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Notes -
Can you explain this a bit more? If you're talking about the ability to maintain an unproductive priestly class it seems like the ancient extractive hierarchy (whether through direct taxation or tradition-bound hospitality) is a social technology which is very capable of doing this on its own. With Christian poverty you even get priests, monks and saints in places where they can just about feed themselves, and their number seems more constrained by the strength of their ideals than anything else.
Not with much clarity. OP has a point, many societies have priestly class, social role, and some part of it is filled by the Priestly-type, individual psychology. The psychological need is constant, but the available options are historically contingent.
I listed some of the things that help guide the psychology of Priestly-type to meaning and zeal. The printing press and the October Revolution happened. The former helped democratize literacy, thus enabling the spread ideas to more Priestly-types, and the latter was added to the catalog of ideas that the Priestly-type now access and maintain. The catalog grows, and Priestly-types continue to splinter, branch, and find novel doctrinal positions.
I didn't mean to imply that we can't find zeal in the past, only that we won't find Marxist Priests there. That sounds boring and obvious to write, but it doesn't feel boring in my head. The catalog of ideas has exploded in size, and it continues to grow at an incredible rate. So if we were to say the population is 15% Priestly-type psychologies, accept they have "an outsized effect on society," then it seems relevant just how many varied positions of meaning Priestly-types defend now. But, I need to think about thinking about it some more.
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