Patriarchy is the correct sociological term. I can't help if it offends you for some reason. Just have to chock that up to your bastion of defensiveness. 😉
And no, hierarchy and stratification are not inherent characteristics of large populations. They are indicative of dominance hierarchies, which when patrilineal and male dominated, are correctly termed patriarchies. The fact that you reject that is irrelevant to me. It's the correct term for such a social system.
A most excellent (although quite long) book on the topic of the myths of hierarchy = civilization is The Dawn of Everything, which does a wonderful, very detailed job of demonstrating how even for the first several thousand years of Agriculture, most human cultures, even those with kings and other ostensible hierarchy, mostly maintained a huge amount of personal autonomy.
"We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. Still, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. In fact, if you bracket the Eurasian Iron Age (which is effectively what we have been doing here), they represent the vast majority of human social experience."
Graeber, David. The Dawn of Everything (p. 523). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
And from my article, written after reading this book:
"But, as I’m finding out, there are also innumerable other examples of settlements, cities, and even kingdoms from around the world where there was little to no top-down hierarchy or centralized political administration. From 300-hectare settlements in China’s Shandong Province that predate the earliest royal dynasties by 1000 years, to enormous ceremonial centers of the Maya which also predate the rise of the kings by 1000 years, we have evidence of many large communities with no evidence of central government or top-down hierarchy."
