tendency

/ˈten-dən(t)-sē/

borrowed from Medieval Latin tendentia, noun derivative of Latin tendent-, tendens, present participle of tendere "to extend outward, stretch, spread out, direct (one's course), aim (at a purpose)" (Medieval Latin, "to lead toward, move in a particular direction")

noun

  1. a proneness to a particular kind of thought or action

  2. direction or approach toward a place, object, effect, or limit

  3. the purposeful trend of something written or said : aim

tendency trend drift tenor current mean movement in a particular direction. tendency implies an inclination sometimes amounting to an impelling force. trend applies to the general direction maintained by a winding or irregular course.

noun

  1. the degree of clustering of the values of a statistical distribution that is usually measured by the arithmetic mean, mode, or median

noun

  1. a tendency that opposes or offsets another tendency

So what we have in human history is probably a long time, millions of years, in which we were like the current hunter gatherers. Fairly egalitarian. Meaning we had a tendency to build hierarchies, but we also had a countertendency, which is to keep things sort of level.