Convincing billions to co-operate based on rules.
It's incredible
During these periods of imperial peace, warfare is mostly confined to the frontier regions or where the empire abuts another empire.
One could argue that we are in a similar time now. The USA basically has a de-facto empire over the Americas and Western Europe. The Middle East is a frontier zone. Ukraine abuts a former empire (Russian/Soviet) trying to regain its former glory. Taiwan abuts China which is trying to establish its own hegemony in its region.
Peace as in no major wars, sure. But plenty of hyper-local conflicts (think clan feuds, hyperlocal peasant revolts, etc) would happen all the time before the expansion of state power in the 20th century.
Hell, when my great-grandfather was born, they were recent settlers in a region of Northern India that was completely depopulated of the indigenous population during the British conquest of the Sikh Empire.
Where my great-grandfather's family was from was filled with multi-generational clan feuds, the occasional peasant revolt against the govt tax collector, and the occasional millenarian revolt.
You wouldn't read about most of this stuff in your high school history textbook or on History Channel, but it would happen with consistency. I can guarantee with a fact that this same story existed in every single country before the 20th century and the rise of the railroad, canned food, and the telegraph.
Before those 3 technologies arose, power projection was difficult, and "empires" were in reality a mixture of local fiefdoms (literally) who pledged feality to some guy in a capital far away.
To use the classic Chinese and Russian quote - God and the Emperor are far, but I am here [0]
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_is_high_and_the_emper...
A country that is a bully to others is not the definition of empire. This isn't even loosely comparable to a real former empire like British Empire and yes "Soviet Empire". China is slowly becoming an even bigger bully in Asia and Africa, but that doesn't make it an empire either.
Also, what you described is basically psudeoscience and veers very closely to eugenics (the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable)
Of course, not all violence is physical. The real change has been the transition from the common application of physical violence to emotional and psychological violence as our societies become more abstract and removed from the cold brutality of nature and subsistence living, except in "extreme" cases.
Also the "greatest trick the devil ever pulled" was convincing people he doesn't exist. Slaves pick your food, sew your clothes and mine the rare earth minerals in your electronics. Vast engines of automated slaughter put meat in your stores. Every advertisement is mind control and every news story is psychological warfare. Every cop is a thug, every judge a sadist, every CEO a sociopath, every politician a psychopath. "People sleep peacefully in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf," as George Orwell said. And they do, cruel, wicked violence. Your hands are soaked in blood, the roads are paved with bones, and the skies are blackened with ashes from the ovens of Moloch.
But you don't see it most of the time, it's hidden away from you, or it's intangible. That's the trick the world learned from the Nazis, how to manipulate and control mass perception through modern media, and by extension to normalize the violence that drives modern society. You can just play Candy Crush, pay your taxes, be nice and not kill anyone and pretend the devil isn't real.
Yes we hide a lot of ... oppression/violence/unfair business practises ... under the supply chain. But hell i think the electronic ledger and RFID will be amount the most transformative technologies our children will see.
Underpaid subsistence workers do produce a huge portion of goods consumed in western nations. Engines of automated slaughter do put meat in stores. Advertising cares not an ounce for your wellbeing, food conglomerates employ chemists to optimize not for health or flavor but how compulsively you want to eat their products, game studios and social networks employ psychologists to most effectively addict you. Mindlessly consuming the news is a great way to get psyopped. Note that I have dropped the universals (e.g. "every", "all") because they weaken the argument by opening it to pedantic attacks, but the above is largely true.
The "every X is a Y" is more fraught. Police are too often predisposed to violence and abuse, many politicians are sociopaths, surely. Selection effects are real. But there are reasonable people too.
The more important point, which the comment misses, is that nobody is really in charge. Yes, there are "smoke-filled rooms" where conspiracies are hatched, but modernity is too large and complex for complete centralized control. The dominant forces today, I would argue, are distributed algorithms composed of flesh and blood human beings, their ideas and social fictions (which comprise institutions), and a vast array of machines. This vortex, this enormous, evolving structure of incentives and infrastructure, has its own autonomy. This is Moloch, and it doesn't even require active malice on any particular person's part.
Paperclip maximizers are not just a thought experiment, we are surrounded by them. We are in them.
Yes, the advertisers don't care one bit for the well-being of the consumers, but can you imagine a reality where they would? I don't. Calling something evil even though there's not much improvement to be made is ... needlessly negative?
> the advertisers don't care one bit for the well-being of the consumers, but can you imagine a reality where they would?
Yes. Imagine a reality where we don't have anything like the advertising sector, or myopically extractive industry in general, sidestepping the whole problem.
Failures of imagination seriously constrain the possibility space. Modernity's totalizing tendency ("the end of history", "the best we've ever had it", etc) is a big reason it threatens to self-terminate, I think. History is path-dependent, yes, and for all I know we do live in a block universe, but for practical purposes the future is under-determined.
> the trick the world learned from the Nazis