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GaldraChevaliere wrote

I'm not an academic, to be fair. This is just something I've spent a lot of time on learning.

Basically, agrarian societies are societies that farm extensively, as opposed to nomadic or semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers and herders. The reliance on a stationary food source, like crops, means places where crops are grown get built up and people become invested in staying there, which changes how they organize and who does what labor. It also leads to specialization, so where the whole tribe might have fought before, now there's a class of warriors who spend all their time training instead of also helping to find food. That class of warriors then gets a kind of primacy in the society, where more food is being laid aside for them to compensate them for fighting and to allow them to spend even more time training, so a power structure is created where the warrior caste is reliant on the worker caste for food, but the worker caste now has to support a caste that can use force to coerce them if it doesn't get its way.

So this worker caste is doing things still pretty similarly to the way they've always done, but they start branching out and specializing too. Itinerant metalworkers and tinkers become blacksmiths, gatherers become farmers and millers, fishermen build ships and docks. Who does what labor becomes restricted more along family and guild lines, but women still contribute as producers. But the warrior caste is receiving the bulk of the products created by the workers, with discretion on how they should be used for the society. And the warrior caste, with its power solidified by violence (that they will either be violent against the workers or allow violence to come to them) becomes separated from the process of production while still benefiting from owning the means themselves.

So this power is being concentrated, but systems like Tanistry still serve domestically to break them up, by distributing 'ownership' of the means equally among children of the warriors. Then one warrior realizes if he passes it on solely to his sons, rather than his sons and daughters, the domain he started with won't shrink as much. It becomes his immortality project, a way to live past his natural life through the reign of his children. Someone takes this idea further, if only the first son gets the land, the domain doesn't shrink at all! Now we have Primogeniture, specifically Agnatic Primogeniture, the standard in feudal systems like those in late Antiquity in Roman and Frankish controlled territories, the Medieval Era, the Renaissance, and the Sengoku period over in Japan. So there's a clear economic incentive to keep power in the hands of men, because the system has come to rely upon it. Philosophies are invented and religions modified to support the dominance of men, and the roles of women are downplayed or erased. Non-Men are punished with violence because their existence threatens the system, since a gay son or a trans daughter cannot continue a family line.

Is this a better explanation? I'm trying to keep it simpler without dumbing it down and insulting your intelligence, but there's so many variables and historical events that led to these systems that it's a little hard to keep it short and sweet.

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Xylanthius OP wrote

Only if you are hostile will I feel my intelligence insulted.

That explanation did help.

I’m not knowledgeable to a lot of the stuff that is talked about on here I just live with the feelings of wrongness.

So as long as you are not hostile I’m not going to feel insulted. I know this feels wrong but I don’t understand why.

Egos are kind of toxic. Everything is in transit.

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