Memes

Small scale hunting and gathering societies are universally egalitarian because it's impossible for any one person to accumulate significant wealth or to control resources. The way members of such societies gain influence therefore is through virtue and personal merit. This is the social system that we evolved to live in over hundreds of thousands of years, and it's why we still haven't figured out an equally amenable replacement in the mere ten thousand years since we adopted agriculture.

That said, for better or worse, agriculture is a trap, and once we adopted it, there was never any going back, so we have no choice but to keep trying with what we have.