Oh it gets better! Keep reading! It probably won’t answer the questions that you brought up as fully as you’d wish, but they definitely explore those topics further.

The key thing I took away from the read is that humans have always been, well, human, in all of our deficient, beautiful, spiteful, genius. Mythologizing the “state of Nature”, as Rousseau did, is absolutely the wrong lens to view this history. It also speaks to our creative potential as a species. We can create any society that we want, as long as it works for a significant number of people.