Katia N’s Reviews > Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse > Status Update

Our Palaeolithic emotions are not a curse. The curse is the institutions and arrangements which bring out the worst in us.

This is very old, at least Rousseau’s time argument. I am not sure I’ve read 425 pages to come to this. It is as difficult to argue against as Hobbs’s one about all of all being evil.

I want you to imagine that the decision to detonate the bomb had rested not with betting scientists or the machinations of wartime politicians but with a jury of randomly selected US citizens fully briefed both on the impacts and risks of the bomb/the geopolitical /military situation. Now, ask yourself this: would that jury – with their friends and relatives waiting at home – have taken the same gamble?

Data is fast becoming the latest lootable resource that can be easily seen, captured, transported, and stored. AI is more extractive than artificial: it’s dependent on cheap workers, cheap materials, and stolen information. If we started paying workers fairly and requiring consent and compensation for the use of public data, the development of AI would both slow and become far more controllable.

The Creek (also known as the Muscogee Creek Confederacy), another key slave raider and colonist trader, were later compensated by being recognized as the first Native American group to be ‘civilized’ by the American government. For the Creek and other groups, slaving and aggression was handsomely rewarded.

One of the hardest things to permanently kill is not swords or crops but ideas. Once a legitimized hierarchy is deeply rooted in a culture, it becomes hard to remove. Entire systems for justifying inequality are carried forward for thousands of years. (Cont. in the comment)

Some percentage of a population appears always to harbour authoritarianism, &studies of twins suggest that it may be largely genetic. Surveys across 8 high-income countries found that around 10–25% ranked as highly authoritarian (with the US scoring the highest) These authoritarians tend to become more politically active&aggressive when they are activated by a social change, most commonly the emergence of a threat.

External threats change our brains in another way. They make us more open to being dominated. Authoritarianism – obedience to high-status authorities and the desire to punish rule-breakers – increases when individuals face a threat to their safety and security.

Administration trumped intimidation. Emerging kings across the world faced a similar problem in trying to prove they had the right to rule. Human sacrifice was a solution that many converged on and then later dropped. the ability to deal out random violence: It’s an act that puts the ruler above ordinary morality. Polities across the world have all settled on the importance of violence to make rulers legitimate.

Clearly, agriculture is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating a state.3 Goliath fuel (caged land, lootable resources, and monopolizable weapons) can help explain why states arose in these areas yet not in Japan or New Guinea.

Many of the cases cut against the conventional wisdom that states allowed for the creation of large-scale farming&cities. The logic was that people needed rulers/bureaucracy to create stable food production to sustain a city’s large population. This wasn’t necessary: across the world cities& large-scale irrigation preceded centralized, hierarchical arrangements. They often fell apart once a domineering emerged.