The way I see it, the minute any society tries to make a property stake on land, they've taken their relationship with the world around them to an entirely different level. If someone wants to separate from a nomadic tribe, they can just leave and hunt/gather on their own. As doodle has pointed out, a lot changes when you start staking vast property claims. Even if you somehow don't "need" an army to defend your claim, the mere act of making such an audacious claim on otherwise naturally-used land is a show of force on others.
Any time you have those claims being made, any arrangement with a government, private security firm, arbitrator, etc, is going to come with the assumption that they cover a certain area. This area can be moved out of if ou wish, but if you're inside the area, you're under its rules, and you are "forced" to abide by them because someone you don't know arbitrarily said that they own all this.
Here, not only does the NEED for government become much higher, but the implications of having a governing force go way up, because they're not just protecting people in a nomadic group, they're protecting vast property claims, and if you don't agree with those property claims, you're fighting against an entity you deem illegitimate, whether it's the property "owner," or the government enforcing his claim.
I think this idea of "private arrangements" would work much better if we all somehow agreed to live a nomadic lifestyle in equilibrium with the world around us, but once we say "f*ck that, there's oil down there," and start claiming vast acreage of land as our own to do with as we please, we've essentially bitten from the forbidden fruit of force. So I think the distinction of "centralized government" vs "loose private security arrangement" is only valid to the degree that we can agree that what these organizations are "protecting" are valid claims to protect.
To go further, you really can't have anything like that (ag society) and call it a "voluntary society" because there's nothing voluntary about me accepting the displacement, pollution, inaccesibility, and ecological fuck-uppery of whatever Farmer Joe and Miner Bob want to do to the land that I used to hunt on. Also, if I wan't to "secede" from said society, do I have to leave land I've developed to someone else? Or can I just secede my property? That could be taken to the extreme, for if a "government" has the right to secede from "government," then surely an individual and their "rightly held property claim" have a right to secede from the smaller goverment. This is the big inconsistency of people who claim states have the right to secede. The idea is quite statist, because it implies the state's superiority not just over the federal government, but over the individual. If after Texas eventully secedes from the Union MediumTex wants to secede from Texas, what kind hipocrisy would it be if they didn't allow it (and what kind of pandora's box would it be if they did)?
violence before government
Moderator: Global Moderator
Re: violence before government
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
- Thomas Paine
- Thomas Paine
Re: violence before government
Im going to bump this thread again and put in another plug for this course on humankind. Lectures 5 and 6 in the course perfectly relate to what we are discussing here. Even if you don't watch the first lectures, I think just watching these two will give you a good perspective on how our present society developed and evolved.
https://www.coursera.org/course/humankind
Lecture 5: History’s Biggest Fraud
About 12,000 years ago, people in the Middle East, China, and Central America began domesticating plants and animals. In the process, Homo sapiens, too, was domesticated, abandoning a life of hunting and gathering for the pleasures and discomforts of agriculture. For most people, the discomforts outweighed the pleasures. The Agricultural Revolution made the life of the average person harder. Why, then, did it occur?
Lecture 6: Building Pyramids
For millions of years, humans lived in intimate bands of no more than a few dozen individuals. Our biological instincts are adapted to this way of life. Humans are consequently ill-equipped to cooperate with large numbers of strangers. Yet shortly after the Agricultural Revolution erupted, humans established cities, kingdoms, and huge empires. How did they do it? How can millions of strangers agree on shared laws, norms and values?
https://www.coursera.org/course/humankind
Lecture 5: History’s Biggest Fraud
About 12,000 years ago, people in the Middle East, China, and Central America began domesticating plants and animals. In the process, Homo sapiens, too, was domesticated, abandoning a life of hunting and gathering for the pleasures and discomforts of agriculture. For most people, the discomforts outweighed the pleasures. The Agricultural Revolution made the life of the average person harder. Why, then, did it occur?
Lecture 6: Building Pyramids
For millions of years, humans lived in intimate bands of no more than a few dozen individuals. Our biological instincts are adapted to this way of life. Humans are consequently ill-equipped to cooperate with large numbers of strangers. Yet shortly after the Agricultural Revolution erupted, humans established cities, kingdoms, and huge empires. How did they do it? How can millions of strangers agree on shared laws, norms and values?
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. - Blaise Pascal