If they are not all bad or good are they all the same ( that is to say composed of equal number and value of good and bad parts) that seems unlikely to be the case and would need some theory other than just answering yes so I suppose we will say no.

If people / cultures / civilizations vary in the level of goodness and badness in them then it follows that there should be a distribution of societies that are significantly more good than bad, societies that are average, and societies that are significantly more bad than good.

If a society is significantly more bad than good it can be true that you could still find something good in them but it becomes questionable if it is worth an individual to study the society to extract this good part from all the bad.

Thus I would conclude that it might not be really worthwhile to learn anything from the Aztecs.

It might be worth noting that the Aztecs demonstrated that if you cannot defend yourself against warlike peoples then lousy become their subjects. This is a lesson of enduring importance.

The Aztecs had a neighboring state to the north east I think. Who were not as violent or warlike as the Aztecs. Every time the Aztecs went to war against them they got rekt.

One historian I read said if Cortez had shown up 50-100 years later they probably would have ended up facing those those guys first instead of the Aztecs and had a really bad time.

> If they are not all bad or good are they all the same ( that is to say composed of equal number and value of good and bad parts) that seems unlikely to be the case and would need some theory other than just answering yes so I suppose we will say no.

Good and bad are time and culture specific. In 50 years, many things that we do everyday now will be "bad" and many things that we see as "bad" will be "good."

This is why the phrase “on the right side of history” is so stupid. It is literally impossible to know what is and is not on the right side of history until it actually is history.

And even then... history takes a long time.

There are no sides to history, winners write it.

I probably wouldn't be too interested in taking advice from Hitler about how to find happiness