Howard Scott defined four stages of societal development as being religious, nationalist, Marxist, and finally Technocratic. These are measured by the methods and ideas that a society uses to govern itself. However, what if you live in a society like a warlord state where there is not even a nationalist or religious component to the nation-state you live under? This is what I call the frontier stage and I think it should be considered a kind of level 0 of societal development. A frontier society is one that does not have a generally accepted legitimacy or ideology and has citizens that only comply with the state out of immediate personal interest or avoidance of harm to themselves for non-compliance. Of course governments and warlords have their own ideas, but in a frontier society these ideas are justifications for the power of a state to rule over whatever people it has under it and are not internalized or accepted by most members of the society.
An example of this is obviously the wild west, but there are some other historical nation-states that can be considered to be at the frontier stage of development like Ezo, which fell apart as soon as their ruler lost money to pay everyone involved. Another example is Rhodesia, which was a regime run by a minority of white settlers who lacked legitimacy to the native majority of the country that was economically excluded and brutally oppressed.
In highly unequal societies like Apartheid South Africa or the modern United States, where certain social classes internalize the legitimacy of the state, other social classes reject legitimacy of the state and have a lived experience of being in a frontier society. To the privileged classes of these societies, authority feels just and benevolent because they have access to necessities and rights that other classes of people do not. The less privileged classes of these societies may be neighborhoods away from people who experience life in higher stages of societal development, because rampant inequality makes other groups of people into a functionally different civilization within the same country. To the less privileged, enforcement of laws are more brutal and often lack legitimacy to the people to whom it is most harshly applied. This creates a cycle because a person living under a state that is tyrannical to them has no reason to see it as a moral authority or follow its laws for any incentive other than to avoid punishment, and their economic needs will most likely be unmet by the society.
The reason I am talking about this is because when discussing the modern US and seeing the strange rise of Christian nationalism in a society that is supposedly in the nationalist stage of development, it challenges the current theory of societal development. If we instead understand that the rural areas of the US are in the frontier stage of development, it would begin to make sense why they would now in the modern era be entering the religious stage of development. Some theorists believe that the United States is backsliding, but if we consider this new frontier stage of societal development, it opens us to the hypothesis that maybe it’s not backsliding. Maybe the rural areas of the US never got to the stage of state legitimacy being determined by religion, and this is happening now due to unequal societal progress and consistent neglect of these areas culturally and politically.
This would also explain why many post-colonial societies tend to become religious or theocratic once they gain independence. The middle east for example is currently under regimes we consider theocratic, but this may actually be more developed than frontier civilizations despite the enormous drawbacks and restrictions on personal freedom that happen as a result of religious governance. If the colonized society is classified as a frontier society that operates through violence and collaborators to enforce the power of the state, that explains why a lot of anti-colonial sentiment tends to be religious in nature. Outside of the middle east, many Irish that fought in the IRA during the troubles were Catholic, and many people fighting in the Haitian revolution practiced Vodou which is the traditional faith of that country. These aspects of anti-colonial resistance are understated outside of the muslim world because they don’t have as much impact on governance or foreign perception, but they are there regardless. From this perspective we also correctly identify colonialism as a destructive force of societal development that causes it to revert back to the frontier stage. The rise of religious-derived legitimacy in these societies is an improvement over brute-force and colonial governance.
I believe that the existence of a frontier stage in the stages of societal development actually gives us a stronger way to understand and describe some feudal or pre-industrial societies. While the elites and rulers of these societies may have derived their authority from religious ideas or nationalist ones for later states, many peasants or citizens of these regimes likely did not internalize or believe this themselves and simply complied out of pragmatism. Legitimacy is more difficult to build than ideology or justification for power, and as we see in the modern world compliance is often more about survival than agreement with political ideas. In even older societies that were tribal or nomadic, we can understand them to possibly be cooperating out of survival needs like hunting and gathering rather than needing to assume religious cohesion. This may ironically put a religious tribe or clan at a higher level of development than a feudal monarchy governed through coercion, but I think that is appropriate if the people found a way to live together without the use of violence, and this would rightfully put many indigenous peoples at a higher stage of societal development and social cohesion than the colonial powers attempting to subjugate them.