How does your theory explain why Christianity was successful?

Yes, and the complex criss-crossing of imperatives show the potential of this mode of analysis. We all follow the imperatives of dead people, including rulers--of course, some play a greater role than others in determining which of the more ancient imperatives get continued and which get cut off. And, someone told the new wife she should donate to UNICEF to save the koalas, the janitor becomes a source of new ideas because he's paid close attention to some important imperatives, which he "transmits" in new contexts (that's what an "original idea" comes down to). In the other words, the "other sources" also derive from power centers, even if less evidently. You're also right that we can't trace every single imperative everyone follows all the time back to every single source. What we can do is bring the ones that are most urgent to us now into clearer focus by identifying its likeliest major source and figuring out how it can be an imperative we fulfill in a shared way.

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I think I may have accidentally "unsaved your comment, so I copy and paste below before responding:

People can often intuit these imperative already, but don’t always agree with them. Even if imperative is clarified, people don’t have to agree with it.

State of mind that determines agreement or disagreement is not only formed by the aggregated information flow from power centers, humans are also complex biological organisms so they are also centers of new information creation, eg man looking for food to fulfill his hunger, looking for strength to impress wife and kids, these are contributing to social structure but they are endogenous motivations. In the same way that powerful individual creates and disseminates info in your model, all individuals can to varying degrees. Therefore clarifying power centers is not only impossible because you’d have to track down every individual’s entire motivations network, but it wouldn’t resolve sources of disagreement even if you could do it.

Take example of immigration to US, this only passes because imperative is not clarified, appeals to existing moralities were made, even though it was bullcrap/deceptive, and only as morality and power dynamics is changing are more explicit talks about ‘white dispossession’ entertained. But obviously there was no desire for a clear policy goal 40 years ago because nobody wanted mass immigration apart from ones pushing it...i.e. clarified imperatives only work when imperative is universally considered benevolent and good....so why is clarified imperative a good thing for the rulers you are appealing to....at some level your model needs uniformly noble rulers and stupid subjects to work....both assumptions wrong.

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If you don't agree with one imperative (strictly speaking, you disobey, presumably without prohibitive cost, one imperative), it's because you are following another (which must be coming from another power center). There are prescribed and prohibited ways of getting food, showing strength, etc.--we don't make them up on the fly. Yes, each individual, even, in a way, the lowest in the hierarchy, issues effective imperatives. But if some people have more power than others, it means some imperatives are more effective than others, and some dependent on and derivative of others. Everyone wants the imperatives they issue to be effective--otherwise, what would be the point of issuing them? The more power you have, the more capable you are of making your imperatives consistent and effective ("consistent" and "effective" are almost synonyms here). If there are enough people who "disagree" with imperatives to hinder their implementation, that means power is confused. Unless you want to say that imperatives flow so freely and diversely that they can never be ordered, which would be tantamount to saying there is no power, imperatives can be made more consistent and effective, from the top down.

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You could say that when people with the right ideology fight seriously to take power, everyone who agrees with them can help them fight. Then, if they win, society will be ruled by those with the right ideology. The reason I don't speak in those terms is that then we have to argue about what the right ideology is, and this kind of argument can't be separated from the ways various power centers leverage one or another of those ideologies. What everyone is arguing for turns out to be something other than what they were arguing for. Imperatives can be made clear when the purposes of those imperatives are also made clear. When I say "purposes," that seems to shift us over into "ideologies," because we can always argue about whether one purpose is more worthy than another. But, say, building a bridge is a purpose, without any ideology. You could tell someone to do something as part of a crew building a bridge. Rescuing people in an emergency is a purpose, but there's no ideology informing it. Now, we can say, but of course, where we should build a bridge, and which emergency do we devote resources to are "ideological" choices. We do get to moral and ethical questions--ultimately, what is a good society, or how should society be rightly ordered? ""Ideology" implies partisanship, and that every question gets plugged into one or another ideology. But if a good society is one that remembers its origin, and if any origin is in some deferral of violence, how to make decisions regarding building bridges and sorting out emergency resources can follow from the chains of authority already constitutive of that social order. Then, if we're arguing, we're arguing about whether our rulers are taking care to commemorate the origin, and the better they are at doing this the more focused and productive the arguments will be. This is really another way of speaking about the clarity of imperatives--a social order founded upon a distribution of land, or of authorities, or privileges and responsibilities, or a hierarchy of institutions, because all that follows from the event of founding (who needed to do what to create order) will be structured by clearer chains of command than one in which the origin is disdained, or disputed.