Quote Originally Posted by unefille View Post
What's interesting to me is that this 'model' essentially preserved itself for millennia. It was not a 'stable' model since was prone to complete collapse as each dynasty declined and plunged into warfare, but the 'model' itself remained intact and survived each period of chaos only to be resurrected.
The Beta form of government survives, and regenerates itself, as long as there is a perception of a danger affecting the whole of society (or at least those with any say). That danger may be an external enemy; it may be the fear of anarchy; the fear of disintegration, the fear of internal enemies. It may even be a totally imaginary enemy.

I have argued elsewhere that Germany was in many respects Delta under the old Holy Roman German Empire, up to the Thirty-Years War in the 17th century, during which Germany "became" Beta. I don't really know much about Chinese history in detail, but it may well be that this cycle of civil war followed by some stability was self-fulfilling in that people took for granted that the alternative to a strong centralized government was civil war.

And it was similar in the Roman Empire. The civil wars in the 1st century BC signalled the end of the Republic, which was Gamma rather than Beta. The civil wars led to the acceptance of a more Beta-ish form of government in the form of the Emperor, but the first emperor, Augustus, a LIE, preserved the essential Gamma character of the Roman Empire, which even became Delta-ish, I would argue, towards the end of the 2nd century AD. But a sequence of civil wars, fragmentation and external threats led to a renewed Beta-ization of the Empire, culminating in the reforms of Diocletian, Constantine and, to top it all, the conversion of the empire to Christianity.