Your comment has thus inspired me to articulate these steps--starting with the change in our relationship with nature, and ending up with that tormenting problem of power from which it was inevitable from the outset that civilization, and civilized people, would suffer.
Breakthrough into re-arranging the ecosystem to meet human needs better, through domestication of plants and animals; -->
New-found open-ended possibilities for cultural innovations of all kinds, including an indefinite capacity for this new kind of society to expand without inherent limit; -->
Inevitable interactions among a cluster of such societies; -->
Those interactions being altogether unregulated, as these societies are no longer operating within the confines of any biologically order and there being no possibility of putting any overarching human-designed order into place; -->
An inevitable struggle for power, as the unregulated nature -- the anarchy -- of the overarching intersocietal system inevitable creates what Hobbes said of anarchy, "the war of all against all." -->
The combination of this inevitable struggle for power with open-ended possibilities for cultural innovation mean that the victors in the struggle for power represent not just themselves but a non-random sub-set of the wide-range of apparent possibilities for the future of human society; -->
That non-random subset will inevitably be those cultural forms that have succeeded in magnifying a society's power that's required to survive in that war of all against all -->
This problem of power-maximization means that what wins in the power struggle is less the particular societies that organize for power, than those particular cultural forms that are required by power-maximization;-->
It is therefore inevitable that the ways of power will be what win out over time in the human world, as all other ways of fashioning human cultural life -- regardless of how beautiful, if they confer upon a society weakness in the war of all against all -- will not remain viable choices for humankind. -->
This inevitability of "the selection for the ways of power" is what the "parable" in "the parable of the tribes" itself demonstrates: any effective power-maximizing entity in the interactive system acts like a contaminant that inevitably infects the whole. -->
The threat of an effective power-maximizer spreads the ways of power because the possible outcomes for those nearby who confront this one imperialist are limited to either being: 1) destroyed, or 2) defeated and absorbed into the conqueror's system, or 3) compelled to retreat to some inaccessible place, out of reach of the power that is threatening its neighbors, thus leaving its territory to be absorbed into the expanding power-system, or 4) driven -- in order to defend itself -- to organize itself to achieve sufficient power to beat back a powerful would-be conqueror. -->
The fourth option -- self-defense -- may look like a way to preserve one's own culture, but to resist power one must have power, and power is a function of a great many dimensions of a society. So the society that wants to defend itself must make cultural choices that provide sufficient power, and if the society that is threatening has magnified its own power with cultural innovations, self-defense against that threat will likely require imitation of the aggressor's power-enhancing ways. -->
All those four options, therefore, have one thing in common: with each outcome, the ways of power are spread further into the system of civilization. -->
The overall direction of the evolution of civilization is therefore a function of the anarchic nature of the situation into which we inadvertently stumbled, as a species. Given the breakthrough, all the rest follows, pretty much regardless of human nature. All it requires is creativity in generating cultural options, and resourcefulness in applying them to assure survival. -->
Our species should be seen not as this monstrous thing we have shown throughout the history of civilization, but rather as a creature trying as best it can to deal with an impossible situation.
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