Has the system finally cracked? Have the wealthy and powerful simply taken so much leaving the rest of us grasping at our very survival, easily manipulated into turning against other groups and even each other in an attempt to make sense of it all? Is society destined to destroy itself or descend into eternal servitude to our masters? How do we get out of this spiral of madness?
By what metrics?
Historically there simply wasn’t physical things with which to have the modern level of inequality. Historically the average lower end was was lower, but the modern high end is incomprehensible orders of magnitude higher.
Historical acts of oppression were often far more brutal and cruel but that’s because it wasn’t physically possible to maintain the constant, but relatively minor oppression that is characteristic of modernity.
I mean, the pyramids are huge, and they were built starting ~2500BC. There was stuff.
It’s true that in any discussion of today’s economics versus that in history (or in very different countries today) you run into the problems of an apples-to-oranges comparison. It’s most common for economic historians to default to hours of unskilled labour; early economists like Marx or Smith would be proud. Archeologists meanwhile tend to use house size in settlements as a proxy. That leads to ideas like the bronze age “palace economy” where all wealth would have flown through the ruler, although one wonders how that could possibly have been implemented in practice. When it comes to comparing modern global inequality, the best measurements are multidimensional indices, but that’s only possible because you can interact with people on the ground in real time. (No, two dollars a day isn’t the same everywhere)
Although there’s some dissent, the gist that pre-modern history included much higher levels of inequality than we see today holds. Here’s a recent example. Here’s an old AskHistorians reply about it, by alternate frontend.
There’s is some interesting comparisons out there. In certain periods and areas, medieval peasants were eating pretty well; much better than the modern global poorest, probably because of there was a lot of land relative to the local population. One the other hand, the poorest countries today have better infant mortality than the richest countries of the early 20th century.
Pragmatism might have had something to do with that, as did unfounded beliefs about the effectiveness of draconian punishments (the English bloody code being an infamous example). There’s no shortage of examples of historical suffering handed out on a consistent rather than occasional basis, though.