[TeMPOraL]

Social contract didn't magically materialize in the West in 1950s. People have warred since forever, and still do, regardless of the ways they run their societies. But nuclear weapons are the reason major military powers don't go all-in against each other today.

Let's also not forget that social contract survives because of a legal system and people enforcing it with power overwhelming any individual trying to violate it. On an international stage, there's no such top-down enforcement (all nations are sovereign) - there's only mutual policing, and nuclear weapons are the overwhelming power.

[vagrantJin]

> Let's also not forget that social contract survives because of a legal system and people enforcing it with power overwhelming any individual trying to violate it

My god, what an arrogant statement. Your faith in overwhelming force is misguided.

The social contract holds because an individual makes a choice to choose peace. That is all the law can do - give us options of consequence. The law can't stop anyone from slaughtering their neighbours or running a bus through a full schoolyard. Thats why despite the US being one of the best armed and equipped police states - school shootings, which are unheard of in most countries - have continued to exist and continue to be perpetrated by teenagers.

Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.

[TeMPOraL]

> The social contract holds because an individual makes a choice to choose peace.

No, that's not all. The crucial missing ingredient here is the individual being able to assume others will make a peaceful choice too. The law offers incentives and disincentives that very strongly promote making peaceful choices - and it's because of that everyone gets to hold the belief that almost everyone else will be mostly peaceful.

(By "everyone" I of course mean "strangers" - laws and governments are not needed when communities are small and everyone personally knows everyone else. It's the scaling up that made formal governance necessary.)

> That is all the law can do - give us options of consequence.

Yes. The "consequence" part comes from the law being backed by a system of enforcement that wields overwhelming force.

> The law can't stop anyone from slaughtering their neighbours or running a bus through a full schoolyard.

It can't stop anyone who's bent on it, but it is an effective deterrent, and this is why, in fact, it does significantly reduce occurrence of such events in the population.

> Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.

Individual responsibility is a measure of how good you are at following incentive structures in your environment for longer-term benefit. It neither creates nor maintains those incentive structures.

[ModernMech]

> laws and governments are not needed when communities are small and everyone personally knows everyone else.

Crimes like rape and sexual assault still happen in cases where everyone knows one another (90% of cases). Even when everyone involved is family! The law and government are still needed to give strength and redress to these victims. What recourse would they otherwise have?

People are mostly peaceful, but emphasis on the mostly. The mostly doesn’t go away when then community size decreases - people will still mostly be peaceful, but others sometimes won’t. And when they won’t, that’s what law and government are for.

[NoGravitas]

>Overwhelming force is not the answer. Individual responsibility is.

Honestly, you're both wrong. It's obvious that overwhelming force doesn't work as a deterrent, at least in the context of the modern US, as you point out, and it's not great as a response. But as the other poster says, you need to be able to assume that most of the time, everyone else will choose peace, and in the modern US, that's not at all a safe assumption.

Both of you are ignoring two factors: culture, and material conditions. I'm only going to address material conditions, because while culture is important, there's not actually a lot you can do about it except through changing material conditions. In the modern US, people generally live in "atomized" conditions — you may know your neighbors, but you're not interdependent with them in any way. Most people don't really have any say in what their community is like, other than the individual act of voting once in a while. Most people work for a living, but don't really have any say in what their work life is like, because that's decided by managers, and people don't have much incentive to identify with their work or take pride in it, because the conditions of their work are decided by someone else, and the product of their work goes to someone else. People are encouraged to identify with their consumption choices, but in the end that just increases the framing of human social interactions as commodity exchanges.

In that context, it's not surprising that the social contract breaks down and that force is not terribly effective in enforcing it. If you want to change that, you have to change the underlying material conditions producing that alienation. Doing so is left as an exercise for the reader.

[dumpsterdiver]

> My god, what an arrogant statement. Your faith in overwhelming force is misguided.

No, you are the one who is misguided here for having any faith in personal responsibility. Humans are inherently greedy, and if left to their own devices without consequence they will absolutely attack their neighbors.

[willyt]

This is a very deep rooted idea in American culture, the kill or be killed, you screw someone over before they screw you over mentality. It's actually something people from Europe need to learn about to be successful in business negotiations with American firms, as there are certain boundaries that we don't cross for cultural reasons and so we don't tend to take a negotiation all the way to the logical extreme and we lose out as a result.

[nradov]

I assume you've never been involved in many high level American business negotiations. Because in the real world it's nothing like that. Regardless of cultural boundaries, the most profitable business relationships last for many years so it just doesn't pay to screw the other side over.

The only major exception is perhaps for certain limited sectors of the finance industry where derivatives contacts are understood to be a zero sum game. So everyone looks for clever ways to screw their trading partners. But European financial firms are just as ruthless as their American counterparts. In fact the Europeans have often been more willing to cross ethical lines.

[throwaway0a5e]

You're either lying through your teeth or using a very, very creative definition of "Europe" that excludes most of everything that once took orders from either Rome or Moscow.

Having to distrust your business partners is not uniquely American in the slightest.

[mbrodersen]

That’s not how it actually works. Most businesses work together for many years and it is a win-win situation. If you screw over your business partners you will very quickly run out of partners to work with.

[mbrodersen]

There will always be consequences. If you attack your neighbour there is a chance that it will go badly for you. There is also a chance that a group of neighbours will join forces to remove you as a threat. That’s the kind of dynamics that has created the modern society: groups of people joining forces to overpower individuals that refuse to leave their neighbours alone.

[mellavora]

Odd, in most social animal species, the drive to be part of the group is stronger than the drive to exploit the group.

Of course, I'm arguing a tautology. And ignoring that while most animals in a social species are socially motivated, certainly some of them will 'cheat'.

[TeMPOraL]

The size of the group matters. Humans function well in small groups where everyone knows each other, and everyone must work together to survive (and then only if we ignore what happens to individuals that, due to character or a sudden health issue, can no longer pull their weight). But this doesn't scale past couple dozen people.

Meanwhile, the other strong drive that both humans and other animal species share is competition between the groups. Over the course of history, humans started to form groups of hundreds, then thousands, and eventually millions of people. In such groups, the drive to subdivide and compete dominates - the history of social development is one of inventing social technologies - cultural and legal mechanisms that keep those large groups whole and defeat our competitive instincts.

[omarfarooq]

> But this doesn't scale past couple dozen people.

Modern corporations contradict that claim.

[TeMPOraL]

No, they don't. They're strong evidence for the claim.

Corporations are strongly structured internally. They usually have a "spine" of bog-standard hierarchical organization[0], and some form of secondary, graph-like, functional organization, different in every big company. Like e.g. (roughly real structure, but fictional names):

- Hierarchical spine: I currently work for team Awesome, under business unit BU1, under department D1; I report to manager Eve (Awesome), who reports to Fred (BU1), who reports to Greg (D1) who reports to Helen (CEO).

- Secondary organization: My team (Awesome) closely works with teams Invincible (BU1) and Jazzy (BU2), all with slightly different reporting chains.

There are dozens other teams in the corporation and several more BUs. I almost never interact with them directly. My social cooperation instinct covers my team and other teams in the "secondary organization" section. Separation of responsibilities and complex structure prevents my team from actively competing with other teams - we either cooperate with them, or don't know they exist.

This is how corporations scale. If you want to see a scaled-up system demonstrating competitive tendencies, that's... the market itself. And it needs the strong, top-down, hierarchical regulatory system to prevent that competition from immediately turning bloody[1].

--

[0] - Which is the fundamental social technology we've invented that allowed us to scale the societies and build a civilization. It's why every large (> ~100) group of people you can find has some form of hierarchical governance.

[1] - As a social technology, the modern symbiosis between the market and governments is a marvel. It's by no means perfect, but the fact still is: we didn't just suppress our competitive tendencies while scaling societies up - we've harnessed them and put them to work, and it mostly turned out OK.

[PeterisP]

Social animal species with a strong drive to be part of the group are still quite happy to exterminate other groups of the same species. Just a random example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War , but there are many others in different species - illustrating that being socially motivated does not mean avoiding organized slaughter of your fellow species-mates.

[Xylakant]

There's a very interesting chapter on why larger powers no longer go to war in industrialized societies in this game review https://acoup.blog/2021/08/20/collections-teaching-paradox-v... (don't let yourself be fooled by the fact it pretends to be a game review, it's a history lessen in disguise)

TL;DR: It no longer pays off. Before the industrialization, the way to improve your countries productivity was to acquire more land, more people, more resources - annex your neighbor. After the industrialization, that is no longer true. Any war against a power that is roughly approaching your power is likely to be net negative: You'll loose more of your economical improvements than you'll gain by annexing lands that are probably destroyed by war. It's what makes guerrilla warfare so powerful. The author also convincingly argues that the first and second world war were a product of people still stuck in the old, per-industrialization mindset while the economics and destructive power of post-industrialization applied.

(very selective) Quote:

Historically speaking, there is actually something to this. As Azar Gat notes in War in Human Civilization (2006), for most of human history, war ‘paid,’ at least for the elites who made decisions. In pre-industrial societies, returns to capital investment were very low. ( ...) For antiquity, the Roman Empire (...) one estimate, by Richard Saller, puts the total gains per capita at perhaps 25% over three centuries.

But returns to violent land acquisition were very, very high. In those same three centuries, the Romans probably increased the productive capacity of their empire by conquest 1,200% (...). Consequently, the ‘returns to warfare’ – if you won – were much higher than returns to peace. The largest and most prosperous states tended to become the largest and most prosperous states through lots of warfare and they tended to stay that way through even more of it.

As Gat notes, the industrial revolution changed this, breaking the agricultural energy economy. Suddenly it was possible, with steam power and machines, (...) to do work (...) – for the first time, societies could radically increase the amount of energy they could dispose of without expanding. Consequently – as we’ve seen – returns to infrastructure and other capital development suddenly became much higher. At the same time, these new industrial technologies made warfare much more destructive (...). Those armies were so destructive, they tended to destroy the sort of now-very-valuable mechanical infrastructure of these new industrial economies; they made the land they acquired less valuable by acquiring it. So even as what we might term ‘returns to capital’ were going wildly up, the costs of war were also increasing, which mean that ‘returns to warfare’ were going down for the first time in history.

It’s not clear exactly where the two lines cross, but it seems abundantly clear that for the most developed economies, this happened sometime before 1914 because it is almost impossible to argue that anything that could have possibly been won in the First World War could have ever – even on the cynical terms of the competitive militarism of the pre-industrial world – been worth the expenditure in blood and treasure.

[hodgesrm]

There were similar arguments before WW I, but the European nations still went to war. All you need is a situation where the people in charge hate their enemies more than they love their children.

[OneEyedRobot]

I'd say there's more to it.

. Underestimation of the cost of an early 20th C. war. Some glorious charges, you win, get home in time for dinner.

. A game theory problem in that once you start mobilizing you can't stop. Not starting the war is more dangerous than simply drawing down.

. The simple fun (for leadership) and profits in a war. Pushing pieces around a map is an enjoyable endeavor.

. Interlocking treaties with single points of failure.

etc.

[throw2500]

Then how come WWII happened? Were the great dictators just irrational?

[OneEyedRobot]

>Were the great dictators just irrational?

Probably not at all, although it's hard to think/talk in a general fashion about such large systems.

The Axis Powers strike me as fighting a more reasonable war than (for instance) their WWI aggressor predecessors if you view it as simply a grab for land and resources. It's a thing that a Khanate or a Roman governor would understand and appreciate. I'd say that the actions of the Germans and Japanese would make perfect sense to the ruling class of most pre-modern states.

It's hard work to avoid Historian's Fallacy.

[Xylakant]

If you want to summarize it in one sentence: yes, they were. In a nutshell, the argument is that the world wars were so destructive because the economic calculus changed, but people required the horrors of the wars to realize that the change had happened.

[harpiaharpyja]

Not sure if this is sarcasm, but yes, I don't think you need to look too deep to see that.

[mbrodersen]

However if war is used to funnel money from tax payers to companies, and politicians owned by those companies, then going to war makes a lot of sense. See the US invading Iraq and Afghanistan for example. The US lost the war in Afghanistan but it was a massive win for defence contractors and politicians controlled by those companies. So don’t hold your breath. The US will be going to war again as soon as a good inflammatory excuse can be used to whip the US population into yet another frenzy (made up “weapons of mass destruction” for example).