Human Social Status is Inherently Violation

Background: dominance vs. prestige. Fatal problem: both are zero-sum at best. 

Dominance is clearly negative-sum. Only one can be master, and the slave is induced to remain a slave via violence, not compensation.

Prestige at first glance looks more promising. It is gained by flaunting dunamis and the resources the prestigious accrue are offered voluntarily. However, the social group has to remember the prestige of the prestigious, meaning prestige piggybacks off attention, which is sharply limited. To gain prestige you must wrest prestige away from the existing prestigious individual, who is necessarily someone else in your own social group.

All forms of human social status are predicated upon violence against the ingroup. Inherently traitorous. The more social status you have, the more traitorous you must have been. Humans have to hide status plays because otherwise you're openly betraying your in-group.

The point of gaining dominance is to be a parasite. The point of gaining prestige is to be a parasite.
The local dominator wrests resources away from the rest of the group via violence.
If prestige didn't result in more gifts incoming than effort outgoing, nobody would want prestige. Ironically, it's double-treachery, as the gift-giver is attempting to seize some of your prestige for themselves. "The local star paid attention to me!" 

As such is it very unsurprising that human social groups reliably self-destruct. They naturally reward the most parasitic parasite until that parasite betrays the group so badly that the host dies.

 

How can such socially harmful behaviour become genetically universal in a social species? Simple: the [short-term] in immoral behaviour can be quite long in terms of reproductive generations. 

With 150-man bands on the savannah, this behaviour has no practical limits. The traitorous parasitism of the big man merely motivates the band to predate on the next band over to obtain resources to satisfy the black-hole sarlacc pit of their own so-called leader. When the band runs out of prey and starts suicidally weakening, it will merely be eaten by the next upstart band and the species can continue eternally like this. 

The upstart traitor-kings merely have to restrain their urges long enough to batter someone into being a tributary. Failed attempts perpetuate the system by becoming tributaries themselves. At no point will all the bands suicide at the same time. 

Yes, a band could eschew social status for a cooperative model and as a result casually roll over the entire savannah, but that first hurdle is far too high.
Firstmost obviously, you're trading the short term for the long term, and in the short term the next band over will (desperately) wipe you out while you're fumbling with a prototype of the new system. It would have to arise not just once or twice, but many times, before it could get lucky. Second, the only person with the capacity to declare the end of social status is someone who already won the social status system. The one who suffers from this mistake isn't him, it's his grandchildren and his friend's grandchildren. He's already dead by then, what would he care? Third, this bigman would have to be both of Herculean stature and Herculean mental stature. Intelligent enough to see a thousand years into the future, and powerful enough to bully everyone into giving up bullying, which they would desperately resist. Fourth, it bears repeating: this bigman would have to bully everyone into giving up bullying. The little men are not going to learn to stop bullying from this interaction. Every time he goes full Sulla and  himself gives up bullying, they're not going to wait and see and learn, they're going to think he's become weak and instantly force him to bully them again.

Multiply the odds of those things all happening together: yeah, no wonder that didn't happen.

 

As governments expand their herds to sizes above 150, the cancerous-growth / cancerous-death process merely happens at different timescales.

Or not: at savannah size it can be eugenic. At Empire size, it is wildly dysgenic. 

The Empire allows the Emperor to have unimaginably huge social status, meaning unimaginable capacity for treachery. The more Imperial, the more the Imperator betrays the Empire he allegedly leads. The faster and more efficiently the host is bled dry. 

Background: everyone is trying to be an Empire. Only the most competent succeed.

Empires gather de jure slaves and engulf conquered peoples. In other words, they aggressively dilute the very genetic stock that was capable of forming an Empire in the first place. The Imperator bleeds his most loyal citizens first, because they resist the least. The Imperial core goes dry first. The more like the Emperor you are, the more efficiently you get replaced by lower-quality livestock.

Everyone is trying to be an Empire, and by doing so, they wipe themselves out, bequeathing their lands to their former slaves and the former raiding vandals they subjugated. Gnon hates Empire.

If these dregs were not also parasitism-positive groups trying to form an Empire, this would be an improvement. They are, so [dregs] is the correct term. Whenever a human subspecies starts developing the virtue that might let it escape the social-status trap, it forms an Empire, which destroys the virtue which allowed the Empire. 

P.S. The violence of social status is why eugenics programs are inherently dysgenic. Regardless of context, the "eugenic" candidates are high-status candidates. Approving a low-status candidate would lower the approval committee's status; not happening. A black government intentional-eugenics program enhances treachery and parasitism before it enhances any other trait, positive or negative. 

 

Conclusion: the Christians are basically correct when they claim the factory-settings human is an evil motherfucker.