Barbarian roots
For most of human history, the Earth was not covered by political nations which controlled every patch of land, like they do now. The world domination by civilization was incomplete. Up until at least the 1500s AD, there were still huge swaths of territory controlled by nobody in particular. Sure, roving bands of hunter-gatherers controlled portions of territory, but with armies so small even the Roman Empire would blush.
Of course, people still lived all over the place, but as decentralized bands of hunter-gatherers, living the way Homo sapiens have always lived. Living off the land, hunting wild animals, gathering plants to eat and make clothing out of, and very occasionally grouping up with other tribes to brew alcohol and party the night away.
But then something changed. Civilization happened.
Private property
People started to realize that some parts of the Earth had great climates for living, and other parts of the Earth sucked to live in. The great steppes of the world, like the central steppe in central Asia, the Eurasian steppe north of the Caspian and Baltic seas, the European steppe, and the North American steppe all proved to be cold and inhospitable to any peoples trying to farm and build large structures.
Of course everybody wanted to live in the Mediterranean, or at least some place warm, with water. It’s no surprise that all civilizations sprung up around great sources of water.
So somebody probably grew some wheat in the ground, put a fence up, and decided he would die before letting somebody else farm within that fence. Say this person was already a local Chieftain, and had the influence to convince the rest of his tribe to protect this newly fenced in land. The best protectors were given the elite status of warrior, and the best talkers were given the status of priest. The Chief uses his influence to convince the rest of the band to build a large structure together, and this becomes the Chief’s house, or castle.
Land that was previously the backdrop to humanities fights, became the object of the fights themselves. Everybody wants to control the nicest territory.
Hard times
There’s a saying that goes something like “hard times make hard people, hard people make easy times, easy times make soft people, soft people make hard times.” Living on shitty land makes your life hard. Living on the Mediterranean coast where food grows easily makes your life easy. Barbarians constantly pushing at your borders and trying to invade makes your life hard.
So the cycle continues. Once one person realized that land was up for grabs, life quickly became a “get with the program” type of situation. How do you beat a group of people who let themselves be turned into slaves, farm laborers, merchants, and warriors, all under the control of one great man who claimed to be a god? When you see this god conquer your entire tribe in one fell swoop, who knows, maybe he really is a god.
Early civilizations were not nice places to be. Food was much worse than what humans were used to eating. Varied diets of meat, veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds, and some wild grains were replaced with grain-heavy diets of gruel.
Work went from a part-time thing that smart humans could do pretty easily utilizing teamwork, to a potentially full-time (24 hours a day) gig for “slaves”, humans that were deemed property by other humans. Something that could be owned.
Civilization turned into this shit deal where the people at the top got it all, and everybody else in society was trying to claw their way up the hierarchy, stepping on whoever they could find to give themselves a boost.
Because hey, if you’re not born a god, fuck you!
The endless struggle
So even if you did happen to be a freedom loving group of people, how do you defeat a civilization where none of the men work because they own enough slaves to do all of the economic labor, so all of the men can devote every waking hour to becoming elite athletes and fighters? This was the reality for the Persians when they faced off against the Spartans. The Spartans were not good people by any modern sense. Hell, I’m pretty sure they didn’t even have fun.
Clearly, you have to get tough. Tough enough to fight the enemy, kill them, takeover their land, and then let easy times make you weak. Then, the next group of barbarians will come along, hardened by their experiences living on shitty land, and they’ll takeover your little empire, and create their own, founded on a new model of toughness and cooperation.
For periods of time, some civilizations experienced prosperity. If you just take a local view of a single part of the Mediterranean, like Southwestern Greece, you’ll see periods of peace and prosperity followed by periods of war and destruction. You’ll see the creation of great temples, the invention of new religions, and overall development of culture. Then you’ll see that come crashing down when the next group of invaders comes.
Zoom out a little, and look at the whole world, and you’ll see a relatively balanced economy of poverty. On average, nobody is rich or doing that well. In fact, with the poor conditions in most cities, the average human still lives in poverty.
Cultural homogeneity
And that explains the situation for most of human history. Brief periods of peace and prosperity, followed by intense struggles from all of the other humans who want to experience that peace and prosperity too.
The most prosperous human civilizations throughout history were found in India and China. Europe was a backwater for most of history, home to lots of fighting and culture wars. Africa, where all humans originally came from, was so diverse and heterogeneous that no civilization could take root for too long before being booted out by another competitive civilization.
India and China, on the other hand, were far enough away from Africa that the populations homogenized. A person from the Eastern and Western edges of Ancient China were much more similar genetically and culturally than someone from the Eastern and Western edges of Southern Europe at the time.
China and India weren’t always huge population centers, but 3000 years of relative stability will definitely help a country grow.
I find it really interesting that the major religions that sprung up out of India (Hinduism, Buddhism) and China (Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism) heavily emphasize obedience and subservience. They’re not trying to convince people to rebel against authority, fight back against power, or try to dominate other people.
In a lot of ways, they emphasize chilling out, accepting your place in the world, and going along with the current systems of power. These ideas seem like they would help a civilization prosper for a long time.
Somebody will win
I don’t want to simplify history too much by saying that from 10,000 BC to 1,500 AD, there were just a bunch of pointless battles which changed the name of the person in power, but didn’t change the shape of that power.
But when King A kills King B and takes over, do you really care what their names are? Does it matter in the least which cultural ideas come to dominate? Seems pretty random to me.
If you were born a barbarian (to a nomadic society) during that time period, your life looks basically the same.
If you were born a citizen in China, India, Mesopotamia, Babylon, Egypt, Mycenae, Greece, Rome, Gaul, or anywhere else during that time, there’s a chance you got to experience some peace and prosperity. There’s also a big chance you were born a slave.
The characters of history are all the elites from their ages, the absolute richest of the rich, the most dominant characters from their time. For the average person, history probably just looks like a life of poverty, struggling to survive in a viciously hierarchical system, the head of which keeps getting replaced through violent warfare.
In a zero-sum world where one nation’s success requires the downfall of another, the most successful societies were able to promote the idea of centralized authority above all other ideas. This is why so many rulers were revered as gods – their power had to be the most important thing in society to keep that society going. It’s not that calling your ruler a normal dude was a bad idea in and of itself, it just didn’t help your society compete against the other societies that really were (in the eyes of their followers) ruled by an almighty immortal sky-being.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether this is a fun thing to do or not, but one thing is for certain – societies that don’t adopt this centralized authority idea constantly got crushed by the ones that do. Princes lose to Kings, Kings lose to Emperors. Empires endure until easy times make soft people, and the cycle repeats.