Feudalism (and we still have monarchies to this day cough KSA cough) in tl;dr is the notion that social relations between homo sapiens should be built on the same asymmetric principles as social relations in other large herding domesticated species.

Can we come up with better, more primate, or even more human, systems? I would claim we could, by swapping reflexive antisymmetric transitive relations for reflexive symmetric transitive ones (as those of us with T-V distinguishing languages have largely done), but nearly a half century of people watching has convinced me there exist large numbers of people who are perfectly happy to be servile to some as long as they get to be arrogant to yet others.