Stability Versus “Progress”

The romanticization of non-industrial or Indigenous cultures often assumes stability where there may be only earlier-stage (civilizational) dynamics. How do we know they weren’t just earlier on the same trajectory we find ourselves?

I think some pre-civilizational or tribal groups may have been on a path toward scale and abstraction, had they continued to expand population, develop surplus, or centralize power. Not all small-scale societies are feedback-sensitive by virtue of size alone. Some were clearly stratifying, warring, or manipulating symbol in ways that hint at incipient feedback suppression. And, of course, some became empires later (e.g., early Mesopotamian groups, Olmecs, etc.).

But many cultures we know of had explicit mechanisms that prevented the civilizational arc. This is where the evidence gets stronger. They deliberately resisted complexity, centralization, and symbolic authority, not because they couldn’t develop them…they chose not to.

The !Kung (San people of the Kalahari) have rich oral traditions that ridicule arrogance, prevent hoarding, and maintain egalitarian relations through ritualized teasing and sharing.

Pacific Northwest tribes had complex seasonal systems with embedded limits on harvesting, enforced through taboo and storytelling.

The Inuit use humor, social cues, and distributed authority to manage conflict and maintain decentralized power, despite extreme environments.

James C. Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed” documents upland Southeast Asian groups who fled state formation intentionally, preserving social structures that avoided hierarchy.

Amazonian and Andean cultures often shaped their environments intelligently (terra preta, agroforestry) without triggering runaway scale or ecological collapse, suggesting long-term feedback awareness (connection).

These are groups with institutionalized feedback preservation…culture as ecosystem maintenance, not system expansion. What’s often identified as a failure to progress (toward the trainwreck we’re on) was an active refusal.

Some paths were clearly tried, then rejected. Archaeological evidence suggests that not all large-scale or symbol-rich societies escalated into collapse scenarios. Some collapsed gently or even walked back from the brink. The Hopewell culture in North America developed extensive trade and ritual networks, but later dispersed voluntarily, reverting to smaller, more localized systems. Catalhoyuk (in modern-day Turkey) was a large Neolithic settlement with no apparent hierarchy or centralized authority, sustained for over a millennium before dispersal. So the arc isn’t inevitable…it can plateau, regress, or reroute.

In other places, the arc was forcibly interrupted. Many societies that appear “early-stage” were in fact stabilized systems interrupted by colonization. Their lifeways weren’t primitive…they were ecologically coherent. What ended them was an external force that did not follow the same feedback rules. Guns, germs, capital, extraction, Christian mission, symbolic domination. We have to be careful not to conflate “didn’t scale” with “was about to scale.” For some cultures, collapse wasn’t an imminent endpoint…it was something that arrived on ships.

So, yeah, some groups were on the arc. But most actively resisted it through cultural structures that preserved feedback, suppressed hierarchy, and treated simulation as dangerous. Others collapsed gently, or dispersed consciously, not in chaos. And many were erased before their trajectory could be seen, by a system already deep in feedback severance.

The civilizational arc is hardly a natural law…it’s a pattern. And patterns can be interrupted, redirected, or refused. But only if the culture wants to stay in contact with reality.

But what allows some societies to stabilize? Is it internal design or external environmental limits? I think it’s both, but when stabilization succeeds, it’s the internal response to external limits that makes the difference.

We can think of external conditions as constraints and enablers. They shape the playing field, but they don’t determine the moves.

Environments that were abundant but not stockpiling-friendly (e.g. tropical forests, seasonal hunting zones) made it harder to hoard, centralize, or form coercive hierarchies. And without massive, storable grain surpluses (like wheat in Mesopotamia), there’s less incentive to control labor, enforce calendars, or invent gods who demand tithes. When nature feeds you just enough, but only if you listen to it…you stay in dialogue with it.

Mountainous, jungle, or arctic environments often prevent large-scale coordination, empire-building, or rapid trade expansion. These conditions inhibit external conquest and select for small-group adaptability over centralized control.

And where population density remained low for whatever reason (terrain, resources, cultural practices like long birth spacing), there was less pressure to intensify extraction or build coercive institutions. When there’s space to move, there’s space to stay sane.

But none of these conditions guarantee stability. They just don’t force instability. Many societies had varying degrees of access to abundance, mobility, or knowledge, that might look familiar to us…and still chose a path of restraint. Why? How?

Again, stability comes from institutionalizing restraint, feedback, and relational intelligence. It doesn’t come from being “primitive.”

For example, taboos can act as a form of ecological governance. Many Indigenous societies embedded strict taboos around hunting, fishing, harvesting, or even speaking certain names or stories out of season. These aren’t “superstitions”–they’re feedback-preserving rituals, tied to real ecological signals. “Don’t fish this river in spring” framed as a spiritual belief may sound religious…until you realize that’s when the salmon spawn.

Then we have the egalitarian social structures we see in most of these groups…something we have the hardest time wrapping our shrunken brains around. These were norms, myths, and practices that flattened power. Joking hierarchies, rotating leadership, gift economies. Leadership wasn’t rewarded with privilege but burdened with accountability. And prestige came from generosity, not control.

And we tend to equate the myths of these groups as some childish version of our own religions. But there’s a key difference. Their rituals and stories were anchored in reality. Rather than simulate the world through myth, many oral cultures used story to maintain contact with place, kin, and feedback. Myth was a mnemonic ecology, not a symbolic escape hatch.

Of course, the biological drive to seek advantage (assuming we accept that framing of it), is universal. This is where feedback-sensitive social sanctions come into play. Those who hoarded, abused, or disrupted balance were shamed, ridiculed, ostracized, or corrected…not pathologized, but realigned. Certainly not made president.

What we see here is an active design of cultures that chose feedback over fantasy, limits over linear growth, and relationships over domination. They weren’t “stuck in time.” They were anchored in reality. And I think that’s the only cultural achievement worth pursuing: stabilization. Progress, the way we define it, has an unmistakable entropic flavor. In fact, in a very real sense, what we call “progress” is entropy.