The Season Of Innocence

The Season of Innocence, also commonly and interchangably called the Great Forgetting, is a period of unknown duration when the Earth retreated from the Galactic Compact and more radically attempted to retreat from history itself.
It started with the Vow of Earth and according to legend it was brought to a close by the actions of Klane Kalonia.
At the beginning of the Season of Innocence, there was an ecological upheaval of great magnitude, after which the Earth was flooded with a number of diverse alien species which were collectively known as the Gene Sea. The introduction of these biota altered the ecosystem profoundly, although it is believed that it had been massively damaged not long before. The human population of Earth shrunk drastically either before the Vow of Earth, afterwards with the arrival of the gene sea, or more likely both. For the survivors a new social order was instituted.
The rules of the Season of Innocence were enforced in a powerful but subtle and hidden way by the combined authority of many Enclaves acting together as the Conclave. Most types of writing were prohibited, except for the strictly practical and even that was discouraged. Settlements were not permitted to grow larger than a certain size or to perist for more than three generations until they were destroyed in a Great Burning ceremony. The Rider tribes were to be maintained in a state of bucolic freedom and ignorance with primitive technology levels and their populations were kept low.
It's not unreasonable to ask whether the Season of Innocence was really as innocent as it sounds. When the Guardians Of Earth set the structures in place to define and preserve a social order where Rider culture would be valued above all others on the relatively empty Earth, why did they think the ideals of the Riders were any more worthy than other cultures? Did they understand the resentment that their rules would breed in the peoples who were obliged to serve the Riders needs even as their own towns were periodically destroyed to prevent the return of history? It appears now, only that they were following the fashion of some extreme pastoral fantasy which they implemented with astonishing effectiveness.