I may be missing something, but the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed relatively peacefully is not a lot of evidence for restraint/unwillingness to use force amongst its leaders. For the whole previous history of the Soviet Union repression and silencing of dissent was commonplace, especially during Lenin and Stalin (for example by the KGB torturing dissenting/intellectual people or sending them to gulags). Also, Gorbachev was a pretty uniquely commited to change in the context of USSR leadership, and there were plenty of other factors making dissolution more appealing. Opression definitely decreased as USSR neared its end, but why does this outweight the very violent first half of its existence?
meiga
Karma: 3
(I haven’t read the story, could be missing something)
Pretty prose, but I am confused as to why you didn’t mention how some beauty features have become somewhat uncoupled from fertily health due to make up, surgeries etc. This would only increase with better tech to the point where it would only very slightly correlate. Seems an important piece of the puzzle along with the fact that most of our drives are monotonic and not very intelligent, breast size being a prime example. So when you consider a society of calliagnosics inventing some compensating technology—I would expext this to be better in terms of health/fertility outcomes for society than the equivalent-tech world where people care about beauty due to the calliagnosic society optimising specifically for those things rather than a correlate.