My previous article (The End of Empires) provided a general historical overview of the decline and fall of hierarchical mass society amalgamations, whether designated as ’empires’ or not. That previous analysis noted that the organisational life-span of such ‘amalgamations’ has been considerably reduced throughout the history of hierarchical mass societies. This reduction in longevity  has gone from centuries numbered in thousands of years (e.g. Egypt and Rome) to mere decades. The short-lived 20th century domination of the USA, within the NATO alliance of hierarchical mass society amalgamations, being the most glaring example of the latter. However, in order to keep those articles as short as possible, very little factual and contextual evidence was provided to illustrate the morbid restlessness (Dysphoria) of these societies as they staggered through their declines. In this article, I shall try to remedy that default a little.

The socio-economic context of all hierarchical mass societies from the most ancient examples to the more modern ones has been to organise and provide the biological essentials for the prolonged living, of all the accepted members of them. These socio-biological essentials, comprise of the necessary Nutrition, Safety and Shelter, along with the social conditions for Biological Reproduction and any other requirements considered important or necessary. The production and consumption of these essentials are commonly achieved and maintained within hierarchical mass societies, by means of class-based social structures and the varying divisions of labour within these. Therefore, the basic class structures of all hierarchical mass societies, including any associations between them in the form of ’empires’, comprises of at least three social classes; a labouring class, a bureaucratic or managerial class and a ruling/governing class.

The precise nature of the divisions of labour for each class within each such society is dependent upon the particular environmental circumstances in which it arises, and the dominant means of production practiced by it. Nevertheless, the basic hierarchical class structure of governing, managing and labouring within them has been and remains, common to all hierarchical modes of production. Because these class structures were (and are) not natural but socially determined, constructed and enforced, all such hierarchical social forms contain differently apportioned rewards, statuses and influences spread across the classes and occupations. It is the human interactions created within these class based structures, that consequently contain and manifest the numerous tensions and antagonisms that exist between the various individuals and classes. These antagonisms in turn give rise to various individual symptoms of an emotional (psychological) character as well as numerous collective symptoms.

For example, symptoms such as those described as alienation, narcissism and schizophrenia, are not the result of individual biological, bacterial or viral maladies, but are psychological, and emotional reactions to mutually contradictory real-world social situations or experiences – of which in hierarchical mass societies – there are many. Once initiated and consolidated as an inter-dependent whole every individual and every class in such hierarchical mass societies, also become mutually co-dependent upon every other individual and class for some essential aspect of their existence.

But, of course this vastly extended co-dependency only occurs within such mass societies. Biologically, and in species terms, every individual human being, irrespective of gender or class remains potentially and actually a species equivalent of every other human individual. Hence succesful sexual reproduction can generally take place between all members of the entire human species, irrespective of social forms of identity such as class, status or geographical location, as can blood transfusions, organ transplants and other biological processes covering a wide range of health and reproductive issues. Species wise human beings are one.

Therefore, despite many socially acquired categories and prejudices, human beings are clearly members of one species, and biologically contain just two genders.  However, due to the dominant social system humanity has become socially divided, into religions, nations and classes. These practical socio-economic divisions within hierarchical mass societies have also given rise to ideological expressions of them which are completely divorced from humanities fundamental biological species identity. Crucially, members of classes within hierarchical mass societies are also treated as vastly unequal entities, their lives are differently rewarded and their deaths, differently regarded. So biologically we are united; yet socially we are divided.

Consequently, within such hierarchically structured mass societies, and from their earliest historical manifestations, these practical divisions, tensions and antagonisms needed to be mediated and controlled, at the individual as well as the collective levels. Unlike previous forms of hominid and human socio-economic, groups, hierarchical mass societies have been so contradictory and so unnatural since their historical development, that it has only been by creating considerable authoritarian means of forcible social control, that they have been able to functionally deliver the above-noted biological essentials for those members of the human species socio-economically aggregated in this way.

Hence, the symptom of authoritarianism, whether it is expressed in it’s relatively mild ‘liberal’ forms (or extreme fascistic forms) is not some ephemeral aberration afflicting hierarchical mass societies long after their development, as some superficial or naive thinkers seem to imagine and suggest. Any study of the actual history of hierarchical mass societies, (their contradictions frequently glossed over by the appellation of ‘civilisation’) will reveal that their socio-economic basis was implemented on the foundations of slavery, extreme citizen punishments and frequent violent actions against other humans.

As early as ancient Sumer and Egypt, this violence was even extended to organised ‘total’ warfare in order to obtain sufficient resources for their mass society needs. This hierarchical mass society history (also stretching from both ancient Babylonian to modern capitalist iterations) has included periodic genocides perpetrated by many people within such societies against rival hierarchical mass societies and their peoples. Hence, the naive (and superficial) mistaken political idea arises of thinking that such genocidal atrocities are the product of certain demented individuals, and that when these individuals are eventually removed from positions of power, the atrocities will end.

In reality, powerful individuals (demented or not) are the continual social product of hierarchical mass societies, and merely personify the aggressive socio-economic practices of such class divided societies which are predetermined by the socio-economic requirements needed for them to continue to survive – in this hierarchical mass society form. Reliable historical, evidence not only vividly reveals this process but also reveals, that mediating and controlling these hierarchical socio-economic tensions has historically been delegated to certain elite chosen (authoritarian) sections of the ruling elite and/or certain chosen authoritarian sections of the managerial bureaucracy, within them. However, once these societies have become established it also becomes obvious that if, for whatever reasons, these internal antagonisms and tensions become disturbingly pronounced, then either the tensions need to be reduced (or removed) or alternatively the mediating and controlling authoritarian forces need to be progressively increased or strengthened to prevent the civil-war explosion of these class-based antagonisms.

Thus, the historic symptom of Fascist authoritarianism, arises not as an external aberration of the hierarchical mass society form but as an internal logical extension of a collective desire by many within them, to socially create or maintain a hierarchical mass society form against other rival forms competing for the same essential resources. The lack of humanity (i.e. hatred, racism and genocide) arising in such circumstances of excessive rivalry is a logical corollary of two socially reinforced anthropocentric symptoms.  First, the strength of a socially reinforced belief in the existence of non-existent entities such as gods: Second, a socially created and reinforced excessive social regard for ones own community, which  in one way or another is then considered to be ‘entitled‘ or ‘chosen‘ to, occupy, monopolise and extract those essential resources for their own use. Once irrational belief replaces evidenced reality within some human beings – any unnatural outrage or crime becomes not only possible but probable.

As a consequence, new hierarchical mass societies and ‘established’ ones reorganise their internal social forces (when experiencing any form of serious difficulty or crisis) during their attempts to establish or to save their collective selves from collapse and thus to continue in that pre-existing hierarchical form. Hence, populist and fascist inclined leaders are easily able to recruit from their own hierarchically distributed communities, the masses they need to establish themselves or to resist their dissolution or the systems transformation into a non-hierarchical form of society. The reason such recruitment is relatively easy, is that significant sections of the population of such societies despite the savage downsides, cannot imagine any alternative possible socio-economic form, particularly if there are actually no functioning alternatives already in existence.

Hence, in the 20th century, German, Italian and Spanish forms of Fascism grew out of the existing authoritarian forms of bourgeois societies. It is also why extreme authoritarian forms of Jewish nationalism known as Zionism grew out of the Jewish elites (and their followers), practical project to create a hierarchical mass society in the already occupied territory of Palestine. In seriously commencing that new hierarchical mass society nation state project, Zionists, like the European colonisors before them, began to follow the logical necessity of obtaining total control of a sufficiently large land mass and it’s natural resources, to create or sustain such a mass society. This is a logic that every such hierarchical mass society has followed since ancient times.

Therefore, getting rid of ruthless leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Putin or Netanyahu, did not and cannot alter the internal socio-economic dynamic of hierarchical mass societies. Such inhumane leaders (and individuals) were not born with such personalities, they have become the outstanding embodiments (personifications) of the social contradictions they have lived through. They are subsequently used as scapegoats who can be eventually blamed or sacrificed so that the unnatural  hierarchical mass society system can continue without them. And, of course,  in order for it to continue the hierarchical mass society system requires the fulfilment of its fundamental socio-economic dynamic of overproduction, over consumption, over pollution and incremental resource extraction. Only a complete revolutionary change in how people live, work and relate to each other and to nature can end the logic outcome flowing from the hierarchical mass society form.

The mass psychology of modern Fascism, in contrast to the ancient forms of authoritarianism which led to older versions of Fascism is a radical extension of bourgeois hierarchical ideology adapted to modern pro-capitalist conditions. Its populist beginnings represent a radical attempt to save a socio-economic system which is in terminal decline, due to it’s own unresolved contradictions, which the liberal/democratic wing of the neo- liberal elite have failed to correct. Even whilst the decline of the hierarchical mass society system continues unabated, particularly in the realms of the current wars and genocides, along with social, environmental and climate degradation.  Nevertheless, a limited, superficial view of the socio-economic problem for humanity continues to dominate global thinking. Here is a representstive example from the UK.

“Two rogue world leaders, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, have woken Europe out of its complacent slumber, shaken awake by the invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s ending of the solidarity of NATO. Alone, Europe must defend itself and unite, if it can, around liberal democratic values it alone is left to represent in the world.” (Britain Rediscovers Europe. Polly Toynbee. Social Europe July 2025)

It is not two rogue world leaders that are the primary problem in the first half of the 21st century, but the system.  Indeed, the liberal democratic bourgeois social values are the ones, which have championed and enabled the domination of the hierarchical mass society system, now harnessed to the capitalist mode of production, that have steered humanity to it’s current situation in 2025. It is a situation in which, due to excessive extraction, production, consumption and destruction of natures resources; global air, sea and land pollution, climate change and essential species loss are increasing daily, whilst wars and genocides are daily unfolding before our eyes.

Yet the above quoted Polly (and many others among the elites and non-elites) continue to parrot the bourgeois elite mantra of defending the core essence of the hierarchical mass society nation-state form as it has existed for the last two centuries. So much for the intellectual capacity and knowledge base of the so-called elites of modernity, which along with much else (some of which is mentioned above) is an integral part of the inevitable decline of the hiearchical mass society system. So it is the socio-economic system itself which needs changing not the political complexion of its ruling elites.

However, this latter level of understanding is still being swamped by the sheer volume of anthropocentrically based bourgeois and petite bourgeois left, right and centre, alternative reformist explanations of what is wrong with human societies and what needs to be done to prevent the collapse of the hierarchical mass society system. Yet it should be obvious to those who study reality rather than ponder and regurgitate ideology, that as the earlier noted rising class and system tensions have not been corrected, suppressed or removed, the structures of our hierarchical mass societies have begin to slowly (or rapidly) crumble and disintegrate. This is the essence of the process of decline and fall of all such societies or all amalgamations of them into ’empires’, as the extensive survey of the ‘Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire’ by Gibbons amply illustrates. Interestingly, at one point Gibbons contrasts the historical records he had consulted on the sack of ancient Rome, with what had come later. He noted;

“Yet when the first emotions, had subsided, and a fair estimate was made of the real damage, the more learned and judicious contemporaries, were forced to confess, that infant Rome had formerly received more essential injury from the Gauls, than she had now sustained from the Goths in her declining age. The experience of eleven centuries has enabled posterity to produce a more singular parallel; and to affirm with confidence that the ravages of the barbarians, whom Alsric had led from the banks of the Danube, were less destructive than the hostilities exercised by the troops of Charles the Fifth, a Catholic prince, who styled himself Emperor of the Roman’s…..In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the manners of Italy exhibited a remarkable scene of the depravity of mankind. They united the sanguinary crimes that prevail in an unsettled state of society, with the polished vices which spring from the abuse of art and luxury;” (Gibbon Decline and Fall ..chapter 31.)

In one relatively short paragraph, this extract illustrates the brutal facts of hierarchical mass society inter human conduct stretching from the period of the Roman empire, the subsequent European Crusades and beyond. In addition, there remains the human on human conduct before and after the two World Wars of the 20th century to be considered. Now in the 21st century conflicts are occuring which contained even more wars and genocides, all of which should at least indicate that humanities commitment to the hierarchical mass society form is an addiction that needs to be ended, preferably before the system collapses from external or internal forces. The associated addiction of humanity to commodity fetishism and the narcissistic sectarianism of chosen or favoured people or my country/religion right or wrong, needs to be rejected before human activity not only consumes more of the human species but also before more of the other multi-cellular species forms that create a balanced biome are further depleted or destroyed.

Roy Ratcliffe (July 2025.)