The issue with that idea is that prehistoric societies, which were the norm for well over a hundred thousand years, were a lot more egalitarian than current society, and that kind of huge separation between wealthy and poor simply didn't exist. It's not that people couldn't be rich, because technically speaking the means existed all along, I believe it has more to do with the fact that ancient societies actually had an abundance of resources and had no need to compete with each other, at least within their own community. (War did exist, but was also very different.) And we're not talking about a savage group of a few dozen folks, some settlements could house thousands while still being hardly autocratic by today's definition.

Mafias as you've said have to do very different things to survive, so of course their configuration is something else entirely. But looking at current society as a means to understand human nature is a very flawed approach as we've had a few thousand years of really wild stuff.


source: just trust me dude

>>1196
Having an abundance of resources is because tropical areas provide a good climate for that,and it's the exact reason why these communities never evolved past small tribe structures.
As long as the climate causes a lack of resources, the competition and social structure like the one of mafia will naturally form. The human nature is always there, but needs the right situation for it to show.

>>1197
I don't believe the artic circle to be tropical. Lack of resources refers to something far below today's luxurious standards.
"Evolve" is tricky because societies without a state existed alongside ones that did have it, and lemme tell ya they sure as hell were no slouches in any sense of the word.
And seriously, they are several times older than writing, art is at the very least 50k years old and that's a very complex thing, they faced their fair share of actually cataclysmic events but endured. Human nature would've taken a very long time to become a human feature.

>>1198
Lack of resources is inherently tied to a large population compared to the available resources which is the result of more resources in an earlier time period.
Tropical and arctic circle both have near constant environment over time compared to the regions with four seasons. For agricultural communities the lack of resources can be easily caused by a year with less rain.

>>1196
It's known that they were better fed on average but they had fewer resources outside of food as well, after all you cant have bronze artefacts if you can't work bronze. A lack of such artefacts and the prehistoric nature in general does make it harder to tell just how egalitarian or not they were but once we reach the age where they have those resources we reach the age where burial sites of important people with lots of them are found, indicating that they were not so egalitarian. But even so, even in non-metal working societies, there is almost always a chief or something similar, we see that in the anthropological record all the time. And yes war existed and it was far worse and far more brutal with cannibalism being the norm.

>>1197
There are plenty of civilizations that have gone beyond the tribal age in tropical areas and plenty that have stayed in the tribal stage outside of it. I don't think it has that much to do with it and could even be argued against, an abundance of food generally pushes society forwards not backwards as people find it easier to do things other than search for it. Tropical tribes tend to be less well fed than our own prehistoric ancestors as well.

I think autocracy is an emergent feature of “the societal marketplace”.
Just as an example, consider how a primitive person would have to get their own food and protect their food and themselves. At some point a person is able to produce so much food that these two roles could be separated and one person would be able to collect enough food for themselves and for another person who is able to protect both persons. This is just basic trading between persons that are specialized. “Ruling” is also a good that is produced, so at some point people began trading their food for some person’s “ruling”.
There exist some markets, like those for utilities, that naturally form monopolies or oligopolies. In some combinations of societal size, complexity, and level of technology, I believe “ruling” is one of those monopolizing markets. As such you have autocracies form, from a “ruling” producer monopolizing the “ruling” market.

Autocracies as they exist now wouldn't have been possible in the early days. Back then, a leader would've had a pretty limited set of tools to enforce his authority (nothing even a fraction as powerful as modern weaponry existed until thousands of years later), and there would've been a much smaller gap between the haves and the have-nots. Who got into a position of power was mostly decided based on who people were willing to obey. If a ruler was unpopular enough, it would've been relatively easy for the pack to turn on him and make someone else their leader.

Looking in the opposite direction, it's a common trope that if humanity is to spread out amongst the stars, that feudalism might take hold once again due to the herculean task of a democracy existing with as long as it might take to travel from planet to planet. I think this sort of thought also is probably revealing; autocracy and democracy may be products of logistics and proximity. That is, feudal systems might be more prone to springing up when contact between other settlements isn't feasible. In this way, maybe it makes more sense for feudal systems to be a local phenomena and democracies a more "national" one. This makes a lot of sense to me because it gives some context into why someone might voluntarily become a serf; if you can already not practically leave, and being a freedman is of no benefit, then being tied to your land is of no real detriment since you would still be tied to the land had you been a freedman since the expense and uncertainty of travel would be unthinkable, especially when in those eras there was no standardization of language so you may very well not even be able to converse with people even a town over were you to abandon the place of your birth.

>>1216
I don't think I have ever seen Feudalism in Sci-fi. It's common to have an empire but not Feudalism. That's fairly simple to see why they do it as well, if you want a faction to control large portions of the galaxy it kind of has to be an empire, either that or tied to a special ideology. Otherwise each planet would want to become independent and being a democracy you would not really be able to stop it.

Did someone say guns?

>>1238
I wouldn't want to use that for stabbing, shooting, or even punching.

you know you're on kissu too much when just the first sentence makes you think "hey is this a repost?"