Social: the Gadiantons are becoming a more significant force. When they have power, one of the associated events is slaying “many of the people,” and laying “waste so many cities.” In the Mesoamerican context, this is the behavior of a city that has completely adopted the cult of war and become aggressive in the establishment of its tribute system.
It is valuable at this point to compare the evidence of the Gadiantons to the description of the Gadiantons as robbers. The process of theft to produce a livelihood tends to be a small operation, without large numbers of people involved. The more people, the thinner spread the spoils. To support a large number of people by theft alone, the thefts would have to be massive, and continual.
With that in mind, note that the described actions of the Gadiantons are murder and conquest over cities. This is not a good method of theft. If you kill the people you steal from, they are not available as future victims. If you destroy cities, you destroy the very basis for your livelihood. What we have in the description of the Gadiantons is not a description of theft, but of a city-state that must have had its own agricultural base, but that increased its wealth by the subjugation of other cities into a tribute system. They would kill and damage cities, but enough would be left for the city to continue, and more importantly, to provide a continual stream of goods into the Gadianton city-state. When the Gadiantons gained the political ascendancy among the Nephites, they instituted “plunderings and murders” (Helaman 6:17-18). The techniques of the Gadianton economic method were the same in the earlier version as they are in the current Gadianton threat. They are best seen in the context of the Mesoamerican cultural system of the cult of war and the establishment of tribute cities.