I don't think it is that simple. If people yearned for freedom and peace intrinsically, dictators would have much harder time to rule their populations and initiate wars.
And I don't find anything bizarre about arguing from the past. Yes, the level of technology has changed, but human nature has not. Reading philosophers from Antiquity, I am always struck by the extreme psychological similarity of ancient people to us, even though they didn't even know what "reading glasses" was.
I would even turn your argument about hunter-gatherers to my purpose. Yes, we carry a burden of being hunter-gatherers for 99 per cent of human existence. It makes organizing larger units so much harder. By trial and error, after some 5000 years of statefulness, we have found some forms that don't entirely suck, but still suck quite a lot.
And I don't find anything bizarre about arguing from the past. Yes, the level of technology has changed, but human nature has not. Reading philosophers from Antiquity, I am always struck by the extreme psychological similarity of ancient people to us, even though they didn't even know what "reading glasses" was.
I would even turn your argument about hunter-gatherers to my purpose. Yes, we carry a burden of being hunter-gatherers for 99 per cent of human existence. It makes organizing larger units so much harder. By trial and error, after some 5000 years of statefulness, we have found some forms that don't entirely suck, but still suck quite a lot.