Aye, friends, I’ve just returned from a journey through Scotland… my first, and likely last, international flight experience (oh the humanity!). We went to celebrate my parents’ fiftieth anniversary and to walk the hills and glens of my namesake’s ancestral homeland. The landscapes were hauntingly old, full of stone and story, and they stirred more than one hard conversation with my family about what it all means. This chapter, from my upcoming book Ten Myths of Progress, grapples with one of the biggest myths I hear all the time… that everything we see around us from civilization, industry to empire, was bound to happen. That human nature itself guarantees expansion, domination, and exploitation. That nothing else was ever possible. There’s a substantial preview and the full chapter below for paid subscribers.
I’ve had some of my most difficult conversations about human nature with my family on long car rides, evenings after a meal, or most recently, while traveling together through the Scottish Highlands. Surrounded by landscapes older than history itself, it was easy to feel the weight of time pressing in. Ancient ruins clung to the hillsides, reminders of kingdoms that rose and fell. The Enlightenment thinkers who shaped so much of modern thought had walked these streets. And yet, the very stones seemed to whisper a different story: cycles of glory, collapse, and conquest repeating endlessly.
My brothers and I debated what this history meant. One insisted that “might makes right,” even quoting Sun Tzu’s Mandate of Heaven. Another wondered aloud if civilization might be far older than archaeology admits because he couldn’t imagine humans like us “sitting around doing nothing for 400,000 years.” I tried to explain that foragers and small-scale societies weren’t doing nothing at all. Our inability to recognize their ways of life as full and meaningful was its own modern bias. Still, from my perspective, these words often fell flat. Joe Rogan was invoked at one point, with the claim that the average person today “lives better than a king did 400 years ago.”
What struck me was the contradiction. My family loved the highland countryside, drinking in the raw, untamed beauty of it all. Yet in the next breath complained about the lack of infrastructure. I pushed back gently, suggesting that the landscape wouldn’t have its character if it were carved up by more and larger roads, power lines, and all that would make up their vision of modernity in the Highlands.
Often, these conversations end with me feeling dismissed, as though my beliefs are a naïve “kumbaya story of history.” But that’s not it at all. I don’t deny the brutality of human life. I just believe that the worst of it has unfolded under civilization, not before it. Still, I sometimes feel that gnawing doubt: maybe they’re right, maybe violence and domination really are inevitable. And if I can’t convince my own family, how can I expect to convince anyone else?
Yet there are cracks in their certainty. Some of them, despite their defense of civilization, speak longingly of homesteads and simpler living. I think deep down, beneath the arguments, they feel what I feel: that something vital has been lost.
These conversations remind me how powerful the myth of inevitability really is. It would be too easy to dismiss as an abstract belief. But indeed it lives in families, in culture, in the way we tell stories about the past and project them onto the future. And it’s precisely this story I want to wrestle with: the idea that civilization was bound to happen, that domination is human destiny, and that nothing else is possible.
The Story of Inevitability
Civilization tells its story as though it were the crown of creation. We are taught to see ourselves on a one-way escalator from darkness to light, from caves to cities, from “primitive” to “advanced.” The story goes something like this: once we were brutish¹ and backward, scraping a living from the soil or the forest; then we discovered agriculture, built villages, forged cities, erected empires; now, after millennia of toil, we stand at the heights of technological achievement. And there is no going back.
It is a myth of progress disguised as common sense. Every textbook sketching the march of history reinforces it: hunter-gatherer → farmer → factory worker → digital native. Every movie and news broadcast carries its echoes: the past as a barbaric struggle, the present as fragile stability, the future as a dazzling leap forward in innovation. The lesson is clear… this world, for all its faults, was inevitable.
And with inevitability comes a powerful sleight of hand. If what we see now was always going to be, then any alternative is painted as regression, a fantasy, a childish dream of going “back to the caves.” The myth writes over every other story of human life as if they were only stepping stones toward the real destination: civilization, industry, empire ascending above egalitarian foragers, subsistence farmers, and cooperative villages.
But inevitability is not fact, it is framing. It is how the winners of history tell the tale, making their power look natural, even fated. And by believing it, we inherit not just their narrative, but their limits: the sense that nothing else was ever possible, let alone desirable.
Historical Roots: Empire and Progress
The story of inevitability is not an accident. It has roots in the very structures of empire and the philosophies that justified them. The great European powers needed a tale that made conquest appear as destiny, not theft. And so history was rewritten as a straight line, with themselves planted firmly at the top.
During the Enlightenment, thinkers in Scotland, France, and England organized human societies into “stages of development”:² savagery, barbarism, pastoralism, agriculture, commerce.³ Each stage was supposedly more rational, more civilized, more advanced than the last. Europe, of course, was conveniently positioned as the culmination of this sequence. This was propaganda, not anthropology. This was a way to justify colonization by portraying Indigenous and subsistence societies as living fossils, destined either to evolve into Europeans or disappear.
Empire embodied this myth in practice. Colonized peoples were stripped of their land, their commons enclosed, their cultures suppressed. But rather than call it what it was… violent dispossession, colonizers reframed it as “civilizing,” “modernizing,” “bringing progress.”⁴ The railway across India, the plantations of the Caribbean, the mines of Africa were hailed as proof that history’s arrow was flying forward, when in reality they were mechanisms of extraction feeding imperial wealth.
Even in our schools today, echoes of this story remain. Textbooks chart neat timelines: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, Digital Age. The message is clear…each era is a ladder rung, and we have climbed higher than any before us. The complexity of human diversity is flattened into a single line pointing upward. Societies that lived outside this trajectory are erased or trivialized.
This is how inevitability became embedded in culture. It was never simply a conclusion drawn from history. These are narratives imposed on history. Empire wrote the story of “progress,” and we are still reading from its script.
Reality Check: Human Story vs. Human Nature
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