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I am trying to make a serious recommendation.
The historiography you are describing (an arc of history that progresses from egalitarian hunter-gather bands through the agrarian, feudal, industrial and information revolutions to ineluctable dominance and hierarchy) is painstakingly debunked by Graeber and Wengrow. They persuasively argue that this historiography is an invention of the enlightenment, arising from the indigenous critique when Europeans encountered the people of the Americas.
You would get a lot out of Graeber if you took the time. The exciting thing about his message is that there is nothing preordained about our social relations and we are free to reinvent them, as people have done throughout history.
t-v-
He's the bullshit jobs guy, if I remember right. I probably would dig him quite a bit.
I'm aware my thumbnail sketch of the last 20,000 years or whatever is severely lacking from a historian's perspective, but I'm not sure why it needs fleshing out at all to serve its purpose of making the point that for the vast majority of our past, we were cooperative by necessity. And that agriculture removed that necessity, and enabled many further technological developments which magnified any advantage gained from dominance.
Do Graeber & Wengrow have anything to say about any means of preventing brutal authoritarians from getting a toehold? Or how to get from here to a level playing field? That's what concerns me.
Seems to me, we require a culture of militant egalitarianism, where anyone who seeks to subjugate others is considered as a cancer cell in the superorganism of society. To reach that point, I think the only halfway plausible path is to create a corporation designed to do it, which can eventually swallow all the other corporations and ultimately render governments irrelevant.
Kimmo
Nit-picking. It's more or less immaterial, at what point the turd was laid in the punchbowl; at some point after the prerequisites were in place, a dominator culture came along and dominated. Whether the final nail in the coffin was Sargon of Akkad, or the East India Company, the problem is the same.
What is the recipe for preventing a dominator culture from getting its genocide on, without opposition from a similar culture?