When I was younger, I thought facts were facts and that was that. Now I see, while facts are facts, the human mind can’t do much with a fact until it has found a place for it within the narratives we use to make sense of the world. These mental models are powerful. The human mind’s greatest strength, they enable us to make major leaps in insight and understanding from incomplete sets of information.1 Without these narratives that we construct, we wouldn’t really understand anything. Our knowledge would be disjointed collections of facts, not pictures of existence.
But there is a down side to this storytelling. The narratives that shape our understanding of the world are constructed from a hodge podge of incomplete information, misinformation, understanding and misunderstanding, personal experience, and the cultural soup we’ve been steeped in. As such, they limit and bias the conclusions we come to from facts. Even more unfortunately, most of us don’t know that. Even when we do, we still don’t grasp how much we rely on these imperfect narratives to judge others, understand situations, and decide what actions to take. Most of us also fail to realize how much these narratives box in our comprehension, blinding us to what would otherwise be obvious.
Case in point: the story we tell ourselves about civilization, a spectacularly effective bit of brainwashing that we’ve been subjecting ourselves to for at least the last 12,000 years. It’s almost awe inspiring how thoroughly the story of civilization that we’ve been told—and that we keep telling others—holds us back from solving two of civilization’s most vexing problems: poverty and inequality. Worse yet, our story of civilization is hindering us right now from rising up to defend all of the good things about civilization that are being destroyed by despots greedy for wealth and power.
Although we all love a good tale about evil leaders and rotten rich people, most of us subscribe to the optimistic vision of civilization. We cheer Martin Luther King, Jr’s idea of civilization’s long arc bending toward justice2 and blend it with the thought that technological progress, accumulating over millennia, has been making life better for people.3 It’s a nice narrative. Hopeful. Optimistic. Maybe even somewhat true.
It leaves out a lot, though. This positive version of the tale of civilization contains neither good guys nor bad guys, just a natural progression toward utopian conditions. But the development of civilization had good guys and bad guys. It still does! Honestly, do I need to name any names? The good guys (meant inclusively of all genders) work to create and fight to maintain things that make life better for people. The bad guys steal wealth and power for themselves, creating inequality, poverty, repression, and misery.
The slightly detailed version of the optimistic story of civilization begins about 12,000 years ago, when there were only a couple of million Homo sapiens alive on Earth.4 These people were still nomadic. They got by via hunting and gathering. But as the last of the Pleistocene glaciations gave way to our current Holocene interglacial, some of these people began to domesticate plants and animals.5 This enabled humanity to become sedentary and grow.
It took considerable experimentation and learning, but we got better at producing food, setting us on a course toward civilization. As time went on, the nomadic hunter–gatherer lifestyle that can only sustain a few people per massive area of land gave way to life in settlements that can get crowded indeed.
At first, these settlements were small clusters of houses maybe not even inhabited year–round. But as we improved our ability to force land to pump out more edible material per acre than wilderness had ever provided us, clusters of houses grew into villages. Over the next few thousand years, as we got better and better at agriculture, villages grew big and dense enough to become towns. Eventually true urbanity arrived in the form of cities. Cities—and their laws, regulations, and social classes—form the core of civilizations.
Today, civilization is basically global and contains more than 8 billion people. This is roughly 8,000 times more human beings (plus billions of times more livestock) than Earth could support without the help of agriculture. Seriously—go, people! This is an amazing accomplishment. We’ve produced that massive mass of human beings who are alive today by eating farmed plants and animals, with only minor contribution from wild caught fish, hunted game, and foraged plants and mushrooms. That’s how great we’ve become at agriculture from a beginning where we didn’t know how to grow anything at all.
However, it didn’t happen overnight. It really took us 12,000 years. Through trial, error, learning, and perseverance, we developed an increasingly wider variety of impressively more productive crops, a greater diversity of working animals, lots of tender, juicy, edible livestock, and increasingly more powerful and efficient techniques, tools, and, eventually, machines with which to work.
As time went on from agriculture’s humble beginnings and innovations accumulated, fewer and fewer people needed to work the land to produce enough food for everyone. As the story goes, this freed up some of the people to do things other than hoe—mainly men, of course, because patriarchy wasn’t giving women much in the way of freedom or free time. A few of these men took it upon themselves to become the ruling class of kings, nobles, warriors, and priests. Some filled the lesser plane of officials and the henchmen, soldiers, and police who supported the ruling elite. The rest of the men freed up from farmwork became the merchants, musicians, tradesmen, and the like who produced or sold the non–agricultural goods, like clothing, tools, technology, furniture, infrastructure, entertainment, and weapons, that people needed and civilization required. The women men married and the families they produced joined the ranks of society their men inhabited and generally worked to reinforce the boundaries between them.
Do you see what happened here? Already by thousands of years ago, we had developed stratified societies filled with all sorts of inequality between people. Men over women, richer over poorer, ruling elite over the lower rungs of society. Yet when we talk about the development of civilization, we tend not to say that quiet part out loud, nor even think it. But, think about it now. Have you ever heard someone mention that the development of civilization went hand in hand with the development of inequality? Or that neither could exist without the other?
Part one of what we don’t tell ourselves when we tell the story of civilization is that the dawn of agriculture was the beginning of the long march toward the massive inequality that we have between people today, where the ten richest men can each possess tens to hundreds of millions of times more wealth6 than the average person in the bottom 50% of adults on Earth.7
To have inequality, a society needs to be producing a surplus beyond the minimum needed to keep most everyone in society alive. Furthermore, this surplus must come in the form of something that can be stored, preferably over years. In the beginning, before societies became complex enough to be using things like money and to be deriving economic value from services and from items not edible, this storable surplus would have been in the form of something like grain. The creation of inequality also required people prepared to have that surplus of grain shared unevenly. This is true on both the making and the taking sides. There have to be people happy to grab more than their fair share of what society is producing. There also have to be people either willing to be grabbed from or people physically, culturally, or politically unable to protect themselves from being, well, basically… robbed (although, of course, that’s not what we would call it in polite society). Hold that thought for a moment, because this is where the brainwashing via narratives comes in.
But first, a slight digression into an interesting wrinkle. As the anthropologist and historian Walter Scheidel points out in his book about the history of inequality,8 the greater the surplus above subsistence a society produces, the greater the amount of inequality it can sustain.
Prior to the development of agriculture, the domestication of grains, and the establishment of permanent settlements, inequality barely existed. There wasn’t anything to hoard. A bigger, meaner person may have been able to demand a greater share of the tubers that had gotten dug out of the ground that week or a greater say in the decision making the group was doing. But before agriculture opened the doors to a storable surplus, inequality couldn’t grow greater than that small pile of perishable tubers and there weren’t means for accumulating wealth or power down generations.
Because it took time for us to get better at agriculture, it took time for the amount of inequality possible to increase. Back at the beginning of agriculture, we weren’t good at it and didn’t have much to work with in terms of crops, livestock, tools, techniques, and technology. Surpluses didn’t happen every year and when they did, they generally weren’t massive. Societies were maybe only able to produce a few percent more food than they needed… even in a good year. If that surplus came in the form of something that could be stored, like say a cereal grain, then any grabby elite that existed could only extract that extra couple of percent for themselves. If they took more than that and kept at it for a couple of years, a good chunk of the society would starve to death and that’s not a sustainable state of affairs.
An elite that has to share a surplus of but a couple of percent over subsistence is not really that much more elite than everybody else still squeaking by at subsistence level. It’s not an Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos versus the rest of the human race situation. Today, we have orders of magnitude more surplus that can be seized, in part because we’re producing excessive amounts of food, and in part because our economies are based on a whole lot more than food production. And so, even if most people have graduated to living more than barely above subsistence level, the distribution of wealth and income is more unequal today than during most of human history and hugely more unequal than it could have been at the dawn of agriculture. You could even argue, although the standard of living is higher than in the past, a lot of people are still living at or even below subsistence level today. Look at the huge numbers of homeless people, for instance, in cities of the Global North because wages don’t enable people to live in an apartment or own a home because property values have gone through the roof. No wonder these heights wealth and income inequality have soared to are tearing our societies apart, filling even the middle classes with rage and a sense the system is working against them.
Which, of course, it is.
Time to start telling the more realistic story of civilization, less rosy than that of the rising tide that floats all boats.
Over time, our domestication of plants and animals (and later, the diversification of our economies) enabled us to accumulate and store bigger and bigger surpluses. But here’s where the stories head in different directions, by focusing on different facts. In the less rosy view, as we got better at agriculture (and the production of wealth in general), we developed social norms to define who has the rights to assets. Big hint: not the people doing all the work. We also created the possibility for people (generally the wealthy, ruling elite) to pass the assets they’d accumulated on to their descendants. In other words, the creation of civilization and its laws and norms and their means of enforcement grew out of the need of the grabby and greedy to protect and pass on the wealth that they had seized from the people who had produced it.
Repeat after me for the next time you tell the popular story of civilization: as inequality became possible, societies quickly developed a ruling class who, by might, the rules of law that they established, and their alleging of things like divine right, got the rest of us to keep doing the work and then unquestioningly handing the surplus fruits of our labor straight into their hands.9 Meanwhile, the better we got at agriculture and the richer our societies became, the wealthier and more powerful the elite came to be than the rest of us and the better they were able to control us and keep that wealth flowing into their hands.
Here’s another simple principle than people don’t seem to be aware of that we ought to start telling each other: left unchecked… for instance by tools such as progressive rates of taxation, wealth taxes, and inheritance taxes… over time, wealth tends to distill itself into the pockets of the few at the expense of everyone else. That’s just how any unbalanced system will evolve over time if safeguards, bumpers, and brakes haven’t been put into place.
And they really haven’t been.
In principle, over the last 12,000 years since we got into growing things, society’s institutions could have prevented inequality from soaring to such insane heights as they have reached today. Governments and other organizations could have rebalanced the distribution of resources and the products of labor via strongly progressive taxation, but also by strengthening trade unions, bolstering minimum wage laws, and using other such mechanisms to slow down or reverse money’s tendency to make money (and shameless greed’s ability to acquire it despite the pain and suffering it causes others).
In practice, the opposite happened, almost without exception. Down through history, almost everywhere in the world where people turned to agriculture, the states that formed around the surplus production and the growth of the population did not stop the selfish, Machiavellian, and greedy from seizing, hoarding, and accumulating more than their fair share of the wealth that the people produced. Instead, the states that formed embraced highly competitive, terribly unfair, and often violent forms of organization that resulted in steep hierarchies of power and incredibly skewed access to income and wealth.10
Even today, even the most progressively communitarian of political parties are not really working on behalf of the people. Take just the last 50 years in the Global North as an example. Have even the most progressive and democratic of governments prevented real wages from falling, workers’ rights from eroding, rents from flying through the roof, social services from shrinking, and tax rates on the most wealthy from plummeting? Not really. Even these progressive politicians, who may even honestly believe they are working on behalf of the people, serve the GDP and the economic interests of rich investors instead of protecting or improving the living standards of the overwhelming majority of people.
It is no wonder that voters are abandoning the progressive, democratic parties in droves. Why keep voting for the party that says its working for you, the common person, but keeps failing to do exactly that?
It’s all enough to make you wonder what would happen if we started telling each other the version of the story of civilization that points out that the greedy and grabby, psychopathic, and Machiavellian formed civilization to create inequality, poverty, the domination of the few over the many, and the laws and norms that sustained such a terrible system and made it seem completely normal to all of us. Would we stop admiring the rich and powerful? Become embarrassed to read their memoirs or buy the latest product that they’re hawking on social media? I bet we’d at least stop voting the rich and selfish into the presidency of anything, even the local pigeon fanciers’ club. Becoming disgusted with the greed of the superrich and with the suffering they don’t care that they’ve caused with their obscene appropriation of the wealth that workers create, would society finally agree to start taxing them appropriately?
Let’s give it a go. Let’s shout out a story of civilization that has two sides flanking the middle. On the one side, we have the rich, powerful, and greedy. Let us frequently remind ourselves that over the last 12,000 years, their ceaseless taking has created savage hierarchies, widespread poverty, massive inequality, and injustices like slavery, racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and other forms of political and social oppression. Then let us give credit to the other side, those people who work to create a better world—socially, politically, technologically, medically, culturally, and scientifically—for little other reason than that it would be good. They have created and maintained things like public education, national parks, public highways, scientific knowledge of the world around us, safety standards, child labor laws, and so much of everything else that makes our lives better but eats into the profits of the rich.
By widely telling the story of civilization as a tug–of–war between these two sides, we might create the political impetus to reduce inequality by more stringently taxing high incomes, wealth, and capital gains; by expanding the existence and collective bargaining power of unions; by making economic investments that support people in the lower half of the economic spectrum. We might also get more people up and fighting for the positive aspects of civilization that we’ve come to take for granted and, as a result, are now in grave danger of losing to an angry wave of authoritarianism.
1 For example, as described for the academic discipline of economics by M Roos & M Reccius (2024) Narratives in economics. Journal of Economic Surveys 38: 303–301. (freely available at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/joes.12576)
2 https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/idea-moral-universe-inherently-bends-towards-justice-inspiring-it-s-ncna859661
3 https://ourworldindata.org/technological-change
4 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hkLbEilJbl630IG68q-aQJlUjuTFm9b_12nQMVd1sZM/edit?gid=0#gid=0
5 MD Purugganan (2019) Evolutionary insights into the nature of plant domestication. Current Biology 29: R705-R714. (freely available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982219306232)
6 https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/
7 https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-1/
8 W Scheidel (2017) The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty–First Century. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 504pp.
9 L Kemp (2025) Goliath’s Curse. Penguin/Viking, London, 592pp.
10 W Scheidel (2017) The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty–First Century. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 504pp.