Your second paragraph asserts without proof that Hobbesian war is inevitable, but there are lots of counterexamples to disprove that claim.
Please provide the counterexamples. I am convinced that power struggles exist at every level of societal organization, down to a family of two.
Depends what you mean by that. If you're saying that people disagree, fine--but disagreement only becomes a libertarian problem when it involves initiation of aggression. To suggest that
violent conflict exists at all levels is simply not reasonable. Examples
abound:
* The so-called "Wild West" was
not so wild after all. On the frontier where government hadn't yet penetrated, people worked out peaceful arrangements nothing like a John Wayne movie.
* The
Pennsylvania colony existed in a state of anarchy for several years.
*
Somalia is no Utopia--but without a state, it's doing considerably better than its neighbors.
* Protesters at
Tiananmen Square constructed and operated a successful anarchist society for two months. (Ironically, they gathered to demand democracy, and seem not to have appreciated that they were actually enacting something better.)
* Whenever people come to a four-way stop sign, or wait for a bus, or spread a beach towel, they demonstrate non-violent conflict resolution.
The final paragraph makes the dubious claim that the greatest centralization corresponds with the greatest progress. The Soviet Union is a decent counterexample. As is the US: her periods of greatest prosperity have been her times of greatest freedom, not greatest centralization.
You define "success" inconsistently. The "success" of an organization is the extent of its control w.r.t. rival organizations.
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That definition is singularly slanted in favor of the state: if "success" is roughly defined as "power," especially coercive power, then yes--totalitarian societies are the most "successful." But who cares?
It might or might not correlate with economic, military, or political success at all, although it generally does. Our current gov is much more "successful" in this Dawkinsian sense than its historical predecessors.
And the Third Reich was even more successful. So what? If that's "success," give me failure.
Do you dispute the fact that we are indeed descended from a long line of herd animals? It's not really open to argument that we inherited our group instinct from a shrew-like ancestor 65 million years ago.
I do not dispute evolution; on the contrary, I use it very much in my argument. What I dispute is the conclusion that we maintain our social organization only because we are hard-wired herd animals.
I didn't say "only." But if you drop the "only," what's left is absolutely indisputable.
Moreover, narrowly taken, the argument is completely wrong. We certainly do not have the social organization of pre-historic men - isolated family groups of no more than 30 individuals. Instead, our social structure has evolved to match the environment, biology, and technology, to maximize the survival chances of genes. Read the "Selfish Gene" for a beautiful discussion on the subject.
It's an elaborate version of the tribal structure. Literally, empires evolved from kingdoms, which evolved from city-states, which evolved from tribes, which evolved from families. The general layout of all are identical. The latter are merely bigger and more elaborate.
What you
can't claim is that we've tried anything else. Arguably, we
couldn't have tried anything else prior to the 19th century: before that, practically everyone hovered on the brink of starvation. A handful of the most hardened anarchists might resort to a tribal structure in a survival situation.
The only debatable question is whether the herd or tribe can be improved upon. But the fact that we've always done things that way does nothing to advance the case; we've done it since before we left the trees or started using tools. We didn't exactly weigh all the alternatives carefully.
There may be more efficient ways to organize, but I doubt it very much. Every attempt at large-scale pre-meditated social engineering historically has collapsed relatively quickly...
Yup. What hasn't been tried is
unpremeditated, non-engineered, decentralized society. I don't know of any libertarians (or anarcho capitalists) who suggest that a centrally-designed society is a workable idea. The free market is the antithesis of that.
--Len.