The Social Organism outgrew the Fundamental Social Network
The most immediate response to this dilemma [the birth of agriculture] was authoritarian forms of governance with all the fixings… military classes, worker classes, slavery and oligarchy. A perfectly natural outcome. Specialized networks, forming networks of networks were required for such a complex social organism to function.
What may have begun as needed specialization by an even accidental decision-making group, with even the best of intentions (e.g. Plato’s philosopher kings), will tend to become self-reinforcing and isolated with it’s own internal loyalties and identifications related to the natural drives linked to their own personal associations and Dunbar’s Number.
Hence oligarchies are over time an unfortunately inevitable problem when society scales beyond natural human community size.
Designs for Representative Government have all been attempts to broaden the decision system beyond the closed networks that tend to form if not interrupted. They do this generally by introducing systems of rules and horizontal or distributed networks to counter-balance or interrupt hierarchical networks; e.g. Constitutions, Bills of Rights, Legislatures, Suffrage, etc.
But even these current representative systems are having their problems and authoritarianism is still a very strong contender. And oligarchy formation is a constant threat for both.
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