Government blog post

I have a theory about the universe. I think that just about everything begins with simplicity, grows more complex and transcend to a profound level of (once again) simplicity. Although I feel this is true as a general rule, I had not considered its implications as regards to civilizations until today. The chapter in my American Government book that discusses the beginning of the industrial revolution started with descriptions of that time period's positive aspects - new transportation, new trade, more successful and world-wide farmers, etc. However, the chapter then moved on to describe how the advancement of society began to trap the disadvantaged and increasingly stratify society. For some reason I made an emotional connection to the men and women trapped (often by their race, gender or birth) in very difficult societal dead-ends. I almost wonder if periods of general darkness and difficult are part of the human race's progress through increasing complication towards the ultimate profound simplicity. That sounds so fatalistic, though - to think that men and women are merely chaff in the winds of societal progression. I guess this gets to the heart of a question I've asked a lot  - given that we are born as certain people in a certain time and in a certain place, how much of our life do we really control? I would like to think that the moral decisions we and life paths we take are valid, regardless of our limited perspective. If that's true, I guess history becomes a little more complex - you can't just look at a generation of people and say they were sacrificed to their time, because they were given a life like ours with which they too made choices. I apologize for the redundancy and unoriginality of this post; of course they too had choices - they were people just as we are. For me, though, it's a different way of looking at history - to see how individual men and women dealt with the limited perspective they were given. I hope I can learn from them.