Bugger FB's prohibition of line breaks!

 The purpose of civilization is to increase the amount of wealth in the world. For the majority, this means more Life. On the 45° slope of an s-curve, the society as a whole gets used to this over the generations, and rising standards of living lead to rising expectations. The same problem can recur if people aren't better off each year than the last or they can't give their children more than they themselves started with. At the same time the society's economy is organized for rising standards and will undergo tensions when this isn't maintained. Doubt and anxiety creep back in.

Dyerism ought to offset these feelings of being ephemeral. Or a psychological adjustment to a steady-state economy can be made. If only people could consciously recall their previous lives, then they could experience slowdowns more philosophically without the fear of impending death. Even the symbolic termination of their way of life can put them in a condition of fight-or-flight. This is what happened to the Puritans and made them so mean and hateful.

In Indian Civilization reincarnation didn’t make hardship pleasant, but it did make it legible—and that distinction is everything. The doctrine didn’t function as a narcotic; it functioned as a cosmic accounting system that let suffering appear neither random nor final. What it offered was not resignation but continuity, a way to situate one lifetime’s miseries inside a multi‑life arc of meaning. Hindu thought treats the atman as eternal and the body as a temporary vessel. Because the soul continues beyond death, hardship in this life is not the ultimate verdict on a person’s worth or destiny.

But not enough to prevent resistance, reform, or social change. People still rebelled, protested, and reinterpreted the doctrine itself. While reincarnation helped individuals make sense of suffering, it did not prevent peasant revolts, bhakti movements rejecting caste fatalism, reformers challenging social inequality, political mobilization against colonial rule (the invasion stage undergone by a civilization in the throes of institutional failure - including the imposition of a universal state by the Mughals).

Reincarnation provided a framework, not a universal sedative. Hardship should be the tension that strengthens the thread. In the global flourishing stage, the threat of institutional entropy must be addressed.

Civilizations don’t “accidentally” become hierarchical. Hierarchy is what happens when certain structural pressures go unanswered. So the real question isn’t how to avoid hierarchy, but how to neutralize the forces that reliably generate it. And those forces are astonishingly consistent across history. What follows is a clear, grounded synthesis—no mystification, no romanticism—just the mechanics.

1. You can’t eliminate hierarchy, but you can prevent its hardening. Every large-scale society develops functional differentiation: some people coordinate irrigation, some store grain, some adjudicate disputes.

That’s not hierarchy; that’s specialization. Hierarchy emerges when specialization becomes asymmetric control—when one role gains:

monopoly on information

monopoly on coercion

monopoly on surplus

So the goal isn’t “no hierarchy.”

It’s no monopolies.

2. The only civilizations that resisted hierarchy did so through design, not virtue. Historical examples—rare but real—show patterns:

A. Polycentric power (many centers, none supreme)

Ancient Greek poleis

Medieval European free cities

The Iroquois Confederacy

Swarm-like trading networks (Phoenicians, Swahili coast)

These systems prevented any one node from capturing the whole.

B. Rotating or recallable leadership

Some Andean ayllu systems

Venetian republic (doge constrained by councils)

Certain Buddhist monastic orders

Rotation breaks the “stickiness” of power.

C. Transparency of surplus

When everyone knows who produces what and who stores what, extraction becomes difficult.

This is why early agrarian states hid grain records.

D. Ritualized leveling

Potlatch

Monastic vows of poverty

Public feasting economies

These aren’t quaint customs—they’re anti-hoarding technologies.

3. The four forces that always generate hierarchy

If a civilization wants to avoid hierarchization, it must counteract these four:

1. Surplus concentration. This is the biggie. Once surplus pools in one place, someone will guard it, then control it.

Countermeasure:  

Distributed storage, federated granaries, local control of production.

2. Information asymmetry. If only a few can read, count, or record, they become indispensable.

Countermeasure:  

Universal literacy, open ledgers, transparent accounting.

3. Coercive specialization. A professional warrior class becomes a political class.

Countermeasure:  

Militia models, rotation of defense duties, no standing armies.

4. Administrative ossification

Bureaucracies become self-reproducing.

Countermeasure:  

Term limits, sunset clauses, periodic institutional “burning seasons.”

4. The paradox: scale creates hierarchy unless you build friction into the system. Large systems drift toward hierarchy because:

coordination requires information

information centralizes

centralization creates leverage

leverage becomes authority

So the only way to avoid hierarchy at scale is to slow down the centralizing drift.

Examples of friction:

federated councils instead of national parliaments

local veto rights

mandatory decentralization of archives

rotating capitals

limits on organization size (no mega-corporations, no mega-agencies)

These are not utopian—they’re engineering constraints.

5. The deepest truth: hierarchy is a thermodynamic gradient. Wherever energy, information, or surplus flows unevenly, hierarchy forms.

To avoid it, you must:

flatten flows

diversify nodes

prevent capture

ritualize redistribution

keep institutions perishable

Civilizations that do this don’t become egalitarian paradises. They become self-leveling organisms.