These periods of destruction/reconstruction devastated the weak, made clear who the powerful were, and established revolutionary new approaches to doing things (i.e., new orders) that set the stage for periods of prosperity that eventually became overextended as debt bubbles with large wealth gaps and led to debt busts that produced new stress tests and destruction/reconstruction periods (i.e., wars), which led to new orders and eventually the strong again gaining relative to the weak, and so on.
