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You ask, "Does the presence of energy surplus create the exosomatic economic social organization, or does the social organization create the incentives and the discovery and the methods to access more energy?" You guess the former.

I conjecture that both are true, existing in a positive (reinforcing) feedback loop. If that is so, then the "burning" question (pun intended) is where to find a leverage point to either break one of those flows or to convert it into a balancing loop.

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