theory

We have the right idea about the physical. Like the idea that surplus production would start concentrating wealth

a lot of people alive right now really dont understand how much of a resource knowledge and knowledge production is.

because early on. early, EARLY on, the families producing surplus, the people who actually experienced gains in lifespan and power, were coalescing into local and then regional, then imperial governments? they were able to collect more knowledge and pass it down faster. Something as simple as figuring out how to identify better soil quality could become an edge.

We were as smart then as we are now, and we were way more sensate to the outside world on the whole, because our lives demanded it. Eventually somebody figures out how people work, having all this extra nutrition, and a larger knowledge base, was putting the people at the top of these early hierarchies, a few steps ahead of anybody else in most ways. This happens independently in many places. With different, messy, extremely human intellectual/material technologies, consistently

The first guy who figured out how to convince other people to fight for his stuff, also instantly created the social pretext for war and mass violence, and these are the contexts where figuring out how to get people to do labor that isn't just for them is being worked out more generally.

There were families and other organizations concentrating knowledge and using it to concentrate influence and power. With time the reasons why you would do this become more than strictly material. The complex contexts based on this need to get people to do stuff means you have to manage their thoughts, and figure out how to motivate people who may be relative strangers to perform labor for you. This creates a need for religion complex enough to be wielded by a state, (though I think the religious impulse is not rooted in this, i do think the impulse towards religion is actively manipulated and has been the entire time we've had it). These complex motives amount to delusions and bullshit most of the time, but it becomes culture.

As you move to these larger city-state social organizations, the basic form of the ruling class exists. It's here, and already for a very long time.

The basic relationship between : -motivating people at scale to do things for people other than themselves and their family -the desire to stay in power, to protect gains, to protect the amassed wealth and collective expression/being of the social order they're at the center of -the basic recognition of knowledge as a resource worth hoarding, hiding, etc.

is a relationship that causes this class to want to preserve itself. So it begins justifying its existence as an abstract idea, either through religious imperative, the promised rewards of conquest, the doling out of "sacred/secret" knowledge (usually the deets on how to manipulate people), or whatever.

"Steve is having to explain why he needs to be in charge, and he is unfortunately the motherfucker who realized you could imprint the structure of the society you want into expression of the culture of that society, so he pays artisans to write and tell the epic of Steve everywhere. We've got writing now too, shit, lets plaster this shit everywhere. The entire world is gonna know Steve was too smart to fuck the goddess of love and war."

the patterns that were established persist, and we never really have stepped out from the inertia of these initial social conditions. We're just living in some bizarre fractal mutant of those initial conditions.

families/etc. come and go. bloodlines (as a byway for knowledge transmission here) rise and fall, generations of this bullshit come and go, and because this basic structure is what we happened to "pull ourselves up" with, it echoes through the finite song of the human species from its start, and will to its end, unless one can make a conscious, concentrated effort to destroy it, the pattern will probably be around as long as we are as a species.

to be quite honest i think it'll carry on well past that too lol