Part II -The Long Slog
- didiermoretti
- Nov 22, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: Dec 5, 2024
INTRODUCTION
Consider one of history's great ironies: while our hunter-gatherer ancestors enjoyed varied diets and abundant leisure in their tight-knit bands, the rise of the first states brought their descendants a poorer bargain. These supposedly more advanced humans found themselves toiling endlessly in fields, growing grain for distant kings they would never meet—trading freedom for servitude, leisure for labor, and dietary diversity for monotonous subsistence. Such was the peculiar foundation upon which all subsequent human advancement would be built.
For millennia after the first states emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, most humans lived perpetually on the edge of starvation. The average peasant in medieval Europe was no better off than one in Ancient Sumer. Only in the last few centuries has humanity managed to break free from this paradox of progress. But why did it take so long? And what finally changed?
Part II explores this grand puzzle of human history. What emerges is not a tale of triumphant march of progress, but rather a messy series of accidents, unintended consequences, and adaptations. Time and again, humans created solutions to immediate problems, only to find themselves ensnared by their own innovations. We domesticated wheat, but wheat returned the favor by domesticating us. We built cities to protect ourselves, only to become vulnerable to new diseases. We invented money to facilitate trade, only to create new forms of bondage through debt.
That humanity eventually flourished despite such self-imposed setbacks might be our species' most remarkable achievement—or perhaps just its most fortunate accident.
