Yes, that's why I called them "failed attempts to encapsulate reality into an over simplified story."

This sounds like a non true scotsman. If large societies buying into a story doesn’t qualify it as a success, what does? M

Why would that be the qualification for success? I didn’t write that “everyone believing it” was the marker of success, so I don’t know why that would be relevant.

In another comment thread, I wrote that a story is needed which combines accurate scientific information with a human purpose in the world. Those examples quite obviously didn’t have scientific views of the world.

By that standard, successful societies are the ones without a story. While the ones with story are autocratic and dictatorships.

By that token, every attempt to encapsulate reality into a simplified story is successful until it fails. Not a very useful thing to bring to the table

Any movement. Communism, nazism, capitalism and religions.

Any extremist political '-ism' has thousands of murders in his belt.

The best goverments are the centered ones, the ones which gave both individual and social rights.