From my equally unfounded gut feel, it's actually balanced societies that are the most successful. When that balance strongly tilts one way, tension occurs and

From my equally unfounded gut feel, it's actually balanced societies that are the most successful. When that balance strongly tilts one way, tension occurs and requires rebalancing for that society to continue to prosper. On society lifetime scale, this usually takes decades which is annoying to a single generation, but a speck in the scheme of things.