As humans struggled to organize as a group, and then as societies, and now as a species , variations around the same set of issues are occuring, with diverse responses but with similar patterns.

Issue 1 : Deciding with the group's wellbeing in mind, and how to organize the singular tradeoffs.

The group's interests are sometimes at odds, or not perfectly aligned with any individual's choice at any given time. As such, the society must A. bear the load of making a consensus emerge (colloqially reffered to as "the law") that is somehow best for the group as a group, and not a perfect match for each given individual, and B. enforce those rules, through ultimately the monopoly on violence State has.

To deal with this, patterns of solutions have been adopted such as :

i) choosing a subset of the society to choose rules : a group of people, or one guy, who supposedly is better than the rest at deciding what's best for the group. Call it kingship, Cincinnatism, dictatorship, communism, oligarchism, it basically revolves around a smaller subset of supposedly better-fit people to choose.

This approach has troves of issues because the choosing mechanism (elections, partisianism, ...) becomes the game itself, because there is high variance in the people responsible for choosing those important features, and generally because the captation of the enormous power placed in a subset is a risk to the integrity of the whole system ;

ii) putting down limitation to how a society can change at any given time : with a collection of texts, knowledge or habitus to inform future generations and maintain some rules independent of people, and/or putting complex processes to let those rules prevail over any single group of people. Call it constitutionalism, tribalism, jurisprudence-based rule of law, it basically revolves around a body of "you can do this but not that" .

This approach has also troves of issue, because rules are often unclear and antiquated, the frequency of change and reason can be hijacked and no compared to reality.