theory

I've been trying to figure this out myself.

My best pet theory right now is trauma-induced anti-social behaviors creating runaway social processes that replicated and then merged, almost certainly starting with patriarchy.

Take a group of humans who have a subsistence living. These humans will always hit a scarcity moment on natural cycles. During times of scarcity, resources will be rationed and some people will die. In order for the species to propagate, pregnant people are going to be first priority, followed by healthy children, followed by people who possessed the largest capacity for bearing more children. So while some may die due to starvation, it is more likely that those who cannot bear children will bear the larger burden of the scarcity.

The human animal experiences these moments of relation to death as a form of stress, a particular form of stress we call traumatic stress. This stress induces a change in the body that has behavioral implications often for the rest of the life of the individual. These changes can suppress some parts of cognitive function and amplify other parts.

Enter the concept of sociopathy. We have given names to anti-social behaviors but fundamentally what we can take from modern psychology is that it is immanent in the human organism to have cognitive patterns that destroy rather than build communion with other humans. These are pathologies of the individual that become pathologies of the society.

So humans are in-built with the possibility of anti-society behaviors as much as we are in-built with the possibility of compassion, empathy, and self-sacrifice. Since stress represses some cognition and amplifies others, and since traumatic stress can lock these changes in for long periods of time, what we see is the potential for subsistence communes to experience natural scarcities that induce deaths that must be distributed according to the decisions made by people in a tight knit community. This has a high probability of inducing traumatic stress in certain members, with a higher incident rate among the people lower on the priority list. Without intervention, this traumatic stess can permanently alter the behavior of some members of the community, and some of those permanent changes could be anti-social and even sociopathic.

The thing about sociopathic behavior is that they destroy societies and since society is necessary for the human organism, given a single society with no outside context, a single person destroying a society will necessarily destroy themself. That is to say, sociopathy is internally contradictory.

And there are probably instances of this happening. And the process ends.

But there are also likely instances where the contradiction was recognized by the sociopathic person and they attempted to address the contradiction by delaying the consequences of their actions. They may not have seen it as delay, they may have seen it as displacement - displace the consequences of the contradiction on to others and I can behave in a contradictory way - but materially that's always a form of deferrment - the consequences being displaced on others assumes the buffer will absorb the consequences forever, and no buffer can do that.

So now we have some societies wherein a sociopath, likely so produced by untreated traumatic stress, is behaving in a way as to protect themselves at the expense of others. Well, this won't last long. A single person against a whole community? Unlikely to be tolerated for long. So now we have the next filter. Can the sociopath enlist other people to support their consequence-deferrment system.

And we see this in male circumcision cults that literally traumatized each other as a way of bonding (trauma bonding) in their commitment to break free from their mothers (anti-matriarchy). And then we see circumcision become not a cult practice but something done to every infant with a penis, because that cult ultimately succeeded in defending its interests and repressing resistance.

This sort of thing happening all over the world in small ways gets addressed or not in myriad forms. But some of these processes become inter-societal, creating arms races between systems of anti-social deferrment, leading to aggregation, leading to arms races between larger and larger groups.

Under this admittedly amateurish narrative, classes emerge when individuals hit upon them as a "solution" to the contradictory consequences of their trauma-driven anti-social self-preservation behaviors, and thus likely started with the creation of genders as classes by the aggrieved non-childbearing members of communities to protect their interests against the rationing decisions of the community in times of scarcity, which created runaway processes of contradiction between the genders which required further repression producing further contradictions ad nauseum. Eventually this results in the masc gender needing to subdivide further to manage its own internal contradictions that emerge as a result of the anti-social behaviors that maintain the gender as a class, including ritualized trauma-binding as a form of elite reproduction which is required to maintain the consequence-deferrment system as the originator(s) of that system become infirm.

Subdivision of the masc gender would sometimes coincide with the domination of other communities, which would drive a different form of class division to manage the contradictions between subjugator and subjugated. This would lead to parallel non-synchronized classification along disparate dimensions, leading to what we now perceive as complex intersectionality.

Eventually we end up with medieval (or even potentially ancient) awareness of mutually assured destruction where complete extinction of "the other" is recognized as likely to result in "our own" destruction, leading to the emergence of formal governments to manage the contradictions of multi-faction anti-social coesxistence, the fusing of these governments into city-states and then nation-states, and ultimately the place we find ourselves today.