Other Paths Were Always Possible

An essay on systems thinking, prehistory and the narrative that is missing

1. The hook: two ways to misuse the past

In the magazine 1843 of The Economist I read the article How Graham Hancock became conspiracy theorists’ favourite historian about Graham Hancock and his Netflix documentary about a glorious civilisation some 13,000 years ago that collapsed around 12,000 years ago. A story about the so-called Atlantis and the sages who built it, leaving behind grand ruins that still astonish us today. It is a reading of history that appeals to many: grand and sweeping, a lost paradise with us as its descendants. Unfortunately it is not supported by real science. Hancock says it himself in the article, almost accidentally: there is no evidence in what archaeologists have studied. That is a classic epistemic trap — the theory is formulated such that every absence of evidence becomes evidence of a cover-up. Archaeologists find nothing? Then they haven’t looked hard enough, or they’re hiding something. This mechanism makes the theory immune to refutation. It is not falsifiable in the Popperian sense. That is not proof the theory is correct, but it shields it from the normal corrective workings of science.

Hancock mystifies the past. David Wengrow and David Graeber do the opposite in The Dawn of Everything — they emancipate it. But neither reaches the broad public. Hancock wins on accessibility, Wengrow and Graeber on rigour. Meanwhile, politics is stuck in a third and more dangerous misuse of the past: the far right offers a glorious past from the 1950s, while those years were still a miserable time for many — marked by poverty, hunger and oppression. Glorious? Yes, if you were a white adult man, perhaps.

This essay is an attempt to do it differently: to use the past as an arsenal of possibilities, not as myth and not as nostalgia.

2. The real problem: we think in isolated pieces

We live in an era of grand challenges that are beginning to seem almost unsolvable for modern societies. When I read the news about affordability and the growing poverty that follows, it appears as a standalone problem. The same goes for the housing crisis. Or consider climate change and, specifically for the Netherlands: nitrogen pollution, PFAS, contamination of agricultural land, the rise of debilitating diseases such as diabetes, cancer, Parkinson’s and dementia.

The problem is not the individual problems. The problem is that we think in individual problems.

Take glyphosate and Parkinson’s: the relationship is now stronger than “not proven.” There is consistent epidemiological evidence from farming communities in France, the US and Latin America. The IARC classified glyphosate in 2015 as “probably carcinogenic.” The counter-study by EFSA that cleared it was partly based on Monsanto’s own data — this has since come to light through the Monsanto Papers. The Netherlands is a particularly stark case: one of the highest pesticide applications per hectare in Europe, combined with an extremely dense built environment where agriculture and residential areas are intertwined. The PFAS contamination via Chemours in Dordrecht is now undeniable. That politics responds so slowly also has a governance explanation: the agricultural lobby is structurally better represented in The Hague than the public health interests of residents.

But look at what happens when you connect the problems instead of fragmenting them. Affordability and housing can be grouped together, as can climate and pollution. And with current geopolitics, those two overarching themes can be combined further: with rising oil prices, a climate measure like renewable energy suddenly also contributes to lower energy costs and thus to combating poverty. In passing, it also delivers more autonomy. Suddenly four problems become one challenge.

That connection, however, is not being made. The individual problems go unsolved, and this leads to distrust of politics. Populist and extremist parties then offer false solutions by blaming foreigners and political opponents — amplified by social media acting as a megaphone for extreme views. A slick story that resonates and taps into a deep longing for a paradisiacal past sticks well. Not a sustainable model.

3. The past as arsenal

But while politics is paralysed by isolated problems and the past is being misused as nostalgia, real science is doing something disruptive: it is discovering that the past itself was far more radical than we thought.

There is the story of Göbekli Tepe, discovered in 1994 by Klaus Schmidt: people without agriculture built a megalithic complex 12,000 years ago, with large buildings and sculptures, and then carefully buried it themselves. Why? We don’t know. I first read about it two or three years ago, because it only escaped the archaeological niche between 2015 and 2018 via podcasts and YouTube — and ironically via Hancock himself, who writes extensively about it. Science made the discovery. The alternative scene did the popularisation. That is a structural failure.

Wengrow and Graeber connect Göbekli Tepe with a whole series of fascinating examples in The Dawn of Everything. Two lessons are crucial. First: other paths were always possible. The linear history from hunter-gatherer to city-state to empire to complex bureaucracy is not that linear. Second: early human societies were far more experimental and politically conscious than the standard narrative suggests.

The best example is Teotihuacan. At its height (100–550 CE) the city had some 100,000 to 200,000 inhabitants — comparable to Rome at the time. What is remarkable is that there are no identifiable royal tombs, no monumental glorification of individual rulers as among the Maya. The art is largely collective and cosmological in character. There was initially probably a central power of some kind of nobility or priestly class. That disappeared, presumably through a revolt, after which a cooperative bottom-up model took its place.

What followed is impressive. The so-called apartment compounds — residential blocks for extended family groups — became suddenly larger around 300 CE, better built, equipped with drainage and courtyards. Archaeologist Linda Manzanilla has shown that these complexes were relatively autonomous economic and religious units. No top-down allocation, but organised self-determination within an urban framework. The city attracted people from the surrounding region, people with different cultural backgrounds who were all housed in dwellings meeting the latest hygienic standards. They apparently paid no heed to so-called economic laws or free markets when building these residential compounds.

The city appeared to function through distributed governance — multiple centres of power, with religious, economic and political functions not concentrated in one person or institution. Whether that was a deliberate political choice or an emergent system, we do not know. But it worked, for a long time.

4. Constitutional imagination

Applying an approach like Teotihuacan’s to our current society requires constitutional flexibility. We could organise politics differently to break through the division between political tribes.

For this, the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee is interesting for a specific reason: it has a built-in mechanism for revision and an explicit principle of seventh-generation thinking — decisions are tested against their effect seven generations into the future. That is structurally the opposite of the four-year electoral cycle that forces every politician into short-term thinking.

The electoral cycle in Western Democracy versus Seventh-Generation Thinking among the Haudenosaunee

Iceland made an attempt at constitutional revision after 2008 via a citizens’ assembly — literally crowdsourcing the constitution. The process was fascinating; the result was blocked by parliament. But it proved it could be done. Unfortunately, existing power structures prevented this adaptation because it went against their personal interests.

In the Netherlands, experiments with citizens’ assemblies are now running here and there, such as the Climate Citizens’ Assembly. The criticism is always: they are not binding. That is true — as long as the constitutional structure itself does not change, they remain advisory. But there is another criticism that is plainly wrong: that citizens’ assemblies are not democratic. We have a completely mistaken picture of what democracy is.

In ancient Athens there were elections. But these were considered the least democratic — because popularity determined who won. Real democracy lay in the sortition of the popular assembly. Every free male citizen of Athens could be drawn by lot for one year to help govern. This prevented populists from gaining unlimited power. Exactly what we now see in Western democracies: populists who spread their too-good-to-be-true stories best via algorithms are doing well. That in doing so they call for the overthrow of democracy is accepted by many as a side effect — because the current system is not solving the problems.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart showed in Cultural Backlash (2019) that populist authoritarianism does not primarily stem from economic anxiety alone, but from a combination of material insecurity and the feeling that established politics structurally does not listen. From affordability and housing through climate and pollution to distrust to radicalisation. That is not speculation. It is a demonstrable pattern.

5. The missing narrative — and where it begins

Radical parties offer non-solutions — pointing to culprits instead of changing structures. But they win because they do have a narrative. A coherent, emotionally satisfying story about why things are going wrong and who is to blame. However primitive.

The centre no longer has a story. It has policy documents.

And yet a narrative is possible that connects and appeals to the desire for things to be different. Let us then build a narrative grounded in conservative ideas — only somewhat more conservative than the non-existent glorious 1950s, something more like Teotihuacan in the year 500 CE. And somewhat less Eurocentric, drawing more on the Haudenosaunee for constitutional flexibility. A narrative that connects problems instead of fragmenting them, uses historical examples of different ways of organising, is pragmatic rather than moralising, and gives people agency instead of blame.

That is precisely what Hancock does — only for the past. He says: there was another world possible, and it was wiped away. That resonates. The political translation would be: other paths were always possible, and they still are. Graeber and Wengrow say the same, but too academically to land broadly.

This essay is a first step toward changing that. At least five more essays will follow to explore the above further and build the narrative.