Showing that we can have multiple snarratves
The early part of this story - humans for 300,,000years till 12000 BC Built kinship systems, music, and immense buildings. The buildings show skills that we cannot yet imagine. Moving hundred-ton rocks and placing them with an accuracy of one millimeter, Who, why? Archeology is in a most fascinating phase. Drones with cameras are key. The worldwide evidence shows the power must've been people is incredible skills, and imagination that we know nothing about and that we should be friends with through at least curiosity.
This led to big empires capable of killing 200,000 in a captured city in a day and forcing the world from gardens to agriculture.
Now we have financial systems that extract wealth from people and land. Promised Russia we would not push NATO into Eastern Europe but we provoked them - on purpose because we think we can win, nuclear capacities not contained. Sanctioned Cuba because it was a threat - people would see an interesting alternative. Similar with Korea and Vietnam. Iraq was believably stupid and the same people are in charge of our reign policy.
Developing country’s airports compared to ours. We should be embarrassed. What is happening with education as many Silicon Valley executives are from India? Why are US kids behind in math, English, and bodily health? Our leaders don’t think about these. They are hooked on the financial system, hot on the well-being of the population.
But the worst is the combination of corruption at the highest levels (lying to the people) with ignorance through poor education from kindergarten (child gardens)through college and professional training to lifelong ignorance. We do not know history, philosophy, science, arts. Things are happening, starting with AI, that has put the power of a few in the center of politics, governance, and economy. It has put nuclear weapons in the control of people who will take planetary risks. AI could unemploy, 80% of the population. I had an MRI scan and fed the results to a bot which came back with a better more comprehensive report than my physician.
This is the endpoint of the current narrative, and again, drones are key.
My current view, about the period of the in-between points of this narrative, from hunter-gatherers as smart as we are to a professional class that is deeply ignorant, is that humans make relationships including technologies that make the relations at ever larger distance and inclusion of more people and machines and solidified by contract. The resulting weaving is increasingly tight (the number of nodes goes up as the square of the number of people included), until we have such a tight structure, with each person or institution holding own to what they have, that change becomes impossible. We have enough freedom to see the looming reality of nuclear war, financial collapse, civil strife, and above all climate destruction, but we have no agency - capacity to respond - to what our heart tells us. We are left with the wisdom of the machines.
Note that the scenario starts and ends with people with the same genes, the same intellect, same feelings.
Regarding those exuberantly productive skills, I'm reminded of a work I bought back in the early '70s, the title of which hints at the marvels within, "Craftsmen of Necessity."