| > Most society rules have a reason to exist. Quite some rules are affected by such reasons as "power begets power" - incumbent rulers/influencers tweaking the rulebook to reward incumbent powers and compliant populace and punish contenders. > Maybe, in the past century a few of that rules have become obsolete. But humanity is excellent at creating rules that makes things good enough to keep going. > There is nothing that makes a society change its rules like a change on the environment. From evolutionary perspective, I'd say people make up all sorts of changes, to a large degree at random, according to their own appetite. Then environment does its things, especially but not necessarily with factors not well understood by the societies, and wipes out the societies which can't survive in the new environment. For example, the USSR has played out the game of "more power to the center, more limitations for the public, more punishments for the dissenters" until it couldn't operate anymore. And increasingly lots of people have seen it coming, some of them decades in advance. Of course you can say "well but most people have survived and now the society has re-made itself", sure, but the society as in the set of definitive, durable, observable social constructs has ceased to exist. |