As with any other cyclic return – including conflict, revolution and large-scale systemic collapse – a holistic and complex systems analysis suggests a few salient points.
Feudal systems of warring tribes return again and again (wearing different uniforms and wielding new vocabularies or other socioeconomic and technological accessories) because they are the optimally-concise self-organisational method by which any gestalt pattern self-replicates through a transmission medium of human minds, artefacts and information-processing systems.
Threshold levels of turbulence, dissonance, conflict and disorder are key components in the autonomous self-propagation of a Global (as in “holistic”) information and energy-processing system; the introduction of entropy into any system forces it to undergo metamorphosis and cultivates a vectored momentum towards a distributed resilience through diversity.
Conflict or adversarial competition and the fracturing of social systems to a scale that cognitive and cultural or communications and semiotic complexity can actually negotiate is perhaps inevitable, if not necessary. It really seems that we place altogether too much faith in the effect or power of human agency; these systems drive themselves.
