Power persists through incremental accumulated advantages rather than dramatic ruptures.

Evidence

We suggest that power endures not through dramatic shifts, but through the steady accumulation of small advantages that lock the status quo in place. — Mikael Persson and Anders Sundell, Blocking the Poor, 8

Categorization

• APHORISMS: Reads as a piece of durable wisdom about how dominance actually works — quiet accretion rather than spectacle.
• XREF: Echoes Tolstoy’s ‘kingdoms of infinite complexity in an instant’ framing and discussions of institutional drift in Pierson. — connects to: Contentious innovation is incremental and endures mainly when it yields real advantage. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 274
• BMF: Evokes the slow, small-advantage mechanics of stratified societies in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower — though only obliquely; a real adjacent read is Hacker and Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics.