A Meaningful Series of Events

Our Pathway to Modernity

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Who We Were

We can only speculate about human societies 10,000 years ago, inferring from limited evidence that we transitioned from nomadic to sedentary life. As food storage became reliable, settlements grew. Brain development and cultural sophistication followed. The narrative varies — some frame this as progress from savagery to civilization; others argue the reverse.

What matters is this: our species survived natural selection, which means many of our traits are adaptive. But modernity changed the game. We didn’t just survive selection anymore — we became the dominant force shaping it. We created artificial hierarchies of human value, and we appointed ourselves the architects.

Our Nature is Cooperative (When Not Exploited)

Natural selection favored prosocial groupings over domination-based hierarchies. Yes, both exist in nature, along with everything in between. But if we apply evolutionary logic to a species where selfish individuals dominate through competition and coercion you get rapid extinction. Cooperation works. Exploitation doesn’t.

Something shifted between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. Our sophisticated neurology and creativity allowed certain individuals, those with narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic traits, to override the social mechanisms that had historically kept them in check. Shame, reputation, and community disapproval once regulated these dynamics. Something broke.

The Concentration of Power

Hierarchies themselves aren’t the problem. Humans evolved under social structures with differentiated roles and responsibilities. The problem is designed permanence or the construction of systems that guarantee power stays concentrated in the hands of those willing to exploit it. This forms a homeostasis where positive feedback loops maintain the structure.

Once individuals with dark triad traits established dominance, they didn’t just hold power; they created institutions to ensure their descendants would keep it. Religion, law, governance, and later science and technology became homeostatic mechanisms — tools that normalized hierarchy as natural and inevitable. When questioning authority became heresy or sedition, the system locked itself in place.

This isn’t natural selection anymore. It’s artificial selection favoring exploitation. A new homeostatis for human social structure.

This structure has persisted since Egypt,nearly 5,000 years. We’ve calcified these hierarchies with increasingly sophisticated technology: fossil fuels, computing power, and reductionist science. Each innovation promised liberation but instead deepened the ability of concentrated power to maintain itself.

Why This Matters Now

The homeostasis is breaking down, but not because we’re evolving past it. It’s failing because it’s unsustainable. Resource depletion, ecological collapse, and the destruction of life-support systems are now complications we can no longer postpone. The structure that kept dark triad leaders in power is killing the species that serves them.

We face a genuine choice: redesign our social organization, or face extinction.

Can We Remember?

The first step requires something difficult: understanding what we actually were before this 5,000-year parenthesis, then using that understanding to guide deliberate choices away from exploitation-based structures.

This isn’t about rejecting hierarchy or specialization. It’s about rejecting permanent, hereditary, exploitative hierarchy. The kind that benefits a few at the cost of the many. And Earth itself.

The obstacle is that modernity, for all its cruelty, offers comforts. We’re asked to sacrifice stability, status, material security. Individuals and communities must decide what to give up, who bears the cost, and where opportunities exist. These aren’t questions for philosophers in isolation but for collective deliberation.

Yet the current grassroots work happening around these questions mirrors the very structure we’re trying to escape: individualistic, competitive for recognition, organized like hierarchies rather than cooperative networks. We’ve internalized the disease so deeply that our immune response still carries its logic.

The Work Ahead

To dismantle exploitative leadership structures, we need genuine communal thinking and organization. This requires a fundamental shift: from building individual reputation and accolades to cultivating intrinsic motivation rooted in group wellbeing.

The fossil record and evolutionary biology are clear: humans thrive in groups. We’re not islands. We know this intellectually, yet modern social structure was engineered to isolate us, to make us competitors rather than collaborators. The homeostatic mechanisms are powerful, but they’re not inevitable.

The critical move is psychological and practical: letting go of the individual need for recognition and reward. Until we genuinely stop seeking personal status within hierarchical systems, we’ll keep recreating them — even when we’re trying to dismantle them.

Return to cooperation means examining who we think we were, using that knowledge to see what we could become, and then having the courage to reorganize our daily lives and communities accordingly. Not out of naivety about human nature, but with clear eyes about what structures enable flourishing versus extraction.