Are we at the precipice of human progress?

Is progress truly possible? Or does this cycle simply continue on forever? Are we truly in the last stage of history, as the Fukuyamas of the world claim? Or is this just one more peak in the endless chain of peaks and troughs? Is the current period of turmoil and turbulence just a minor interruption in an endless age of peace and prosperity? Or were the past few decades merely a bubble of stability that's finally starting to pop? In a thousand years from now, will people look at 21st century Western civilisation as a great society that brought about a worldwide technological utopia, or as just another empire that stretched itself too thin and collapsed into ruin?

The economic collapse proved that we're not entering an age of unlimited prosperity and growth after all. The failure of "regime change" in Iraq proved that the rest of the world won't convert to secularism, egalitarianism, capitalism, and liberal democracy just because we want it to. Russia's newfound wave of expansionism restarted the Cold War and put an end to the age of endless peace; turns out the realists were right about international relations after all, nation-states won't peacefully cooperate with each other if they can gain more from breaking the unenforced rules of the global community.

Saudi Arabia's brutal conquest of Yemen shows that warlords are still among us, just as ISIS shows that there may always been barbarians at the gate. The re-legalisation of chattel slavery in Libya shows that even the evils that we thought had been abolished can always resurface. And maybe this is all temporary, maybe these problems are just the last dying gasps of an older and harsher world, but maybe not. Maybe this is the world's natural state, and we've simply been spoiled by our 60 year long reprieve from it. Either way, it's quite discouraging for anyone who grew up believing the idealistic promises of the 90s and early 00s.

Sometimes it seems like, deep down, humans really haven't changed all that much over the past few thousand years. We're still the same species responsible for countless centuries of war, oppression, slavery, and genocide, and maybe no matter how advanced our technology and our social structures become, that won't ever really change.