I suspect that attempting to alleviate anxiety over starkly limited agency is as old or older than humanity (see also: any ritual/religious/magical attempt to propitiate the spirits/ensure favorable weather/manage disease or fertility, or just about anything else you can think of, which definitely stretch back to the dawn of recorded history, and seem quite likely to have just been practiced by illiterate people before that point. Some evo-psych research team is probably demonstrating magical thinking in great apes as we speak).
That said, it isn’t exactly a novel thesis that modernity is surprisingly bad in terms of anxiety and uncertainty with respect to agency (especially when you consider that it’s pretty much the best time in history in terms of having actual power over the world and your fate. Shove over Asclepius, and take 1x 250mg Azithromycin daily, one of these two things will make your throat feel better…) It wouldn’t surprise me if a combination of powerlessness (combined with the substantial effectiveness of the modern nation state in curbing serious violence, relative to historical levels), makes for a lot of fodder for the ‘wacky hijinks’ file.
