[mjburgess]

The issue is often that people with dystopian visions of the present and utopian visions of the past/future rarely have policies that are effective at actually redressing problems.

Routinely their dystopianism drives them to revolutionary ideas whose net effect has always been mass impoverishment.

[chungus_khan]

And people with utopian perceptions of the present tend to have policies that ignore underlying problems until they boil over into revolutions.

Fixating on how great the present is accomplishes nothing and appeals to almost nobody.

A typical feudal serf probably lived better than a hunter-gatherer, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't want to be free, and telling them that things are better is just avoiding the question.

Any analysis which fixates on things being uniformly better or uniformly worse will paint an incoherent and unhelpful picture. A realistic look at things involves looking critically at present and past policy in a nuanced manner, even in areas where things may be better.