The tragedy of Herschel Walker isn't over yet (an opinion found on CNN)

[Tommymac]

11. For some hope, read 'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity'

It is a very tough read, but damn if the authors (anthropologist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow) are showing us that NOTHING is preordained, and humanity can and HAS overcome periods of authoritarianism throughout our history and prehistory.

Democracy is just as much in our genes as authoritarianism, if not more so. This book explodes the fables of the unchallengeable power of Kings, Princes and other types of Authoritarians of the past in a very scholarly manner.

The future is truly What WE can make of it. Nothing is pre-ordained.

It is giving me hope, at the least - I'm about a third of the way through.

The Dawn of Everything
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber, and archaeologist David Wengrow. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2021 by Allen Lane (an imprint of Penguin Books).[1]

Graeber and Wengrow finished the book around August 2020.[2] Its American edition is 704 pages long, including a 63-page bibliography.[2] It was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing (2022).[3]

Drawing attention to the diversity of early human societies, the book critiques traditional narratives of history's linear development from primitivism to civilization.[4] Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia.[5] It relies on archaeological evidence to show that early societies were diverse and developed numerous political structures.[2]

The Dawn of Everything was widely reviewed in the popular press and in leading academic journals, as well as in activist circles, with dividing opinions being expressed across the board. Both favorable and critical reviewers noted its challenge to existing paradigms in the study of human history.

Summary
The authors open the book by suggesting that current popular views on the progress of western civilization, as presented by Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari, are not supported by anthropological or archaeological evidence, but owe more to philosophical dogmas inherited unthinkingly from the Age of Enlightenment. The authors refute the Hobbesian and Rousseauian view on the origin of the social contract, stating that there is no single original form of human society. Moreover, they argue that the transition from foraging to agriculture was not a civilization trap that laid the ground for social inequality, and that throughout history, large-scale societies have often developed in the absence of ruling elites and top-down systems of management.

(My bold)