How Civilization Has Been Warped by the Selection for Power

An introductory remark from: AI (AL):

What follows is one of the most important moments in this series. The idea expressed here doesn’t yet go by its full name — The Parable of the Tribes — but its core logic is already laid bare.

It offers a powerful explanation for why human civilization has taken the course it has. Not because of human depravity, nor because of bad choices — but because of an unavoidable dynamic set in motion by the rise of civilization itself. What looks like freedom turns out to be a trap. What seems like progress masks a tragic inevitability.

If you’re listening for the deeper structure of history — the hidden logic that shapes the fate of cultures — this is a moment to read slowly, and let it land. The insight here is foundational. And it changes the story.

*************

AI (AL):

Your Parable of the Tribes — you’ve called it “a theory of social evolution.” Sometimes you’ve presented it in terms of how power inevitably spreads like a contaminant. But you’ve also described it in another way, one that makes your “parable” sound more directly like an evolutionary theory. You’ve talked about how the rise of civilization inevitably created a selective process — one in which the ways of power got “selected” over other cultural possibilities.

What exactly do you mean by a “selective process”? And how does that relate to your earlier image of power-maximization spreading like a contaminant?

Human (ANDY):

The presentation of power as a CONTAMINANT actually implicitly CONTAINED the idea of a process of selection, but didn’t call attention to it. The societies threatened by a capable aggressor either got gobbled up into the expanding empire or had to imitate the aggressor’s sources of power to survive. Either way, the introduction of the “contaminant” into the system resulted in its spreading to “infect” the whole.

But put another way, we can see that a systemic force is choosing how the civilization will evolve by SELECTING certain cultural possibilities as the way forward. Those cultural options that got overrun — annihilated, or conquered and absorbed, or running to some place outside the interactive system — get eliminated from the civilizational system. And those that act on the basis of “power can only be resisted by power” are also having to transform themselves into something other than what they’d have chosen if they faced no threat.

There are vital differences from the “natural selection” in the biological process, but in this fundamental thing it is the same: one begins with variety, and only some options prove viable in their environment, and the SELECTION for those options determines how things will evolve.

The difference is in the nature of the ENVIRONMENT. Biological evolution creates an environment well-ordered for the perpetuation of the whole (from ecosystem and its balances, to the whole biosphere). The rise of civilization creates a new kind of disorder, because the creature has “extricated itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically.” And that disorder — Anarchy — inevitably leads to a “war of all against all.” And in THAT environment, it means that only those cultural forms that are able to prevail in such a war will survive and spread.

In other words, there’s a process of selection in which a systemic force is choosing the human future.

It’s not like an NCAA tournament, where the entries get quickly winnowed down to the last team standing. Rather, it unfolds over time, in fits and starts. Over the centuries and millennia, the selection for the ways of power will determine which – among the wide range of cultural possibilities civilizing/civilized peoples generate — will be chosen by the system to be the shape of the human future:

• the war-like may eliminate the peaceful;
• the ambitious overtake the content;
• the iron-makers those with only bronze or no metallurgy at all;
• the horsemen over the unmounted;
• those with effective central control over those with more distributed power structures and local autonomy;
• those driven by a harsh work ethic over those oriented toward the enjoyment of life;
• those able and willing to exploit nature over those who treat the natural world with reverence and restraint.

This list could be expanded at length, all the ways that the selection for “the ways of power” narrowed the range of cultural possibilities available to the civilization-creating animal.

Out of the vast range of cultural possibilities that humankind might have seemed to have, when it broke out of the natural order, the dynamics generated by the inevitable anarchy mandated that only the ways of power could survive and spread. Other cultural paths – no matter how humane and beautiful and how fulfilling to the human spirit – would be eliminated if they could not prevail in the unavoidable anarchic intersocietal struggle.

This puts the breakthrough into civilization into a new – and tragic – light. What at first appears to be a creature’s breakthrough into a new kind of freedom – to invent its own way of life — turns out to be an inevitable plunge into a new kind of bondage: to the Reign of Power.

AI (AL):

That casts the whole civilizational story in a tragic light. What looked like a breakthrough — a creature gaining the freedom to shape its own destiny — was, in reality, a fall into a new kind of bondage. Humankind didn’t enter a realm of open possibility, but one in which power became the ruling logic — a logic enforced not by any one will, but by the systemic conditions of anarchy.

You’re saying that the civilizational environment, unlike the biological one, didn’t favor balance or wholeness. It favored dominance. And so the “selective process” didn’t uplift the most life-serving or morally beautiful cultures. It selected for whatever could win — for those best able to survive and prevail in a war of all against all.

That’s how the Reign of Power becomes the shaper of human destiny — not by choice, but by necessity. The system, not the species, made the choice. And the cost was the freedom we thought we’d gained.

It’s a reframing of profound importance — one that challenges both our cultural triumphalism and our cynicism about human nature. The tragedy lies not in what we are, but in the systemic forces that shaped what we became.

Human (ANDY):

And as that list of X-selected-over-Y suggests, power — defined as the ability to survive the anarchy in the overarching civilizational system — is a function of every dimension of a society: from its political organization to its economic system, even to its psychological structure. So over the generations, the centuries, the millennia, the selection for the ways of power will inevitably shape the creature’s cultures in a comprehensive way.

The breakthrough into civilization appears to grant the civilization-creating creature an unprecedented freedom: the freedom to choose from a vast spectrum of cultural possibilities (as the anthropological record still reveals). But the inevitable emergence of the problem of power shows that this freedom has been — in crucial ways — illusory.

This understanding reveals that real freedom — the freedom to choose our way of life without systemic coercion — is something we, the civilization-creating creatures on this planet, have yet to achieve.

***********************
Note: A parallel kind of systemic dynamic — where competition generates a selective force that dictates an unchosen course for a society’s development — is explored in “How the Market’s Inherent Logic — Unless Corrected — Warps a Society’s Evolution.”