Agh no. Please don't use average utility (or its proxies like height or income) to evaluate societies. It matters how many people there are too! If disease wipes out half the population, and the remainder now has more to eat and grows taller, that is not a good thing.
Collapse is one of those tropes that is poorly treated, popular among people who aren’t interested in the details of history and only some grand lesson or some justification for some feeling in their gut about impending doom.
Of all of them, I'm most attracted by the concept that, through most of our evolution, our culture contained an immune system that limited the harm ambitious psychopaths could inflict. But our present culture is adapted to maximize the impact of those same psychopaths.
Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization."
- Google doesn't serve Huel - Google has maybe two total pong pong tables in the London office and staff here are some of the most diligent coworkers I know. - Google actively is working to, and has reduced, conflict cobalt from the supply chain. - No one I know in Silicon Valley "cleaves to Hobbesian myths" to "justify" their grip on anything. Everyone I know shows up to work to provide for their family, grow professionally, or self-actualize. - People who "dream of Singularity and interplanetary civilization" isn't a thing, no one dreams of this fantasy.
If the so called professional being cited here cannot avoid use hyperbolic drivel and unfounded fantasy to substantiate the claim, it's difficult to give credence to the case.
The survey of polity mortality this book is supposedly about seems fundamentally biased by the idea that power-seeking and inequality are inherently negative, when that's only a framework that is applicable to the 1859-1973 period of labor shortages relative to land under cultivation making economic growth dependent on restraining the expression of hard power.
In societies without a state there is almost universally a high rate of male mortality from infrequent violent squabbles (about once a year) over territory used for social production - game rangelands, prey pastureland, cropland, marriageable women, adoptable children, choice of protégés. When labor is in the normal case of oversupply second sons don't always make peace with having little to inherit and despots act as a way to restrain the activity of their class.
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It seems a lot of damage done unintentionally in academic works conflating valuable discovery with unevidenced bias comes from being insufficiently reductionist.
People with dark triad traits don't materialise out of the ether, they are selected for by their effect on group reproductive fitness. Their motives and those motives' motives are accountable and transparent to sufficiently thorough psychoanalysis and the root causes for why they keep becoming privileged economically can be found by digging into the weeds of information theory.
> In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.”
... are fair assessments of how we got here, imo. If you have criminals in control, able to institute a self-serving brainwashing culture (education) in the populace for a few hundred years, we are where you would expect - with people demanding forcible extraction from their masters out of fear (government, taxes).
The same goes for the life of any hunter gatherer. Lack of modern medicine alone is huge. Living as a hunter gatherer might be okay if you were healthy. Get injured or sick and there’s nothing to be done. Infant and maternal mortality were also high.
The wealth of the present age is utterly unprecedented. If it collapses the fall will not be like other falls. I am skeptical about the value of any comparison with any historical example. This is too different in too many ways.