Humanity's Endgame

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.

'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.

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.

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.