[_DeadFred_]

If you're focused on farming and I'm focused on taking the product of your labor I win. Your attention/resources are split between producing and defending yourself/survival. Mine is entirely focused on extraction.

Over time the imbalance compounds. I spend all my effort improving the mechanisms of coercion and extraction. You split yours between survival and production. I get better at taking you get just good enough at surviving to keep producing. The system stabilizes around that balance with you allowed enough to survive, but not enough to escape the cycle.

We have had extra excess because for a little while enough of us didn't think in the hundred thousand year old way you wrote. But the 'modern' tech bro world isn't able to get away from the hundred thousand year old thinking. And generations of progress potentially erode because the systems of power guiding them haven’t evolved beyond ancient incentives with all signs now pointing to new locked in systems of control instead of shared prosperity.