During the Age of Transformation (Karen Armstrong, Marijia Gimbutas) the military strategy the group used to resist or conquer out-groups determined, and set in mental stone: in myth, tradition, law, literature, norm and value, the consequential metaphysics (assumptions and values) of each civilization. And they survive to this day. In no small part because we have exercised the eugenic or dysgenic values in each of those eras, and to no small degree bred for adaptation to those strategies.
Iranian, Egyptian, Chinese Armies in the river plains
European warrior aristocracy and its militias.
Steppe tribal raiders.
Diasporic traders and wandering herdsmen, gypsies, and pirates.
What we are apparently afraid to face, is that the long term de-civilizing consequences that have led to India and the muslim world, and africa, and now to south america can also be brought here to the upper lattitudes because of our use of fossil fuel heating and air conditioning. Demographic distributions matter more than excellences. No genius can reorganize a society of these imbalances without a return to either working class command economies, or it’s predecessor slavery. It’s simple math. They are too relatively unproductive to generate a concentration of wealth necessary for a voluntary organization of production (capitalism) to create marginal (decidable and influential) differences in reward necessary to form the various networks of hierarchies that as a collective can survive competition.
Man was not oppressed by aristocracy. Man and Woman were domesticated, like every other feral animal, through a continuous process of eugenics that suppressed the lower class reproduction and redistributed reproduction upward, while at the same time increasing the scope of parasitic prohibitions that we call laws, and incrementally forcing everyone into productive activities in order to survive. We sent to war, hung, or starved the rest.