You are absolutely right.

I recently read this fascinating article https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-a-new-hypothesis-for-how-human-civilizations-first-got-started.

"The dawn of human civilization is often pinned down to the rise of farming. As food production grew, so did human populations, trade, and tax. Or so the prevailing story goes. Economists have now put forward a competing hypothesis, and it suggests a surplus of food on its own was not enough to drive the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to the hierarchical states that eventually led to civilization as we know it.

Only when humans began farming food that could be stored, divvied up, traded, and taxed, did social structures begin to take shape.

That's probably why cereal grains like wheat, barley, and rice – rather than taro, yams, or potatoes – are at the root of virtually all classical civilizations. If the land was capable of cultivating grains, evidence shows it was much more likely to host complex societal structures."The relative ease of confiscating stored cereals, their high energy density, and their durability enhances their appropriability, thereby facilitating the emergence of tax-levying elites."

There you have it and so on and so on - adding energy to the mix. Ukraine is in part about wheat and oil.

I have often thought that the one thing which eludes the super rich is longevity. Musk, Bezos, Koches and others are living on borrowed time and they know it. We all are.

It's an unequal, unfair, brutal Darwinian world and somehow we have to make sense of it. I'm with you Jessica and yes it's all about exploitation of most of us even the middle classes by rich elites.

Now how do we fix it - we can only tinker around the edges and make sure we vote on what serves our own well being and not on religious, idealogical or social issues. They won't feed us or give us water or keep us alive to keep figuring it out.