What you are describing as the "aristocratic system," I think better called the Feudal arrangements, continued later into the industrial period most famously in the American South, where large estates were becoming increasingly economically viable with the combination of slave labor and mechanized processing of cotton. Some old world cultural expressions of medieval chivalry not only had persisted there but were becoming more popular, with a craze for dueling, a deadly menace mentioned repeatedly in the press. In spite of the aristocratic cultural vigor and highly militarized aristocracy, the Confederacy never had much of a chance against the industrial, logistical and numerical advantage of the Union, and indeed, the superior communication lines available by telegraph.

During the period discussed in your post the British were not significantly culturally different from other European competitors for me to put great faith in the argument that this gave them more success at sea, at least against other Europeans. Throughout the age of sail the British generally maintained a significantly larger and more effective fleet than the French or indeed any of their competitors and so always benefited from making more aggressive action. When you have all the chips at the table that's just how the game goes. Additionally, the British held a few key technological advantages in the velocity of their artillery projectiles and in the chronometer, an extremely sophisticated device which was designed to keep navigationally accurate track of time while in the heaviest seas and through earth's varying gravity. Arguably the chronometer was the greatest advantage the British ever obtained, considering knowledge of one's longitude is important to exercising sea power. Indeed, this is the era in which communication and navigation has already become quite reliable.

On the one hand it's true that relevant information and communication gives powerful force-multiplying advantages. On the other hand, it's not true that a warrior culture with some equivalent to the Articles of War is in itself advantaged in any way from more desultory strategies.

There's no need to strain a metaphor beyond its good use. The intuition pump as a surprise taste test could be more, a moral allegory as you've had it, but that's the very kind of narrative thread-weaving which I wanted to warn against.

What I want to emphasize most of all, and I'll be more direct and less clever now, is playfulness over minmaxing. Making and stockpiling increasing amounts of bows, ever more effective weapons, is not so much a metaphor for a game as it is the most immediate and serious existential threat to humanity, even moreso than the climate. If we're at all wise to the world, similar existential consequences from AI are still quite beyond the horizon. Serious to be sure, but these tenuous long strands of allegory, metaphor, and tapestries of analogy, the very substance of Rationalism and logic, are basically unfalsifiable and therefore closer to the mythological. 

OP is onto something in pointing to playfulness, taking the way of Gandalf rather than Saruman. Saruman's way is precisely what Anthropic is doing, playing a defeatist game of ring-making, orc-breeding, and forest-burning.

Agents which do not care even instrumentally about effecting the wider world probably will not predominate. They will probably be bystanders and NPCs - and by their own lights, this is fine.

I would point your attention to Rucker's character Sta-Hi Mooney, from the Ware series. An inattentive reader of Software might consider this character a bland hedonist, and in the first sense he is. But through the novel it is revealed that he is very engaged in a Dionysian manner, the disruption of rationality provided by drugs gives him an awareness that is not available to "NPCs," mere bystanders, or even the hyper-rational inventor of AI, Cobb Anderson. We see a Dionysian kind of character also in Fear And Loathing, where only Raul Duke can actually discern the mad American Dream. In a sense these characters are destructive, tearing down common illusions that we all take for granted, and in the case of Sta-Hi, we have it double in his destruction of the Big Boppers.

Rationalism or Apollonian thought is less capable of "play," and I do not mean that in the sense that rational people aren't enjoying themselves. Rather, play in the sense of Derrida where we are stressing the seemingly unlimited permutations within a limited system. This working out of a minmaxing strategy for making sense of the world leads to a very narrow and deterministic style, Narrative.

Apollonian thought is insidious, one may not even notice its narrative building blocks. This hunch that a Rationalist is better prepared for "instrumentally effecting the wider world" cannot be true, as the whole affair is bent towards the crystallization of ideas into more beautiful, solid, or eloquent terms. This is the opposite of transformative action. Ultimately, the destructive impulse of the Dionysian is a perhaps final reflection upon a thought and not a destruction as it poses, and what was once their new paradigm instantly begins to itself crystallize as rules of how to best play the newly-altered game arise. So its destructive mandate is not an end in itself, but a new beginning.

This dynamic is very evident in a lot of popular fiction, as well. When one finds oneself in a lose-lose situation, I think the slightly crazy and compulsive Captain Kirk is in order over rationalist Spock, the Vulcan most often convinced of his own narratives and a total defeatist. Contrast Gandalf with Saruman, the wandering unserious wizard who quite irrationally let the world's fate hang in the hands of a few very hedonistic hobbits rather than the very logical Saruman who wished to build up his own power to betray Sauron.

This is not some "Noble Savage" view, as the Greeks were indeed an example of relative high civilization compared to their contemporaries, and I have applied none of the typical virtues that are associated with such a narrative. The Noble Savage trope is largely praising the imagined warlike and masculine qualities of populations that are seen as less civilized. The Noble Savage is innocent only of the effeminate quality of civilization.

This talk about efficiency might lead somewhere fruitful, even if your argument is confused and pointless: We just have stronger weapons / swords and nukes are equally efficient. I have no idea what you even mean, but let's think about this more. A nuclear bomb is in fact far less efficient than a sword as it requires vast amounts of industrial development, mining, and energy to create and deliver with any effect. The same can be said about a rifle, it requires far more energy and labor to manufacture than a machete, and requires a constant supply of ammunition to function. The immediate conclusion upon a moment reflecting on the efficiency of weaponry is that we're investing much more energy into increasingly less efficient weapon systems, as if it is a race to spend more and more resources to gain tactical advantage. That is, kill at increasing distances. Look at the current conflict in Ukraine. The largest proportion of infantry kills are taking place by remote controlled suicide drone, something that is wildly inefficient. A lot of these drones are now even being controlled via fiber optics to prevent signal jamming, and so you see the trees in no man's land just draped with miles and miles of wasted fiber optics.

If what you claim is indeed true, and warfare is always equally brutal across all eras (or this parallel view, that the past was indeed more brutal), then the added inefficiency of modern weaponry seems to show that in terms of wealth and resources, we are nonetheless committing more resources than ever to weaponry. I cannot think of a single ancient empire which stockpiled weapons and bombs with even a fraction of the commitment of modern nation states.

So, I see you've been looking into Wikipedia and beginning some interest in history. I'm glad you've taken some of your first steps into a deeper understanding of the topic. There are a few warnings, though. When we see numbers in ancient texts such as Plutarch's reference to "thirty thousand," these need to be framed with extreme caution and understanding that ancients simply did not keep accurate records, such as birth certificates, and what evidence we do have shows the numbers to be always exaggerated. We must consider also that Thucydides' history is colored by a critical bias against Athens, with his overarching narrative presented in the Peloponnesian War. All of the speeches and quotations given in Thucydides are meant to create an impression, and are misrepresented when interpreted as if they were a journalistic source.

Now, it's good to hold these ancient atrocities in one hand, but they are not themselves showing a more cruel world of the past. We must compare them with the modern wars if they are to give us some meaningful contrast. Let's take World War 1, for example. We are just going to breeze by each battle and give a death count.

The battle of the Marne, over 500,000 died. 700,000 in the battle of Verdun. Over a million in the first battle of the Somme. 800,000 some in the second battle of the Somme. Kolubara, around half a million. Gallipoli, another half million. Galicia, over 600,000. Third battle of Ypres, exceeding 800,000. A million and a half in the Spring Offensive. Around 1.8 million in the Hundred Days Offensive. 2.3 million in the Busliov Offensive. Estimates have around 16.5 million soldiers as casualties of the first world war.

World War 2 saw some decline in military casualties but also the tragic and steep increase in civilian casualties, with somewhere around 40 million dying as a result of the war. This is due in large part to citizens becoming valid military targets, something that was only hinted at in the first world war. Curtis LeMay, the American commander who organized the systematic firebombing of Japanese civilians said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals."

Now perhaps this brutal form of war is more kind, you are thinking, because there is no capture or sale of enemy soldiers or citizens as slaves, but I think that is utterly facile and mistaken. The Geneva conventions explicitly allow compelling prisoners of war to labor, so long as they aren't officers. The US and Soviets forced German prisoners of war into labor. The Germans captured and enslaved the people of Europe on a scale that was unprecedented in history, with fifteen million people enslaved. 

Last century is often called the "Age of Genocide" and we can make a list here, too. The Armenians of Turkey, Jewish people of Germany, Bosnians, Mayans of Guatemala, Tutsis of Rwanda, the earlier examples of Tasmania's complete genocide, the genocide of Native Americans, all represent a rising global trend that is very decidedly current and recent, with genocide by no means a universal feature that is continuous through history.

There are currently around two million people in the American prison system, of these around 800,000 do everyday labor like the rest of us, paid in rates best measured by pennies per hour. The trend of mass incarceration in the US is one that has massively increased over the past generation.

With a less biased view of the last century, as well as the present, it is clear that these events of the past were not "terrifically violent" by the standards of the modern era.

Those hardly count as cherrypicked examples when they're so incredibly vague. You did not name a single historian, Greek city state, solitary event, or personality from history which could be counted as an example supporting any thesis. These are only vague mischaracterizations and not data points. I have explained to you in great detail how Whiggish history was and is a politically-interested style of writing history that has gone out of fashion for nearly all experts in the field. There are plenty of tribal controversies in the interpretation of history, but this isn't really one that historians currently care too much about at all.

The argument here is incredibly unconvincing and utterly puzzling. Moses is a mythological figure

These vast sweeping claims you're making are not original thoughts that you've gotten from firsthand sources, but rather they are from 18th and 19th century historians. That is, the narrative of gradual improvement over time in what's called Whiggish history. It's very popular among non-historians or amateur historians but 20th century historians were very critical of this view. Experts in the field, the people who are making a career of "looking at historical documents," have largely flipped on this view.

Herbert Butterfield wrote a famous takedown, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). P. B. M. Blaas felt the style had already passed by 1914, in his seminal work on historiography, Continuity and Anachronism (1978). His term for your idea that people in the past acted on the concept of survival of the fittest before its conceptualization is called Presentism, a form of anachronism, and it's the biggest stumbling block for understanding the people of the past.

David Cannadine, the Dodge Professor of History at Princeton said, "Whig history was, in short, an extremely biased view of the past: eager to hand out moral judgements, and distorted by teleology, anachronism and present-mindedness."

Frederic William Maitland is widely considered the first of a new breed of historians. The answer to Whiggish history was in fact utilizing more data than ever. For him, that meant actually reading as much of English law as possible and understanding it in its own terms, rather than treating it as a more vague process inevitably leading to the present. Contrary to your claim, the firsthand sources in fact shattered Whiggish pretensions.

I'm trying to very politely tell y'all in this thread that this crap is the Newtonian Physics of history. Sure, Edward Gibbon and other ye olde history is a decent starting point, but if that's all you have you're pretty much out of touch with the field.

Does a bacterium "practice survival of the fittest" in a way that matches the expressly Darwinist ideology of Hitler? Of course not. And neither does a Chimp.

Platonism is the first sin of Rationalist discourse. The idea that logic has a direct connection with reality only makes a computer programmer into an instant master of all disciplines. If we accept the more conventional philosophy of Formalism where logic has a much more vague and obscure correspondence to reality, the study of logic becomes just any other field.

The argument that "people have always been shitty" is ignorant equivocating that tells me you think there is nothing to gain from the topic, because if people do not change then History is a worthless project. What very little we know about ancient witch hunting in Rome is utterly irrelevant to the easily illustrated current trend of increasing shittiness.