Purely based on the number of people on the planet and the degree of technological advancement we've achieved as a species, it's pretty safe to say our globalized civilization is generally more complex than human societies of 15,000 years ago. It's not zero-sum, it's a question of degree.
Fair enough. I won't belabor the point.
Oh come on now Kooky. You don't think that's perhaps a slightly biased summary? Can you really not think of reasons why populations of people (not just "the elite") would generally prefer an agrarian, settled life with an established government than a nomadic life? Really.
The transition to agricultural life infamously resulted in a general worse quality of life for people across the board, with shorter life expectancies, worse variety of food, and a greater prevalence of disease and illness.
As far as I understand it, the widesprwad adoption of agriculture wasn't one based on preference, but necessity: Climate change had massively decreased the population of animals in the Middle East and other subtropic areas after a period that saw increased settlement and rapid growth among the hunter gatherers, so people had to rely more and more on agriculture to get by. I don't think it is a coincidence that those were the places where the earliest agricultural civilizations sprung up.
The reason why very few groups in history have remained agriculturalists is exactly for the reason you outlined in your previous posts: At some point, it becomes almost impossible to transition from an agricultural society back to a hunter gatherer lifestyle; the realities of the latter cannot sustain the same populations of the former, and the division of labor common to agricultural civilizations cannot be maintained to the same degree in the comparatively smaller groups common to nomads.
As far as I know (though I could be mistaken) the Native American tribes fleeing to the Midwest such as the Lakota were the only example in history of (semi-nomadic, granted) agriculturalists transitioning to a nomadic hunter gatherer lifestyle; I assume that this only really worked due to the catastrophic decimation of Native populations during the early arrival of the Europeans.
You seem to be operating under the assumption that states are the only forces of coercion in the world. You don't think hunter-gatherer societies had any coercion in them? One of the benefits of city-based life was/is stability and protection from coercion afforded by one's government.
No, I am operating under the assumption that states are simply
better and more efficient in using coercion than non-state societies; an assumption which is backed up by the vast majority of historical encounters between state and non-state societies.
Early governments were based in cities. The city fundamentally exists because it provides a center for governments to operate from. The people of early agricultural societies were not "protected from coercion afforded by their government" by moving into cities. The cities were the
centers of the coercive powers of government. The people who lived closest to cities tended to be the ones within easiest reach of the grasp of the state.
Conversely, it was people in terrain less suited to agriculture who were furthest out of reach for early government, and who tended to be the least governed - the hill and forest peoples, and the people roaming the deserts and grasslands at the edges of early agricultural states; people living on marginal land that was of little interest to the early agricultural states, and therefore weren't bothered unless they proved troublesome.
... doesn't exist, does it? Since the breaking of the USSR, socialist policies have been seen as decreasingly viable to any significant degree, and adherents of neo-liberal capitalist ideology have been steadily chipped away at existing social security systems and state industries. The nearest equivalent that still exists in some countries are industries under state control in nationalist-authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, or Saudi Arabia, and those have little interest in giving up state control.
When you develop one that has any realistic hope of being enacted in the lifetimes of our grandchildren, let me know what it is.
Don't worry, our civilization will be consumed in the fires and floods of climate change before the decrepit autocracy in charge of our civilization would even think of ceaseing its grasp over people's lives.
It is not a coincidence that people usually have an easier time imagining the end of the world, than they have imagining a better world beyond the grasp of capitalist authoritarianism.
So actuallly they had to move to live. (Edit to add: and they still had conflict, despite their relative mobility.)