Not sure it answers directly your question, but I am reading Graeber & Wnegrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, and one point is that the human experience has been way richer than commonly taught, and we have already reached high levels of cooperations in very different ways. One way to get the "right" balance seems to have been to embrace seasonal changes in semi nomadic peoples, like getting the institution for big/huge gathering (winter) and destroying it every summer, with different mechanisms such as rotating the winter ruling tribe...

But modernity is very different especially in that we have less and less individual space to split and are mainly settled... Anyway these experiences can be sources of inspiration to resolve our current paradox: alternating rulers (not the same as voting for them), alternating the very structure of society...

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The cyclical growth/contraction point is very interesting, I'll have to think about that