I suggest it is not too much of an exaggeration to claim that the 20th Century witnessed a series of cataclysmic socio-economic events that culminated in two huge paroxysms of the hierarchical mass society system of human aggregation. These huge disturbances were in the form of two World Wars; the first lasting from 1914 – 1918; and the second lasting from 1939 – 1945. In a long history of wars between hierarchical mass society elites, dating back millennia, these two were unprecedented in that they involved multiple nation-state military alliances and introduced the modern phenomena of ‘total war’. The first one took place at a hitherto unknown international level and the second one took place on a genuinely global scale. Both wars were traumatic and accompanied by such huge levels of losses to life on earth in all its forms – human, animal, insect and plant, that an entirely new concept was applied – genocide!

Indeed, in the advanced capitalist countries of the world the general social, economic and financial circumstances were so bad in the decades leading up to these wars, that based upon them a 20th century revolutionary activist and multi-talented Marx-influenced, author, Leon Trotsky, claimed that these paroxysms marked the ‘Death Agony’ of capitalism. He also unwisely predicted that these death agony convulsions of the capital based socio-economic affairs of all nations, would establish the objective conditions and produce a grass roots motive for a solution that Karl Marx had earlier proposed. The solution suggested by Marx was – a world proletarian revolution – and the formation of an alternative socio-economic system. That system was characterised at the time as world socialism. The fact that this scenario did not actually materialise throws serious doubts both upon the predictive analysis and scenario.

In retrospect, it is clear that a hard core of revolutionaries of that 20th century period thought that the hierarchical mass society systems, initiated originally in the ancient middle-east, were part of a historic series of socio-economic progressions implemented by humanity, which would lead to improved living conditions for the human species. It was held that the original examples of such hierarchical mass societies (in ancient Sumer and Egypt) had been developed further in ancient Persia, Greece and Rome. During that development many of these city-state aggregations became large enough to be classed as ’empires’. It was a process often designated as the progress of ‘civilisation’. These hierarchical mass society forms continued expanding their territoritorial control and influence by guns, swords and murder throughout the long middle ages. Eventually, the hierarchical mass society system was transformed by the development of a capitalist mode of production.

After, a series of internal revolutions in Europe, these hierarchical mass societies became dominated and ruled by a new elite – the bourgeoisie. The transition from a Feudal mode of production to a capitalist mode introduced extra negative social contradictions and many of the 20th century revolutionaries concluded that the capitalist system – due to these internal contradictions – needed to be superseded. They imagined humanity needed to implement a further socio-economic transition, in the form of the creation of egalitarian mass societies structures based upon the industrial mass production methods which had already been pioneered within the existing bourgeois system. These future egalitarian hierarchical mass societies were designated by their revolutionary champions and promoters as socialism and communism.

In the 20th century, social systems based upon these particular isms were indeed founded (in Russia, China, Cuba and Yugoslavia) yet each one of these top-down hierarchical led systems replicated the general characteristics and symptoms of all previous hierarchical mass societies. Furtheremore, the historical record indicates that various capitalisms, various socialisms, various liberalisms, several fascisms, a handful of Islamisms, Hinduisms, and even Buddhisms were experimentaly tried. Yet all these elite orchestrated alternative societies, have demonstrated that they were all variations of the basic hierarchical mass society social structure and for this reason all merely replicated all the tensions, contradictions and dehumanising conditions attached to this particular template of human social living.

So it transpires, that the extended genocide of Palestinians by Israeli elites, the current major wars in Ukraine along with 2026 attack by Israel and the US on Iran in the Middle East, at a fundamental socio-economic level, are not specific to the capitalist mode of production, as some anti-capitalist commentators seem to think. All these historic paroxysms result from something more fundamental than capitalism, which afflicts all hierarchical mass society systems. These capitalist examples are just the continuation of hierarchical mass society contradictions being played out as they have been, generation after generation, but now in a more modern technical context. What the underlying contradictions the 20th century revolutionaries and their 21st century imitators had thought were specific to the capitalist mode of production, are actually specific to all hierarchical modes of production, and here is why.

From their earliest beginnings, the hierarchical mass society system of satisfying human nutritional and other socio-economic biological needs, had introduced an unresolvable contradiction between the natural resource requirements of these societies and the locally available natural resources needed to fulfil them. The privileged needs and desires of the elites governing these societies for luxuries such as palaces, silks, gold and silver ornaments, rich and plentiful foods, large armies for purposes of social control and territorial expansion, along with a class of bureaucracrats for administrative purposes, not only added excessively to the total needs of the whole society, but also seriously imbalanced the ratio between human consumption of nature and the biological rate of reproduction of their preferred natural resources.

This socio-economic class based resource imbalance of hierarchical mass societies quickly exceeded the locally available but limited natural resources. The result was that new resources and new territories containing them were constantly needed and obtained as the societies and their elites grew in numbers and desires. Consequently, if the new territories were not already occupied, the new resources could be obtained relatively peacefully. However, if any resources were already occupied, forcible seizure of them soon entered the socio-economic calculations of ruling class elites. Once the hero worshiping spin and the rose tinted glasses have been removed from anyone reading the historical narratives about ancient Sumer, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome they provide substantial evidence of this hierarchically acquired and therefore persistent characteristic of aggressive socio-economic expansion.

The fact that over extraction by hierarchical mass societies is a persistent characteristic is also evidenced by the various national histories during the long Middle Ages within Europe and the many other armed conflicts within the European and later Colonial periods and of course they are now occuring again in the 21st century. The capitalist mode of production by introducing advanced technology and power driven machines has not started the symptom of excessive extraction, consumption, transportation and pollution, it has merely increased the pace and volume of these activities and substantially increased ecological destruction and climate change imbalances. It is obvious to those not wilfully blind, that the contemporary elites in Russia, China, Israel, and the USA, for example, are currently actively and ruthlessly pursuing land and resource materials, that are currently controlled by other hierarchical mass societies.

The so-called progress of ‘civilisation’ has actually been an endless battle between privileged elites for control of ever greater natural resources, by means of armed warfare in which the non- elites lives have been sacrificed or degraded. Once this fundamental socio-biological relationship between hierarchical mass society natural resource consumption and the reproductive rate of growth of those natural resources, is understood, something existentially problematic becomes obvious. It is that the extraction and consumption of any natural resource cannot consistently exceed the natural reproduction of that resource and be sustainable. Even ignoring every other negative factor introduced by these hierarchical mass systems the socio-biological imbalance at their basis leads to an inevitable countdown.

The fact that this over extraction is a permanent characteristic of hierarchical mass societies is why this series of blogs bears the title of ‘Hierarchical Societies: The Final Countdown?’. For a few thousand years the hierarchical mass society system commencing in ancient Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, Greece etc., had room to expand whenever it needed new resources. Therefore the results of this consumption/available resource imbalance were hardly noticeable. After local resource exhaustion and even desertification, these societies expanded throughout the middle east, then throughout Europe, then by ocean travel throughout Asia, North America, South America, Africa and Oceana. Now in the 21st century, this hierarchical mass society system of human aggregation occupies and/or controls practically all the globe.

The implications are clear. So as long as humanity does not end its hierarchical mass society fixation, the future will be more of the same as it has been since ancient Egypt and Babylon and as it was during the 20th century. The pattern of; wars and genocides, along with long term lethal shortages of essential resources and climate change hardships are not individual elite character defects but the distorted logical outcomes of a system designed to function according to the needs of a privileged elites. The more astute elites, such as those congregating in Epstein File type oligarchies know this problem actually exists and that the contradictions are increasing. However, their solution to it is not to change the system which privileges them, but, as the Epstein elites demonstrated individually and collectively for entertainment and pleasure, they are prepared to sacrifice the masses by ignoring any moral and legal barriers to wars, genocides and the engineering of starvation level shortages.

Only 2,000 years after hierarchical mass society elites had adopted monotheistic religious creeds and had invented the myth of a super being having created humanity and nature, the modern elite worshipers and supporters of this invented mystical being are once again demonstrating they are quite prepared to mass eliminate large numbers of their own species. To understand how such a recurring process could develop and continue within the most advanced and intelligent biological species form of life on earth, we need to consider some important, but insufficiently considered socially derived symptoms of hierarchical mass societies.

The following three symptoms of hierarchical mass societies were identified by a number of 20th century thinkers and they were stressed in particular by the revolutionary-humanist thinker and activist Karl Marx. The symptoms are; Estrangement, Alienation and Dehumanisation. These socially derived and maintained symptoms are the socio-psychological expressions of the hierarchical mass society system. Parts 2 and 3 of this series (to follow) will indicate how these three symptoms of the hierarchical mass society system developed, how they came to dominate all elite strata of humanity and how they also spread to some of the non-elite victims of these societies.

Roy Ratcliffe (March 2026)