You think this was written by AI? I'm curious, why? Anytime I'm about to read a long post I generally paste it into a few detectors for sanity, but none of them flagged anything for this one. I read the entirety and thought it was pretty compelling - long maybe, but thoughtful. I appreciated the historical quotes interjected, and didn't find the prose suspect.
Some of the formatting for emphasis and em-dashes looked a bit iffy. It's hard to imagine AI wasn't involved, at least an an editor or to discuss ideas. To be clear, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with this.