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history after the agriculture revolution can largely be understood by answering this question: how did humans organize themselves into large cooperative networks when they lack the instinctive ability necessary to sustain such networks?

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the short answer to this question is that humans created imagined orders and invented writing which filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance

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what were the impacts of these mass cooperation networks on the lives and relations of humans

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for many, the appearance of these mass networks were a dubious blessings

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these imagined orders were neither neutral nor fair

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they often divided people into arbitrary groups and arranged these groups in hierarchies

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upper level groups enjoyed privileges and power

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lower ranking groups suffered from discrimination and oppression

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e.g. the code of Hammurabi established a clear hierarchy of superiors, commoners, and slaves

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groups are divided by castes, race, religion, or wealth

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they divide people into categories, then treat people according to that category without respecting their true abilities

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Hindu society: if you want to marry, you want to know to which caste your potential spouse belongs to, much more important than their personality

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cultures with these obvious separations into categories will claim that this is natural and inevitable, Hindus believe that a cosmic force and not human imagination is responsible for the division of the castes (from the story of the Purusha), they believe the differences are as rooted in the natural world as, say, differences between the sun and the moon

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Chinese believed that goddess created humans from earth, but that aristocrats were created from good soil whereas commoners were formed from brown mud

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however, these don't reflect any natural order, but are created by people who create laws

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as far as we can tell, most the different methods by which societies in history have classified people into groups, most of them have been based on imaginary stories and lack evidence for their justification beyond the stories themselves

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unfortunately complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination, some more than others, but scholars do not know of any complex society in history that was able to organize and maintain itself without some kind of imagined hierarchy and some kind of discrimination

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this is because all of these imagined hierarchies serve an important social function: they enable strangers to know how to treat one another without spending the time needed to become personally acquainted

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even to walk down the street, we need the help of these imagined hierarchies, because, unlike ancient foragers, we live in cities of millions of people, not in bands of dozens of people, and we have to have some reference to know how to treat all the strangers that we meet so we have various cues that we use to know how to treat them without getting to know each person individually, we treat people who are dressed in suits differently than people who are dressed in rags, we treat women differently than men, we treat a priest different than a shopkeeper and rabbi differently than a gay man

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all societies are based on these imagined hierarchies and social differences but not necessarily on the same set of differences

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e.g. when British ruled India in 19th century, and you had an (1) untouchable, (2) Brahmin, (3) Protestant Englishman, (4) Catholic Irishman, if each of these people have the same propensity for doing business, they will not have the same opportunity to become rich since the economic hierarchy in 19th English society was weighted with legal restrictions in favor of Hindu Brahmins and Protestant Englishmen

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Indian society classified people according to caste, Ottoman society classified people according to religion, and modern American society gives importance to race and wealth