Prior to Alexander, simple city-state like entities were dominant and the norm. No one had to bear the tax of some professional army or deal with the federations of disparate polities. Shit gets real bad, everyone goanna die this winter from starvation, worst case is city vs city raids. Lots to try to trade across cities where many skilled trades and goods are unique but quality varied. Getting raided? NP, retreat to the walls with your belongings and defend with your neighbors. You know nearly everyone on the walls beside you. Wives and daughters worry, but the idle times and company are more jubilant than not. The differential in forces is negligible. Defending is a massive advantage. There are very few creative innovators around that are focused on attacking. Raiding is about poor management, resource scarcity, and minor thievery. Where the former are larger parties and latter are smaller.

Along comes The Great Asshole, and here come the pro bro brutes. They are the first regional sized force. The whole group of them are totally desensitized to morality. This is not some parity or simple innovation of technology. This is - it does not matter that a coalition of cities are banded for defense. No one has ever seen a force so large and so murderous. These are the military engineers.

Brutishness is so very limited in real value. It only matters in one on one engagements with limited constraints. Humans are not predators of strength, but of endurance.

The real strength to fear are the engineers. The creative innovators are scary as fuck. When a group of them are focused on the innovations of murder orgies, common folks are a thrashing harvest.

After The Great Asshole, you no longer have some negligible tax to help pay for the walls. Now you pay a much larger sum. The city is dotted with these new professional murder chaps that work for this raider fuckwit asshat that killed Gerry, the guy at the forum market everyone liked. You know, the one with the two gorgeous daughters everyone loved. You would not believe the terrible things the guy in the tower did to them. The whole city heard it, every night for weeks.

Now here you are on a wall next to a bunch of guys you do not know. They seem halfway alright most of the time, but you just know they are not leaving until all your reserves for the winter are gone. Half of your neighbors are dead or left the countryside. Your shack of a home, it is the third time you had to toss something together. The old raiders are looking for food and goods, but these new sadistic fucks burn your shit down for kicks and giggles. Now, uncle dude is not just enslaved in yondertown. He is literally abducted by aliens. People just disappear and no one knows what happened. The party is over, decency is dead, tyranny of the foreigner reigns supreme, hailing from a place you never knew existed. You never imagined humans could be so vile, so cruel, so terrifying. You never felt so violated, so traumatized, so helpless, so lonely. That was the real change.

The population reached a size and wealth that made a test of true human nature possible. Alex was simply at the right time and place to manage an engineering core of mass murder orgies profession that was at the transition point of local to regional wealth management. It was a giant regression and depression of progress that ground everywhere Alex touched to a crawl by the force of attenuation; the way things recovered were a shell of what could have been achieved without attenuation and the same resources and effort gone into amplification. That is always the case, as proven by tit for tat plus ten percent forgiveness solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma problem within Statistics. One of the most persistent primitive stupidities present across time and human culture thus far is the failure to understand how attenuation cannot amplify. Shame does not produce positive change. Alex was the great monster. A serial killer in parallel port operation. •»ÀĪÙ¬§¬¶¬×