No offense taken. But I am a bit worries sometimes about the hostility towards people asking questions.
Tbh. So far I mostly read about western, Arab and Asian civilizations and there really aren’t many examples when you go bigger in size of small tribal living. In my opinion, tribal life is a lot different and naturally more non hierarchial because mostly everybody knows everyone and if you act too selfish you’ll be shunned. From what I read it becomes problematic as soon as the civ reaches a high number of people. Then they tended to get expansionist and hierarchial which resulted in either slaves or prisoners of war with lower social status or some kind of caste system.
I will read into the dawn of everything and the other link you provided on the other thread and am happy for more fodder. I will be traveling through south America soon and wanna read up upon their ancient history anyway.
Thanks for taking the time to look it up and edit!
I don’t understand why you feel the need to be hostile and make this about white men. This is about civilization theory.
If your point was that white civilizations made the world into the mess it is right now, I wholeheartedly agree with you. It is however not the point of my inquiry. I was generally curious about bigger societies that managed to stay relatively non hierarchial which would result in an equal share of ressources (what this whole thread was about) From what I have read, all bigger “successful” civs developed a strong hierarchy which resulted in a big wealth gap as well and/or built their empire through expansion and as a result slaves and POW who granted them free labour to built their infrastructure. Some examples:
Egypt (not white) China (not white) Khmer (not white) Japan (not white) Osman empire (not white) Persian (not white) Babylon (not white) India (not white)
Imo indigenous tribes are not helpful in this discussion because I am interested in examples or solutions for big societies and tribal structures are very different because people usually all know each other over 1 or two axis which strongly discouraged selfish behavior (it got you shunned).
I am very interested in African and ancient American civilizations but there is not a lot of unbiased literature out there (To my knowledge - which is why I asked for more info)