I think you're fundamentally correct, but this is a mechanism which works better in small groups (say, a hunter/gatherer group on the African savannah, or a sma

I think you're fundamentally correct, but this is a mechanism which works better in small groups (say, a hunter/gatherer group on the African savannah, or a small medieval European peasant village). The same instincts which create haters now, would prevent somebody from getting too powerful in a small (Dunbar's number or less) group. Unfortunately now, we are interconnected in groups orders of magnitude larger than that.