From Fossilized Ritual to Fossilized Power : Extending the Deep Symbolic Systems Model from Subsistence to Empire

This paper serves as a direct sequel to Technology as Fossilized Ritual (Vondoom, DSSM Preprint), extending the Deep Symbolic Systems Model (DSSM) from technological stabilization into subsistence strategies, exchange systems, warfare, and imperial formation. It argues that the transition from early foraging societies to agriculture, long-distance trade, organized warfare, and empire follows a single cognitive trajectory: repeated survival behaviors become ritualized; rituals are materially stabilized; stabilized practices are externalized into scalable systems of control.Within this framework, agriculture stabilizes food through enforced waiting, exchange stabilizes value through ritual equivalence, writing stabilizes obligation through impersonal memory, and warfare stabilizes extraction through repeatable violence. Empires do not arise from ambition, ideology, or innovation, but from the fossilization of competitive resource acquisition into administratively enforced ritual (Scott, 2017; Graeber & Wengrow, 2021).The paper further argues that modern humanity has crossed a phase boundary in which survival is no longer the dominant selective pressure. Contemporary symbolic systems increasingly optimize coordination, influence, and meaning. Technology no longer fossilizes survival, but power.