Obedience Networks are used to gain mass formation - control by authority, at scale.
The motive of these networks is not wealth and power for the few, but for the people who form that network to be protected by that wealth and power.
The people of the network ARE the authority, as a whole, wealth and power simply being their proxy.
Making a great masse of people a wilful instrument of that authority - through wilful obedience.
"we are the hand, not the brain"
A network can range from small local groups to an entire nation of willing participants.
The strongest signal of an obedience network in play, is a loud focus on principle values while never actually attending to those values at all.
Taxation being the most effective tool used to gain the obedience
Through peer acceptance within the social hierarchy
"I'm proud to have paid all my taxes"
And fear of exile for anyone who resists - the tax avoidance narrative
This approach is ancient, tribal, primordial, social - and used to be effective in times where small problems could kill the entire tribe. An authoritarian hierarchy was mandatory for survival in spite of its injustice.
Today it is moot, due to the staggering amount of wealth available though cooperation and technology - there is no longer a need for obedience to a hierarchical authority.
This is not to say an administration is no longer required, nor is it to say we need 'proper' communism for goodness sake.
It is to say our tribes have yet to recreate our narratives to recognise this evolution of humanity and allow that recognition to shed the obedience networks of the aeons.
It's also to say that the staggering levels of wealth being produced now still lack justice in their distribution(more of those who create it do not get to keep it), precisely because the obedience network demands it be that way. It has nothing to do with socialism because socialists steal just as much of it unjustly as anyone else, thus reinforcing the point.
So civilisation is truly at risk until we can make a paradigm shift in the collective psyche dominating our world. Yes, take us to Mars, please, and beyond. That is just a part of the new narrative which will help the world climb to new heights.
But while this ancient obedience network persists, with such a destructive narrative, the risk remains ultra high for this civilisation. Only the rent seeker prevails in that world.
The old narrative used to be wrapped into what we today call religion and it worked well enough, and better than the alternative, though by no means perfectly.
Do we need a new religion, with it own new narrative. Which includes everything now so obviously missing from the old narrative of Christianity. Maybe it's already underway but given we're all living right in the middle of it, we cannot see the woods for the trees