🕯️: honestly i could make the case that it was only in the last 6,000; the emergence of agriculture didn't automatically create authoritarian states.

What happens to societies when all legitimate, peaceful means of political accountability are rendered impotent?

I keep telling myself that most of the people who have ever lived on this planet spent their entire lives under some form of authoritarian or totalitarian government with no political accountability.

I don’t think this is actually true? It’s always been possible to hold leaders to account in small-scale societies, which account for most of human history; even the largest ancient city is dwarfed by our present ones.

yeah i mean it's complicated, definitely by the time you have a grain-state with a standing army, it's pretty hard to tell the king to fuck off, but there's a lot of grey area between "forager chilling in the woods" and "slave building the king's mausoleum"

and even by the time states emerged, they were a minority and unstable

And that’s only in the last 10,000 years!

honestly i could make the case that it was only in the last 6,000; the emergence of agriculture didn't automatically create authoritarian states.

Oh absolutely; you have to have a whole culture of hoarding and a money economy develop before you’ve got authoritarian states. (And even then those authoritarian states are tiny and you can totally leave!)

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