[inawarminister]

>That general improvement, over the long haul, in the material conditions of people lends an arc to the human story. History is not cyclical, like the seasons of the year. Rather, history is the story of a fundamental inversion in progress. We are slowly graduating from top-down systems of political control to bottom-up systems. Like an iceberg rolling over in the open oceans, human society has been transiting from despotism toward democracy over the millennia.

Very much disagree. He talked about Roman Empire's (and late Republic) massive inequality, but he forgot about Athens, where Western notions of democracy were born and strangled by kings and republics (then Emperors). We have had peasants republics in Dark Age Europe (Frisia, San Marino, even Venezia and Genoa and a dozen elective city-states).

In Asia, my tribe has had majestic maharajas that spun the entire region, who then retreated to their mountain refuges to rule as sacral kings, only to lose power to bottoms-up tribal and village councils that revolted into theocracy only to be subsumed into the colonial state.

Politics is downstream of culture and economics, not the cause of the latter.