The fascination with the Roman Empire among Americans and Europeans stems largely from a shared cultural ancestry rooted in its laws, architecture, and political ideals. From the architecture of government buildings in Washington, D.C., to the foundational legal codes of Europe, Rome feels like an eternal blueprint for modern civilization. Many also find a deep sense of identity and prestige in tracing democratic values, military discipline, and grand engineering achievements back to a historical superpower. Furthermore, the dramatic tales of rise, moral decay, and ultimate collapse serve as a perpetual mirror for contemporary anxieties about the fate of modern Western societies. Ultimately, Rome represents a golden standard of monumental ambition that continues to capture the Western imagination.

Like the "old man yells at cloud" meme.

"Rousseau has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the 'noble savage', which he didn't really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the 'myth of the stupid savage' even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity. Nineteenth-century imperialists adopted the stereotype enthusiastically, merely adding on a variety of ostensibly scientific justifications - from Darwinian evolutionism to 'scientific' racism - to elaborate on that notion of innocent simplicity, and thus provide a pretext for pushing the remaining free peoples of the world (or increasingly, as European imperial expansion continued, the formerly free peoples) into a conceptual space where their judgements no longer seemed threatening. This is the work we are trying to undo."

Graeber/Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

As an indigenous person I wholeheartedly reject the cartoonish noble savage trope, which, ironically, Europeans came up with and peddled, not indigenous peoples. When I speak of my culture's lack of wars, armies, kings, or any viable form of social subordination whatsoever, or the fact that they were among the world's first copper workers, or the fact that they created a successful large scale agricultural society in a farming-averse ecology without markets or states, I'm describing a highly complex world created and managed by highly intelligent people. I speak of the success, wisdom, and hard work of many generations. We're fully aware that the freedom our ancestors enjoyed wasn't the product of living like mindless animals in some imaginary state of nature. Our ancestors designed their societies the way they did precisely because they knew that every society is subject to countless imperfect human behaviors and tendencies, and they succeeded in preempting many of them.

Nobody's saying there wasn't violence, betrayal, attempts at coercive control, or moral depravity, though even early European visitors familiar with Algonquian peoples routinely noted how these things were far more scarce in those societies than anything they'd seen elsewhere. And yes, we know that the Americas were full of diverse cultures on a scale that non-indigenous minds can hardly imagine today, so there's no pretending that they were all the same, especially when the ethnographic record shows us all that they were wildly different.

Not savages, not noble, just human. Pretty sure that's all we ever wanted to be seen as.

II Samuel 6:16

As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart.

Context: Ka’iana was a high Chief of the Island of Hawaii who played an important role in the unification of the islands.

He lived and served under the Islands of Kaua’i and Maui for a time, before joining a European merchant ship and traveling to different parts of the world, returning to serve King Kamehameha with knowledge of the outside world and a good number of firearms.

He would eventually turn against Kamehameha, joining the King of Maui, Kalanikūpule with a fair amount of men and weapons.

The reason for this defection is debated. Some say that he simply felt unappreciated, that Kamehameha’s Chiefs were plotting to kill him, or that Ka’iana had been having an affair with Kamehameha’s favorite wife, Ka’ahumanu.

At the battle of Nu’uanu in 1795, Ka’iana was killed by Kamehameha’s army after taking several shots to the chest and legs

*Salter was elected mayor of Argonia on April 4, 1887. Her election was a surprise because her name had been placed on a slate of candidates as a stunt by a group of men hoping to secure a loss that would humiliate women and discourage them from participation in politics.*

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_M._Salter