Lorenzo from Oz

States, culture, cognitive dimorphism, mass production, social corrosion, hidden impoverishment

Lorenzo Warby — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 03:58:00 GMT

This is the fourth post in series on using evolutionary reasoning. The first post discussed pitfalls of evolutionary reasoning and advanced 42 propositions about human tool use, cooperation and mating patterns. The second post advanced another 78 propositions on norms, language, prestige, propriety, social aggression, diet, religion, and murdering our way to niceness. The third post discussed the role of niches in human societies and how they generate demographic boom and social order bust cycles in human polities, cycles that very much have contemporary resonances. This post advances 90 propositions about states, culture, cognitive dimorphism, mass production, social corrosion and masked impoverishment of human flourishing.

The Great Pyramid at Giza, consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks: approximately 5.5 million tonnes of limestone, 8,000 tonnes of granite, and 500,000 tonnes of mortar were used in the construction. The monumentalism of ancient polities manifests rulers dominating the extraction, creation and use of surplus. Wikimedia commons.

Human males and females have distinct, but overlapping, patterns of cognitive traits. The distribution of cognitive traits among human males being “flatter” than among human females, plus those distributions having different averages, results in a large majority of both males and females having a pattern of cognitive traits that does not occur in the other sex.
Thus, we are a significantly cognitively dimorphic species.
As these differences are clearly selected for, it is not an advantage to human lineages to have male and female cognitive patterns converge “too much”.
If members of a lineage with a high degree of such cognitive convergence become sexually oriented to their own sex, this impedes continuing such cognitive convergence between the sexes within the lineage. It also generates lineage members able to invest more in cultural and other social-connection goods rather than in their own children, to the internal and external advantage of the lineage. (Gay men are wildly disproportionately likely to work in caring and cultural professions.)
If there is a range within which cognitive convergence is conducive to successful human mating, this will strengthen these patterns.
The development of productive assets (salmon runs, arable land, animal herds) provided mechanisms for dominance—usually via coalitions—to re-enter human societies.
Such productive assets both enabled, and regularly expressed, such dominance, including through much increased capacity for polygyny.
The development of productive assets also increased the incentive for women to engage in hypergamy (seeking high-status mates). That human males are primed to value physical signs of fertility made this a practical option.
Women tend to show more concern for status than men in mating, given the resource and social-connection advantages of a higher status mate for their children and greater male focus on physicality.
This greater female operational concern for status extends to friendship networks: women are far less likely to have lower-status friends than men, as female friendships are based on emotional investment to generate robust support for raising our very biologically expensive children, and lower status women are unlikely to to be “worth” the investment.
As men are far less likely to find women threatening than women are to find men threatening, and men focus more on things and performance of roles, women show far higher rates of social preference for other women than men do other men.
One way religions can promote fertility is by embedding women in strong maternity-promoting social networks. Such plays to greater female social preference for other women and their stronger tendency to normative conformity.
Conversely, men are much more likely than women to have lower status friends, as you never know when you might want them on your “team”. This, along with the strong female social preference for other women, makes men more the social solidarity sex than women.
Teams as such are morally neutral—the Mongols and the Waffen SS were both excellent at building effective teams. Nevertheless, effective institutions usually operate as expanded teams.
As teams are the archetypal non-kin connection for men, male friendships tend to be emotionally thinner, broader, and more flexible in who they include, than female friendships. Men are also more likely to continue to invest in maintaining friendships despite disputes.
As the physically weaker sex with bubs in tow, women tend to avoid physical aggression among adults, but are more likely to use relational or social aggression. This is both more effective, and safer, if they present it—including to themselves—as “just” social or moral concern, using our considerable capacity for self-deception, as most of our cognition is not conscious.
As part of assessing threat and commitment, women tend to be better at reading other people’s emotions than men. Men tend to be more aware of their own aggression than are women.
As women are typically more alert to other people’s emotions, and see relationships in terms of emotional investment, women tend to be systematically better at networking than men. The elimination of male same-sex social spaces therefore tends to disadvantage men.
As war provides intense stress and emotional connection, conflict can often provide men with an intensity of connection they struggle to find elsewhere.
Much of male social interaction is about testing potential team members—if I say outrageous things, will you still support me? if I put you under pressure, will you fold?
Women working in male-dominated environments can easily find them emotionally bruising. Conversely, it is hard to build trust if folk are “walking on egg shells” in very tone-policed milieus.
Female groups are typically built from the emotional-commitment pattern. Such cliques tend to be more emotionally intense, more conformist, socially narrower and more unstable than male teams.
In particular, within female networks, disagreement is more likely to seem either hurtful, or as a threat. The women’s movement has regularly been marked by intense shaming and shunning behaviour (“trashing”). Men working in female-dominated environments can often find them emotionally smothering while cognitive conformity tends to be required for stable female networking.
As men tend to focus more on roles and things, they tend to be more comfortable with hierarchies. As women tend to focus more on emotional connections, they tend to be keener on “flattening” social interactions. So, men tend to be more comfortable with overt seeking of status and status differentiation than women, including acknowledging differences in performance/capacity/achievement and identifying failures to reach set standards.
Farming and pastoralism enabled dramatically larger populations and created productive assets—arable fields, animal herds—that could be seized. This increased the scale of social predation, thereby encouraging the intensification of kin groups as part of more intense selection for effective warrior teams.
The result was the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck, which only about 1-in-17 male lineages survived but did not limit female lineages. Effective male teams killed—or sometimes enslaved—their rivals, took their women and bred with them, intensifying selection among human males for effective teams.
The massive harrowing of male, but not female, lineages after the development of farming and pastoralism. Karmin, et al, 2015.
While in any generation, most men reproduced, over time, there was an intense harrowing of male lineages until the social strategy of taxing losing males, which rewarded enabling them to breed new taxpayers, evolved.
It also meant that generations of human females bred with the rapist who had killed their male relatives. This has had lingering effects on patterns of female sexuality—romance novels about the love of a good woman taming a male brute speak to this, as does attraction to “bad boys”.
Social defection has also been much more likely to be a successful strategy for women than men.
The tax-the-losers social strategy of tribute (chiefdoms) and especially taxation (states) required seasonal crops—for stored food was taxable and non-seasonal crops do not structurally generate significant stores of food.
Seasonal crops—requiring the storing of food and the seeds for next year’s crops—also increased the need for protection.
The combination of predation and protection was deeply embedded in the creation and evolution of states. Focusing only one of these features of states is seriously misleading.
Due to the need for taxable seasonal crops, states originated in fewer locations than did farming. Far more of the Earth’s land area has had states first imposed on them from outside than were origin points for states.
Farming does not, in itself, generate significant surplus—food above subsistence—it mainly supports more babies.
Tribute and taxation, by taking food before it was used to support more babies, does generate significant surplus.
As states have dominated the creation, extraction and distribution of surplus, they are a fundamental structuring element in societies—including of their class structures—they are not “reflections” of them.
The socially structuring power of states makes it harder to impose accountability on them.
As no mechanism of accountability is infinitely flexible or scaleable, the larger the state apparatus, the greater the incentive—and potential capacity—to frustrate accountability to the wider society.
Due to states creating surplus through their extraction efforts, state societies are considerably more complex than stateless societies.
As states are built from taxation—coercive extraction of resources, originally in kind—and more taxpayers mean more revenue, as soon as there are states, there are incentives to expand the territory (and subjects) from which one extracts resources.
Empire is the result of there being states with the capacity to be imperial.
In particular, increases in the level of trade tends to increase the scale of states—including of empires—as trade gives access to resources from outside your territory, enables greater specialisation inside your territory (so Smithian growth in production) and can be fostered by providing protection, other public goods and transport networks.1 For instance, as pastoralists were also traders, the creation of the Scythian tribal confederation—the first substantive steppe polity—led to increases in the size of empires based around the Fertile Crescent, culminating in the first mega-empire—larger than five million square kilometres—the Persian Empire. Similarly, given the need for China to import horses (due to the lack of selenium in it soils) and trading silk to buy them, a unified China generating more trade—and so revenue therefrom—tended to be matched by empires encompassing more of the taxable territory across Eurasia. The Qin-Han (221BC-220) unification coincides with the rise of the Roman, Parthian (247BC-224) and Kushan (c.30-c.375) empires.2 The Sui-Tang (581-902) unification coincides with the rise of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates (632-750).3 The partial—but increasingly commercial—Song unification (960-1127) coincides with the rise of the Seljuk Empire (1037-1194). The Yuan-Ming-Qing (1271-1912) unification coincides with the rise of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922).
Source, Turchin 2009.
Until the C20th, any economic or social arrangements that fostered the capacity and resources for states to operate at scale led to empire. The more such capacity expanded, the larger empires tended to be. For instance, the dramatic fall in transport and communication costs from the 1820s onwards—with the invention of steamships and railways—led to huge increases in trade and to European maritime empires reaching their peak extent outside the Americas.
As empires tend to encourage trade through more extensive provision of protection to increase their revenues, this creates both upward and downward spirals between trade and empire.
States come in two basic forms (1) authoritarian, based on ruler and subjects; and (2) associational, based on deliberative assemblies and citizens. Some states have mixes of these forms.
Until the development of the representative principle, associational states—which occurred in many civilisations (e.g. ancient India, Mesoamerica)—could not successfully scale up, so tended to be overwhelmed by authoritarian states, that could and did scale up. Rome’s willingness to expand who could be a citizen was, at best, a partial exception to this pattern, given the Roman Republic’s collapse into rule by emperors.
We cognitively model not facts but significance to us, so what we can grasp, especially what is vivid.
Culture is the social transmission of norms, skills, connections, symbolic markers and rituals, cognitive framings and life-strategies. Such transmission can be down family lines; by the example of other adults; or by the example of peers or other interaction groups.
Culture is an emergent phenomena, mobilising various evolved mechanisms.
Culture is a “bottom-up”, socially permeable, if persistent and interactive, phenomenon that also involves such things as shared narratives.
Culture is not some all-encompassing, top-down, unitary thing despite the power of shared cognitive framings in generating robust, shared expectations.
Nevertheless, the persistence of culture generates much of its value, by generating robust, shared patterns of expectations.
Myth operates as compressed memory, providing stories helping to
build and sustain shared expectations, references and cognitive framings.
Expressing myths in epic poetry operates as an effective oral transmission mechanism, since poetic metre provides an error correction device: breaking the rhythm and/or the rhyme (depending on how a language works) reveals an error. The Vedas, the Homeric and Vedic epics, could thus be transmitted across centuries orally.
Since institutions are structures of rules and norms, a polity needs to have a strong civic culture to have robust institutional norms and so robust institutions. Normative decay or collapse often precedes regime, or even polity, collapse.
How many people come into a society, at what rate, in what size groups, with what cognitive framings, inevitably affects the social equilibria that institutions are based on, and so how they operate. Thus, mass immigration can fracture a polity to the point of civil war: examples include the Texas Revolution (1835-6), the American Civil War (1861-5), the Jordanian Civil War (1970-1) and the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90).
The definition of nation by Regino of Prum (d.915), based on Classical conceptions—Diversae nationes popularum interse discrepant genere moribus lingua legibus (the peoples of various nations differ by origin [ancestry], customs, languages and laws)—became the standard definition in medieval Europe and expresses why ethnicity, as a multi-dimensional structure for human interactions, has been a persistent factor in human affairs:
Via culture, ethnicity profoundly affects: (1) how extensive, and robust, shared expectations are; so (2) ease of communication and interaction; and (3) patterns of social connection, including marriage and friendship networks. Religion can operate similarly, especially regarding (3).
Modern sub-cultures indicate how much cultural identification can be chosen. The more complex and immersive the culture, the more difficult it can be to adopt. Nevertheless, the permeability of human social groups—including cultural groups—is a major factor in human social selection.
Serious adoption of a new culture usually takes time and operates across modes of social interaction, such as religion, kinship arrangements, dress, epic narratives, songs, etc.
Different cultures generate different patterns of individual and social calculations, different cognitive framings and so different normative social-scapes, social signals and patterns of expectations.
Precisely because we cognitively model significance not fact, people from different cultures, religions, ideologies will behave differently in the same circumstances because the cognitive significance differs, so the operational incentive structures differ.
Precisely because we human cognitively model significance to us, we persistently fail to understand how much other people can have very different perspectives. Even when we are so aware, folk often assume the rival perspective is a reverse of their own, which is just another way of imposing our cognitive framing on others. Thus, folk on the left focused on equality, and liberals focused on liberty/autonomy, regularly misread conservative focus on order.
Recent scholarship has identified culture, along with institutions, as very important factors in long-term economic growth. In particular, formally similar or identical institutions can operate very differently in different cultures due to differences in cognitive framings, norms and expectations.
The way social media has undermined group attention has had a polarising, therefore socially corrosive, effect on modern polities. This is especially as social media is very effective at upscaling relational aggression.
Social media has also greatly complicated peer group interactions, as these can become both more invisible to parents, operate in potentially emotionally intense “slivers” of human interaction—so without all the physical cues we have evolved and learnt to notice—and be highly deceptive, since people can present quite false online personas.
Online interactions are para-social rather than social. Thus, by not transmitting the signs of emotional commitment and affinity that are important to female sexuality, dating apps greatly increase hypergamous choices by their female users. Like all effects with some genetic base, female hypergamy is very much mediated by social and informational interactions.
The dramatic expansion in our access and use of energy (aka the Industrial Revolution aka the Great Enrichment) since the development of steamships and railways in the 1820s has meant falling transport, communication and production costs. It created mass globalisation—that is, markets that extend across polities.
Dwellings created households as consumption and production units. Even government became centred on royal and imperial households.
Vassalage and fiefs represented government by distributed households.
The harnessing of cheaper and cheaper energy for transport and production meant that production moved en masse out of the households, which became consumption units.
Mass production—moving production out of households—coupled with falling communication and transport costs, generated mass politics. Thus, while national feeling goes make centuries, even millennia—Old Kingdom Egypt was the first nation-state, with a very clear sense of who was, and was not, Egyptian while from 928 onward the English kings of the Houses of Wessex, Godwin, Normandy, Blois, and the first two Plantagenets proclaimed themselves King of the English (Rex Anglorum) rather than King of England (Rex Anglie)—nationalism as mass politics is largely a product of the energy breakthrough.
Urban polities with deliberative assemblies generated precursors to modern mass politics, both because of population concentration and because urban centres have forms of factory production—production outside the household—going back millennia.
Mass production made it easier for states to tax economic activity, as factories and firms became tax extraction points. The previous dominance of taxes on land and trade for state revenue became eclipsed by income taxes on labour and capital.
Mass production raised the value of production and exchange—so labour and capital—for state revenue while lessening the importance of territory (i.e., land). That shifted the advantage towards the commercial (increase trade) states of the maritime order over the continental anarchy (grab territory) states.
Mass production and mass communication increased the importance of shared language for both mass political action and for coordination across ever larger ambits of state action, including discouraging exit of labour to different language (and cultural) groups.
The more revenue (and military capacity) relies on labour (including its potential mobilisation), the more creating a sense of shared identity—typically based on shared language and culture—is an advantage to a state, both for internal coordination and for retaining taxpayers.
These shifts undermined empire by raising its costs, lessening its benefits and generating increased capacity and motivation to exit empires. As Henry Kissinger commented: It would have occurred to no one in the eighteenth century that the legitimacy of a state depended on linguistic unity. It was inconceivable to the makers of the Versailles settlement that there might be any other basis for legitimate rule. Whereas the C19th naval hegemon—Great Britain—relied on the largest empire in history to support its naval hegemony, the post-1945 naval hegemon—the US—relies on the largest alliance network in history to do so.
Regarding imperial calculations, administrative elites came to have far better career prospects from internal colonisation of their own societies—via the expanding welfare states—or “vertical” colonisation—via expanding international bodies—than the “horizontal” territorial colonisation of traditional empires. The EU (and its precursors) has been a mechanism for replacing the administrative opportunities of territorial or maritime empire with those of transnational administration. The “ever closer union” of the EU is a transnational colonising enterprise.
As the administrative classes expanded, they become more socially imperial in their own societies, using mass immigration to balkanise the demos and delegitimise local culture and heritage. After the collapse of the Soviet Union decreased fears that the working class might defect to a rival ideology, or that they might be needed to be mobilised to meet an existential threat, a wider pattern of elite contempt within Western countries for the heritage and other attachments of their demos developed. There are few more colonial enterprises than “decolonising the curriculum”, whereby a self-righteous elite condemns the heritage of the “legacy” population and demands it be replaced by its superior offerings.
In a world of low and falling communication and transport costs, the interests of capital increasingly favour movement of factors of production—including labour—across borders. Careful comparison of economic performances by different countries show that the alleged wider economic (and even more social) benefits of such movement of labour, and even of capital, are regularly over-sold.
Cheap energy, interacting with technological change, to generate falling transport, communication and production costs, means increasingly efficient replacement of what was done within households (individually or via local networks) while raising the cost of children—especially for women, who have a much wider range of possibilities the more education and other social possibilities they have—and increasing urbanisation. This combination increasingly eliminates the large family “tail” needed for positive fertility. This is even more so when the improved educational and income opportunities of women have the effect of reducing the pool of marriageable men.
As human niches expand from cheap energy generating mass prosperity, social factors become less constraining, resulting in innate tendencies manifesting more strongly, including cognitive differences between men and women.
As transactions generate both commercial and tax revenue, commerce extending the range and size of markets, and state programs and services being provided on a transactional basis, all favour promoting transactions over connections—such as providing public housing on the basis of need that ignores patterns of local social connections.
Our capacity for self-deception makes it easier for socially-negative incentives to operate, especially when there are networks of people with a shared interest in the appropriate rationalisations and not-noticings.
That much of the welfare state apparat gains increased access to resources if social pathologies increase has a socially corrosive effect. For example, public health gains more resources the more metabolically unhealthy the population becomes; NGOs and government departments paid to service the homeless get more resources the more homeless people there are; those paid to service the disabled get more resources the more people are defined as disabled; those paid to oppose discrimination get more resources the more things are defined as discriminatory; and so on.
Moral project public policy is inherently socially imperial, by actively promoting concept and mission creep while using its proclaimed good (moral) intentions to frustrate critical examination and accountability.
The replacement of connections with transactions increasingly forces younger generations to purchase benefits that were previously provided by connections and more robust social commons. This has an impoverishing effect across the generations in terms of human flourishing, an effect that is masked by treating the exchange value of transactions being measurable as making them more valuable than benefits from social connections and social commons that do not so register. Hence: The young are told they are richer, and in the currency of flat-screen televisions they are. But the goods that constitute a life — house, spouse, children, good school, good neighbors — have inflated so far beyond wages that the ordinary life path of 1965 now requires an extraordinary income. “GDP goes up” is used to deflect attention from more direct considerations of human flourishing and social resilience.
As we humans are adapted to connections first and transactions a distant second, such shifts away from households and connections to transactions increasingly disconnects measurable transactions (e.g. GDP) from human well-being.
Various religious communities reject or limit such seductive efficiencies and so can maintain the inter-generational resilience of positive fertility. Congregations in particular provide potentially robust sets of connections.

The next post in this series examines how the failure to accept the constraint that everything social is emergent from the biological means that much of social “science” is not, in fact, science.

References

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In his original article, Friedman argues that wider control of trade routes allows more effective taxation by larger states. Looking at evidence from, for example, Roman tax revenue, it is clear that increased specialisation—increasing tax revenue from land revenue—and the capacity of public goods provision to increase trade, are much more important in trade increasing state revenue faster than administrative costs rise, and so increasing the size of states.

The collapse of Roman silver exports due to massive debasement of its coinage (likely due to collapse in silver mining) hugely weakened the Roman-Indian trading system and coincides with the collapse and/or shrinkage of dynasties, empires and states across Eurasia. The Crisis of the Third Century was not just Roman. Indeed, the continued control of the Mediterranean trade routes gave the Empire greater resilience than other polities. Conversely, the later Vandal conquest of the Maghreb (435) fatally undermined the revenue viability of the Western Roman Empire.

The extremely disruptive An Lushan rebellion (755-763) and its aftermath coincides with the shrinkage of the Abbasid Caliphate, which accelerates after the collapse of the Tang dynasty. The Abbasids even sent cavalry to help the Tang dynasty put the rebellion down.

Imperial demographic booms and social order busts (plus contemporary resonances)

Lorenzo Warby — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:19:16 GMT

The first post in the series discussed the pitfalls of evolutionary reasoning and advanced 42 propositions about the development of human tool use, cooperation and mating patterns. The second post advances a further 78 propositions on use of fire, norms, language, prestige, propriety, diet, social aggression, male/female differences, religion, and murdering our way to niceness. This third post is an interlude on why niches matter, even in complex societies, and how this throws light on contemporary social and political patterns.

About niches

Natural selection proceeds by competition between genetic lineages over the available niches members of those lineages can occupy. The more resources available to sustain such niches, the more niches there can be, in number and type. Tropical jungles team with life, deserts don’t.

One of the striking things about humans is our ability to generate new niches, and to move between them, due to our technology and cognitive plasticity. At a dozen or so localities within five or six regions around the world, populations moved from occupying foraging niches to creating and occupying farming niches.

Source.

Foragers started the opening up of the steppes for human use by domesticating horses—along with dogs and reindeer, the only animals domesticated by foragers. Adding axles to wheels meant wagons, which enabled animal herders (i.e., pastoralists) to wander, with their herds, across the steppes. It later also meant chariots, which made them very dangerous to other groups.

Source. Mesoamerica was the only region with cities without a large domesticated herbivore. Sacrificing people to the gods and then eating the sacrifices provided the elite with a source of animal protein.

Later still, the invention of the recurve bow meant that horse archers could shoot as far and with as much power as people on chariots or foot, while being much more effective raiders. Massed horse archers created the basis for steppe empires, starting with the Scythians.

Both farming and pastoralism dramatically increased the number of human niches compared to foraging. But having children does not automatically create niches for them. As in all species, human lineages compete for the available niches.

Males in particular compete for marriage/mating opportunities. One of the things polygyny does is intensify such intra-male competition, as a marriage does not take a male out of the ongoing competition but does remove their wife from the marriage market.

Polygyny tends to distribute women up the social scale, leaving men at the bottom without marriage prospects within the group. Thus, insisting on single-spouse marriage helps social cohesion within a group or society.

Single-spouse marriage also creates partnership marriages, where the wife could—and regularly did—deputise for her husband in his absence. Having a wife deputise for her husband in a polygynous household where wives (and concubines) were competing for the prospects for their children was a recipe for disaster.

Elite polygyny in Chinese society generated a non-breeding male underclass. It also helped generate the outlaws, rebellious sects and peasant revolts that are such a feature of Chinese history. In our own time, Gulf state polygyny helps generate recruits for jihadism in poorer Arab countries.

Polygyny plus horse archery, or boats, is a great way to create a raiding culture, on the basis of “those people over there have women, steal theirs” and “wealth raises my status and so my marriage prospects”. Monasticism, by contrast, can be a way of “soaking up” excess males (and corralling the non-normies).

The Norse were polygynous polytheists at the start of the Viking age. Wikimedia commons.

A key feature of Middle Eastern history is that areas of farming and pastoralist niches are geographically interwoven, to the extent that people have regularly moved between the two. There was thus a social selection advantage in being able to unite people across those ecological divides: something monotheism, with its unified moral, ritual and doctrinal framing, did very well. Hence the region is the source for all the major monotheisms.

Source.

Since the C7th Arab break-out, the region has been dominated by the monotheism that sanctified the Arabian pastoralist synthesis: polygyny, patrilineal kin-groups, raiding and enslaving non-believing outsiders (including taking their women), law based on revelation and high levels of cousin marriage.

Source.

Prior to that, the Iranian plateau had been dominated for over a millennia by the proto-monotheism of Zoroastrianism and the lands westward had been dominated for around three centuries by the monotheism that sanctified the Roman farming synthesis—single-spouse marriage, law as a human creation, no consanguineous marriage, female consent for marriage, individual wills coupled with testamentary freedom, suppression of kin-groups—while also anathematising sex outside marriage.

Rivers provide fertile soil, animal and plant resources, so could support relatively dense human forager populations and even denser farming populations. This meant that early city-building cultures typically arose in river valleys. Plant-eating, river-valley farmers working in irrigated fields full of pathogens and parasites were then periodically conquered by meat-eating pastoralists.

Source. A cline is a measurable gradient in a single characteristic (or biological trait) of a species across its geographical range.

The massive expansion out of the Pontic steppes by the Yamnaya that led to half the world speaking Indo-European languages as their first, or a second, language was a dramatic example, but so were the histories of the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges and Yellow river valleys: all of which were in range of pastoralists, whether from North Africa, Arabia, nearby uplands such as the Zagros mountains, or the steppes.

The Mekong did not so suffer—no pastoralists within range. On the contrary, the upland horticulturalists suffered regular slaving raids from the riverine states.

The farmers regarded pastoralists as raiding, thieving, woman-stealing, raping, murderous, human pests. The pastoralists regarded farmers as weaklings who could not defend their own. In accordance with stereotype accuracy, they were both correct.

Georges Rochegrosse, ‘Attila et les Huns’. Roman villa in Gaul sacked by the hordes of Attila the Hun. Wikimedia commons.

The demographics of imperial success leading to imperial failure

The Chinese dynastic cycle was also driven by constraints on the number of niches. A founder establishes a dynasty, unifying the Han heartland. This brings peace. Farming production and trade, so resources, increases. The population expands because more niches are generated.

Eventually, the farming population begins to reach the limits of sustainable farming niches, given the existing technology. The farming niches shrink in size, making taxes more onerous. Excess population is squeezed out of farming niches, into banditry.

Putting that in more conventional economic terms, food prices rise as population increases faster than production. The return to labour thus falls, while those to land (rents) and capital (interest) rise. As the costs of land and capital rise—and distress increases—the concentration of ownership of both land and capital is likely to increase, further increasing inequality. Material stress—including the sharpening of status differentiations—makes family formation harder and violence a more attractive strategy.

Given elite polygyny, the aspiring-elite population increases faster than do elite niches. Increased contestation over resources corrodes norms, allowing bureaucratic pathologies to worsen. (This is especially so if there is no character test among the elite, such as the duel of honour.)

Disappointed elite aspirants form a counter-elite and organise the increasingly numerous outlaws and desperate peasants in large-scale revolts, often via religious sects. The Taiping Rebellion is an extreme manifestation of this repeated pattern: one reason Chinese political culture is so obsessed with order and harmony is when order breaks down, millions die.

At some stage, the dynasty is overwhelmed and collapses; war, disorder and disease massively culls the population, and the cycle begins again.

Historical modelling suggests that normative cohesion—what the pioneer of systematic social analysis Ibn Khaldun called asabiyya—was weakest within Chinese polities when population pressure was most intense and strongest when it was least intense. The balance of external threat and internal tensions affecting normative cohesion is a recurring pattern in human affairs.

Norms evolved to generate more robust common expectations, enabling higher levels of cooperation. Of course a decline—or, worse, collapse—in normative cohesion within societies and polities is bad for human cooperation and flourishing (and the polity).

We can see, for example, the collapse of the Soviet Union—so the removal of an external threat and of the concern within Western elites that it might be necessary to mobilise their own working class to deal with an existential threat—has been succeeded by increasingly polarised Western politics, including Western elites becoming increasingly hostile to (indeed, contemptuous of) the interests and concerns of their own working classes.

This assault on working class interests and concerns includes trade policies that off-shored manufacturing; technology that hollowed out local manufacturing employment; mass immigration that broke up working-class communities, and so their locality-based social networks, while generating a fractured demos; denigration of the local majority’s cultural heritage, often using immigration as an excuse to do so; morally grandstanding debauching of beloved entertainment franchises; housing policies that drove up rents and house price by restricting supply and driving up demand through mass immigration; education, policing and prosecution policies that put the local working class as the lowest priority; using metastasising linguistic taboos to—via moral abuse, cancel culture and outright censorship—block and de-legitimise working class speech as unacceptable morally vulgar; plus a general shift to non-electoral—often transnational—institutional policy-making that by-passes working class votes. Quantitative easing, by inflating asset prices, increased the experiential and perspective gap between elites and workers.

When working class voters—in reaction to all this—started voting national populist, this became an excuse for another wave of moral abuse and de-legitimisation. Ibn Khaldun was not wrong to note that normative cohesion (aka asabiyya) within a polity waxes and wanes, and this matters.

Versions of the cycle of the creation of domestic order generating population growth that then creates both elite and popular pressures on social order have afflicted polities since states—and especially empires—began. While pre-1820s economic history did generate various economic “efflorescences”—periods of growing living standards—these never lasted because the technological take-off required to break out of the Malthusian constraints did not happen.

Until, of course, it did: in Britain, in what we call the Industrial Revolution. Britain became the first country to adopt learning-by-experimentation at scale. The commercialised technological breakthroughs by jobbing artisans enabled ever greater use of energy to create more, more varied, and larger, human niches.

Crucially, no elite coalition vetoed this take-off.

A classic example of technological/economic take-off being vetoed by an elite coalition is the Ottoman Empire’s ban from the C15th to early C18th of the use of the printing press by Muslims: a ban that was not fully lifted until the C19th. The use that Christian Europe made of the printing press from 1440 to 1830—uses that Islam eschewed—explains much of the very different trajectories in the adjacent civilisations over that time.

‘Net Zero’ and its equivalents—such as denuclearisation—represent contemporary elite coalitions vetoing economic advance, worsening contestation over resources and thereby destabilising the existing political Party system. This is especially so when constraining the supply of housing, while using mass immigration to drive up the demand, thereby increasing rents and house prices, turns into a new way to have increasing population/land ratios put downward pressure on the size of niches.

Source.

Cheap energy was the escape from the Malthusian constraints. Turning against it is not a path for human flourishing.

Universities that massively overproduce elite aspirants, while generating elite status games systematically hostile to human flourishing—due to being based on systematically false claims about humans, and human social dynamics, plus dubious ones about our wider environment—are not a good civilisational prospect.

So—having seen why niches matter in human history—the next post resumes the propositions about basic features of humans and human sociality, focusing on the rise of states, culture, cognitive dimorphism, and mass production.