Landowners built themselves and their dependents strong houses and castles.  Much of the labor power that went into this construction was “forced.”  The laborer gave the landlord labor time in exchange for the privilege of working part of the land for his own support.  Soldiers defended the landlord and joined plundering forays on the territory of neighbors.  The priests, in exchange for sustenance, mollified “higher powers” and built temples in which the people could gather, worship and be admonished.

Farsighted, energetic, resourceful men (and women), using mass productive energy, built themselves castles, built their priests temples and mobilized serfs, war captives and slaves who worked in gangs for generations and centuries to assemble the raw materials, construct and decorate the buildings, and perform the services needed to operate the enterprises and to provide their owners and masters with the necessaries, comforts, luxuries.

As centers of civilization grew richer and more powerful they defeated neighboring peoples, brought some of them home as war captives and exacted from their defeated rivals promises to pay yearly tribute in the form of timber, metals, food and often of slaves.

Mobilization of energy resources had been proceeding on a small scale for ages.  Successful civilizers made this one of their chief tasks, mobilizing energy forces and materials and using them to build palaces, temples, mausoleums and whole city complexes with appropriate defenses against marauders and other enemies.

Administrative networks, adequate to produce such results, planned and directed the construction and administered and policed the operations.  Using elaborate techniques of communication, transportation, fabrication, beautification, accounting, planning, initiative, leadership, mobilization, maintenance and replacement of labor power, imposition and sharing of authority, discipline, adjustment to deviation and opposition, means for dealing with revolt and rebellion, the builders of civilization performed their necessary tasks.

As civilizations have matured they have grown at the nucleus, expanded abroad and experimented more or less successfully with various means of exploiting nature, man and human society.  Most of the competitors for survival and supremacy dropped out or were forced out in the course of continuous survival struggles.

Survivors of the obstacle race dealt successively with personal rivalries; class conflicts; civil wars; dictatorships; tyrannies; with overhead costs that grew more rapidly than income; with empty treasuries, inflation, depression, economic stagnation; with increases in top-heavy bureaucracies; with parasitism; with hooliganism; with the growing role of the military in decision making and administration; sharing the honey-pot with migrants and invaders; with rivalry and power struggle at home and abroad; with division, fragmentation and eventual dissolution.