Tuesday, June 12, 2012

History of government

I just started reading Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel". Yeah, I know. I'm late to the party, but I just found the book available in my price range at Goodwill...

The earliest parts of the book gave me a couple of thoughts.

Even if government/the State were "necessary" to get "us" to where "we" as a species are now (which is a common, unproven, objection to anarchy/liberty), they are no longer necessary. That would be like saying that because you had to drink milk when you were a baby, you can't ingest anything else now that you are grown. You must keep nursing, exclusively, until the day you die. Or that since humans once used stone tools, we can't advance beyond that, either. It's silly.

And...

Species evolve under pressure. As long as things are going well, there is no reason to change. Perhaps government/the State was the pressure that made humans evolve. Like a new parasite or disease. Or, if not an effect on biological evolution, perhaps there was a pressure to force cultural evolution, instead. Maybe government didn't "free" humans to develop culture and civilization, as has been claimed- maybe those things developed and evolved as a sort of immune response to the deadly threat posed by government's growth; an evolutionary arms race.


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