Il senso delle proporzioni

“Civilisation has emerged only recently – in the past six thousand or so years – and it may yet prove to be an unsuccessful experiment.”
(Roy Rappaport, “Maladaptation in social systems”, 1977)

“The citizens of modern complex societies usually do not realize that we are an anomaly of history. Throughout the several million years that recognizable humans are known to have lived, the common political unit was the small, autonomous community, acting independently, and largely self-sufficient. Robert Carneiro has estimated that 99.8 percent of human history has been dominated by these autonomous communities. It has only been within the last 6000 years that something unusual has emerged: the hierarchical, organized, interdependent states that are the major reference for our contemporary political experience.” (Joseph A. Tainter, “The collapse of complex societies”, 1988)

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