The role of weight in identity
Continuing on the subject of identity and culture, an important constituent of identity is not only where geographically the self is operating, but also where in an individually interpreted social hierarchy the subject is at.
I will borrow a common term from software development to describe this; weight. A system with multiple communicating modules or cells often times develops an internal imbalance in power. One part of the system becomes more vital than the others. In this case, a system capable of internally value its constituents in terms of importance gains a huge advantage. The system starts to assign weight values to the models within it and can subsequently make computations and decisions on these properties.
An example; when the body is starving it will prioritize autophagy based on how important tissues are to the organism. The body as a system has assigned weights to the different tissues and consumes them in a prioritized order. Similarly, the different faculties of society are weighted in case of an emergency. Plumbing and resource logistics are traditionally defended with higher priority due to their stabilizing role in the system.
The next evolutionary step on the same ladder is for the individual constituents to become aware of their own value in relation to the system at large. This allows for further optimization such as the birth of heroism and altruism. This is the founding principle of social hierarchy, it is the reason why people must rank themselves internally.
I want to distinguish this from a more basic form of power dynamics based on self-evaluation. Namely, the relation that a more primitive system has to its surroundings, where the organisms evaluate other beings merely to know if they should attack or flee without any higher purpose. Such an organism would never knowingly support a stronger or weaker "sibling" for its own benefit, while this might happen in a social hierarchy.
Any efficient control system needs this property of weighted constituents. For us humans, most of our behavior is formed around these relations, both individually and at an ideological level. A system that cannot protect the vital parts of itself will lose in competition with a system that can. For civilization to be considered "equal" in the systemic sense by modern standards, each individual part of the system must be of similar practical importance.
It is hard to estimate how many of our human emotions that are made to enforce this hierarchical structure. Some are obvious, for example, the feeling of awe, disgust, and admiration. Others are more convoluted with potential other motives, such as pity, love, and hate. Either way our sense of identity within a system is largely dependent on our own evaluation of ourselves and others within it.
These dynamics are becoming more visible as a system is forced to operate in scarcity, when its survival is in danger. I hypothesize that societies that are developed in a barren, unfertile environment will evolve a higher focus on social hierarchy, as the weight-value of objects will be more frequently accessed and acted upon. As such it would make sense to assume that most proto-civilizations evolved under such scarce conditions and that the upheaval of social hierarchies is a symptom only showed by societies wealthy enough that the purging of impurities no longer affects its survival in the same sense. This also means that I presume that as resources become more scarce, social norms would regress to a more "resource-effective" state.
Even though the focus on social status mellows with luxury, the will to justify one's own existence seems to linger. Indeed, one often finds oneself "weighted" by many people, and above all the need to weigh oneself. I believe this has directly affected the decline of the so-called "noble" mindset. But more on that some other time.