The history of the modern world in a paragraph.
Everything we have now, good or bad, is the direct result of the system built by the ones in charge, their cultures and values. If, in an alternate universe or dimension, a different group/tribe/race/sex of people where the ones at that critical moment when the powers shifted, would we have more, less or none what we have now? Would we have no internet but flying cars? The only thing we know is that we would not be exactly where we are now and enlightenment would still elude us. Oh, and you’d never have existed.
After all it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said — in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.