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“Social cohesion is a necessity, and mankind has never yet succeeded in enforcing cohesion by merely rational arguments.

Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers:

ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand,

dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.”

Okay, excellent observation in and of itself.

If you want to translate it into The Human Pageant, consider the course of human history.  Up until recently it’s been driven by young people (generations) who couldn’t handle the confines of their traditional homelands any longer.  That cohesion with local lore and Sense Of Place were lost for the restless.    They had to get away, move on and start over with their own fine tuned stories of reality as they perceived it.  Take the risk, do the hardships that needed to be done, take advantage of the environments they found after peerless journeys, all thanks to the ability of our incredible learning brains.  All the while growing that brain and its Mindscape.

Right?  Do you agree that’s an accurate description of the current running through all of humanity over the past couple hundred thousand years?

I don’t have the time to double check but either David Wootton, perhaps also Yuval Noah Harari, write about humanity being achieved when we learned to believe the stories we tell each other.  The one did a nice job of discussing Peugeot the person, then Peugeot the business idea.  The “story” we tell ourselves wrapped around with all the majesty of religion, contracts, seals, stories we tell each other – as it relates to the Peugeot entity that remained after the person died.    (in their “The Invention of Science” (Unabridged), “Sapiens” (Unabridged) respectively)

I agree a society’s cohesion depends on how much individuals buy into the story, and from that, how much they buy into the control structure they live within.

(we remember communist nations, that we’d grown up believing were granite solid, but hell, some sort of tipping point was reached, poop, it all fell apart and all bets were off.  It’s like there was a run on the Belief Bank causing it all collapsed.  Well sort of.  Like in the Bmovies, the victorious final scene is disturbed by the slain beast opening its eye.  Still, we all most continue believing someone’s story.  And if enough people believe it, the few who don’t, don’t matter.)

Am I getting close, in my rambling sort of fashion, to the point you are trying to make?