I think there are probably ways to build a pocket of power and trustworthiness, which does get absorbed by powerful empires which rise and fall around it, and doesn’t lose it’s soul in the absorption process. Rather than try and compete with empires on their own terms, make sure you either look uninteresting or illegible to empires, or build good relationships with them so you get to keep surviving. (Hmm. The illegible strategy maps to the Roma, the good-relationship strategy maps to the Amish?)
I’ll add Israelites / Jews to the list here. Not the same kinds of good relations as the Amish—we’re more of a target—but we seem to be able to survive in many more, varied political environments, and with a different kind of long-run ambition—and we’ve been around for longer.
Getting conquered and exiled by the Babylonians precipitated a rapid change in strategies from territorial integrity around a central physical cultic site, to memetic integrity oriented around a set of texts. This hasty transition worked well enough that when the Persians conquered the Babylonian empire, Jews were able to play court politics well enough to (a) avoid getting murdered for retaining a group identity, (b) return to their original territory, and (c) get permission to rebuild their physical cultic site, all without having to fight at a scale that could take on the empire.
By the time of the Roman exile, the portable cultural tech had been improved enough to sustain something recognizable for multiple millennia, though the pace of progress also slowed by quite a lot.
There was also a prior transition from having almost exclusively nonhierarchical distributed governance, to having a king, also partially in response to external pressure.
I’ll add Israelites / Jews to the list here. Not the same kinds of good relations as the Amish—we’re more of a target—but we seem to be able to survive in many more, varied political environments, and with a different kind of long-run ambition—and we’ve been around for longer.
Getting conquered and exiled by the Babylonians precipitated a rapid change in strategies from territorial integrity around a central physical cultic site, to memetic integrity oriented around a set of texts. This hasty transition worked well enough that when the Persians conquered the Babylonian empire, Jews were able to play court politics well enough to (a) avoid getting murdered for retaining a group identity, (b) return to their original territory, and (c) get permission to rebuild their physical cultic site, all without having to fight at a scale that could take on the empire.
By the time of the Roman exile, the portable cultural tech had been improved enough to sustain something recognizable for multiple millennia, though the pace of progress also slowed by quite a lot.
There was also a prior transition from having almost exclusively nonhierarchical distributed governance, to having a king, also partially in response to external pressure.