Summary - understanding social complexity

I want to summarise the points I have been making in the last half dozen posts.

When we look around the world, we see societies of varying sophistication.

We should not put this down to some societies being more 'talented'. It is a matter of scale and eigenmodes.

The question is, why scale increased in some places and not others.

We should not think that increasing scale is an obvious 'choice'. People actually like to get away from each other. And the simple, free lifestyle of low-scale societies holds many attractions.

That said, people are contradictory. Population concentrations can be attractive, offering possibilities not found in the free-roaming band, especially as far as young people are concerned. Once established, high scale may be self-sustaining.