In pluralistic alliances (the strongest kind) or in egalitarian societies (common in the evolutionary background), the senate conspires to prevent any faction from getting too much power, or a kind of power that can be used to permanently entrench itself. So, how do you get power, in that kind of situation? By arguing that you have too little power and that others have too much. So naturally everyone spends all of their time and energy doing that.
There was probably also an evolutionary pressure be paranoid about your opponents’ hidden advantages—they always have more of them than you can understand.
There’s a tendency for powerful people to appoint meek people as their successors, or for key positions, because the meek are non-threatening, then the higher ups die and the new appointees stop being so meek, people forget that they ever were meek, but they were. So at high positions, everyone has an incentive to be meek. And maybe that adds up to an effect where the organisation as a whole becomes meek. ie, an aspiring leader is eager to commit to binding their prospective power to be unable to reverse the decisions of the previous leader knowing that this will make the leader more willing to appoint them. They get their wish. Now the organisation as a whole is actually less powerful, there are things it can’t do. Over successive transitions, this will lead to organisations who are only able to do things that the dominant morality (or the morality shared by a long succession of leaders at least) already wants them to do, if this goes on for long enough (so far it never has afaik) they will have roughly no power, they’ll just be executors of a contingent set of social principles. And I guess that was one hope as to where social progress could have come from.
Some other reasons this happens:
In pluralistic alliances (the strongest kind) or in egalitarian societies (common in the evolutionary background), the senate conspires to prevent any faction from getting too much power, or a kind of power that can be used to permanently entrench itself. So, how do you get power, in that kind of situation? By arguing that you have too little power and that others have too much. So naturally everyone spends all of their time and energy doing that.
There was probably also an evolutionary pressure be paranoid about your opponents’ hidden advantages—they always have more of them than you can understand.
There’s a tendency for powerful people to appoint meek people as their successors, or for key positions, because the meek are non-threatening, then the higher ups die and the new appointees stop being so meek, people forget that they ever were meek, but they were.
So at high positions, everyone has an incentive to be meek. And maybe that adds up to an effect where the organisation as a whole becomes meek. ie, an aspiring leader is eager to commit to binding their prospective power to be unable to reverse the decisions of the previous leader knowing that this will make the leader more willing to appoint them. They get their wish. Now the organisation as a whole is actually less powerful, there are things it can’t do. Over successive transitions, this will lead to organisations who are only able to do things that the dominant morality (or the morality shared by a long succession of leaders at least) already wants them to do, if this goes on for long enough (so far it never has afaik) they will have roughly no power, they’ll just be executors of a contingent set of social principles. And I guess that was one hope as to where social progress could have come from.