the past isn't all meanness. you win more with friends you trust than with slaves fighting for you. even the greediest king needs to feed his soldiers. doing t

the past isn't all meanness. you win more with friends you trust than with slaves fighting for you. even the greediest king needs to feed his soldiers. doing that is a lot easier when your kingdom is prosperous because your people have property rights and solid contracts. the allies won the second world war because the nazis and the japanese killed or ostracized all of their weirdos. we just kept ours busy cracking their codes. military conflict is only one aspect of history - and i'd say the bonds formed between soldiers matter more than the violence they inflict on each other. technology matters - sure. but you need to account for the technology of trust. a society that is strongly trusting of its internal members because they all have historical records of statements they've made about each other and their relationships, with measured accuracy and self-contradiction frequency - that civilization will be more supportive of its members and quicker to defeat its enemies. see https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop for more on that one. look at game of thrones, and how powerful the stark family remains, even after they are all killed. they are loved, and that's a power that the lannisters totally underestimate, to their failure. even after Ned stark is gone, the love his supporters bore him causes them to stick together, while the tyrells and the lannisters squabble like a bunch of children. Coordinating group effort is really fucking hard. Love, trust, and friendship are way more cost effective than greed and selfishness. love doesn't always win. it doesn't have to. it can wait patiently for greed to chase its tail into a corner and starve itself to death. if love does that, someone who loves it will come by and put it right. look at how many corporations push for diversity - not because they care, but because even a sociopath sees the value in _being seen as_ honest and caring and good. once that becomes extremely difficult to fake, i'm sure it'll affect the entire culture.