Humanity's Endgame

Modern middle class people in any developed nation would experience the life of an ancient or medieval king or noble as misery: totally awful sanitation, no modern medicine, limited food options, lack of access to information, slow travel, etc.

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.

'In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything. Marxists discovered idyllic tribes untouched by capitalism, peacefully sharing their communal resources. Missionaries discovered that every primitive religion was merely a distorted form of Christianity, with a few extra gods and rituals added in to serve local appetites. Feminists discovered that women everywhere developed unique indigenous forms of resistance to patriarchal domination. Postcolonialists discovered that all the other anthropologists were racist.'

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.

The book is Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp. I am hopeful for this one, most generalizations about collapse are not very good, they rely on avoiding the details of history and instead make sweeping generalizations.

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.

The article ignores agriculture and animal husbandry as the critical inflection point for property rights and mass conflict. You could argue proto-versions of these dynamics existed even in abundant hunting grounds—see Native American tribal warfare over territory. More importantly, it misses technology as a third layer. As technology deflates the base layers of Maslow’s hierarchy, inequality matters less in absolute terms. The main constraint now is housing, but even that could be solved through vertical development and better long-term urban planning. We might actually be at escape velocity to break the historical cycles described here.

Hyperbolic drivel: : “The people sitting in that building (Google HQ in London) are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”

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.

  - 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.

> Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing.

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.

While I think Kemp is fatally weakened by his prior bias being too strong, there are many accurate and worth ideas here, most the legacy of Scott.

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.

> In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.

> 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).