Anarchy and civilisation

The book, The Dawn of Everything, points out many rational fallacies and examples of circular reasoning arising from the failure of our imaginations when we guess at the motivations of alien cultures

Homo sapiens have been around for perhaps 200,000 years and we have little idea about how we lived during the first 195,000 or so, of those. The eminent 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed primitive humans lived happy, childlike lives, as members of small, free-roaming bands of hunter-gatherers. This was until such time as mankind developed agriculture and settled down, becoming more hierarchical and less happy. However, the equally eminent 17th century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, postulated individuals in hunter-gatherer bands must have been selfish creatures with nasty, brutish and short lives, until they were civilised by the advent of agriculture