Taking this a step further, it's logical to conclude that society itself is a constant war between rich people, who use their wealth (influence/power) to enlist the poor in their attacks on one another. Taking it another level, we could say that "society" itself is merely a side-effect of this war, in fact it is the current state-of-the-art weapon in this struggle. If something better than capitalistic society comes about (such as, most obviously, human-level AIs and robotics), the rich will not hesitate to abandon the society strategy.
That's pretty close to the insight I had about a decade ago reading the opening paragraphs of A.H.M. Jones's biography of Augustus.
I've quoted the passage, which describes the political balance and division between the optimates, populares, and equites, roughly the oligarchs, labour, and petit bourgousie, in this (now archived) Reddit post:
The durability of such conflict makes me strongly suspect that this is innate to human polity, and Jones's description of the respective groups' political platforms, concerns, and ideologies strike me as both insightful and possibly innate.
I've mentioned this several times previously on HN:
Taking this a step further, it's logical to conclude that society itself is a constant war between rich people, who use their wealth (influence/power) to enlist the poor in their attacks on one another. Taking it another level, we could say that "society" itself is merely a side-effect of this war, in fact it is the current state-of-the-art weapon in this struggle. If something better than capitalistic society comes about (such as, most obviously, human-level AIs and robotics), the rich will not hesitate to abandon the society strategy.