There is nothing inherent about wealth that grants the owner power over many other people. The owner, if very skilled in combat, might be able to physically defend their wealth against three? Five? Eight? Other people. Beyond that they have no chance.
In any system where wealth converts to power, it does because the majority of people implicitly agree with playing the game that way.
In a practical egalitarian society, if the person with all the furs decided one day to not share, then the people would stop sharing their food, tools, building skills, childcare, medicinal treatments, fire, feasts, etc. with this person. They wouldn't have any choice but to rejoin society or try to go truly independent.
Sure, and this is why the wealthy always use some of their wealth protecting themselves. In a society where physical violence is an immanent possibility they hire some kind of bodyguards; in a society like ours where the main threats are not physical in nature, they employ lawyers.
...but then why wouldn't the bodyguards just expropriate even greater quantities of that wealth than the wealthy would bestow on them?
Somehow, they have to first be convinced that the wealthy has some sort of moral right to their possessions. In other words, they have to play along in the game of wealth distribution.
I'm not sure I understand the situation you describe. If you hire 40 goons to guard your furs, those goons could physically overpower you and take your furs for themselves.
...unless you have convinced them of your moral right to those furs. That's literally the only way a large group of people can be "unable" to expropriate them.
I don’t believe the goons would be operating on the principle of your moral right to the furs, rather they would be taking the more practical approach of believing you can provide them with a better quality of life than the next guy (and that they don’t have the skills to acquire furs on their own)
> There is nothing inherent about wealth that grants the owner power over many other people. The owner, if very skilled in combat, might be able to physically defend their wealth
In order to even have a concept of "owning wealth" there must be a physical defense of wealth already set up.
It's "inherent" in that sense. Owning the thing means having some means of physical militaristic defense of the thing.
The underlying fact you're referencing here is simply that the means of defense is never an individual's physical power.
What it is instead, is their position in a social graph of interests. Other people in the society have their own lives structured so that it's in their interests to serve and protect power.
I don't want to disagree with your nuanced and well-reasoned reply in general.
However, ownership exists in egalitarian forms of organisation too. It's not the "exclusive right to prevent others from using the thing", but in any human arrangement people understand that some objects are needed by some people (crutch, broken leg), some objects are more actively used by some people (household hatchet, cutting wood every week), and some objects have sentimental value for some people (grandma's ashes.)
These things normally count as property, with no violence to enforce it.
Sure you can overpower me and steal everything I have - once. Or you can join me and I’ll provide you a better living than those others for the rest of your life.
Yeah, so then we're looking at a person who is so adept at everything that they single-handedly can outperform society in providing necessary functions for other people. If that sort of person exists, they're surely rare enough that it makes no sense to optimise society around them.
The individual in question needn’t outperform the rest of society, they merely need to be critical to the activities of the rest of society. Whether Their criticality is necessary, just, or effective doesn't matter. But it does mean that they can pay bodyguards better than everyone else, and there is no inherent reason to believe the body guards will beanle to step into that role.
Humans will suffer very bad leadership indeed. Not only does the leadership not need to be "the best" -- they can be very abusive and tyrannical for a very long time, before any kind of collective revolt is organized.
"all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed"
> As a group expands in size, don’t the opportunities for an individual to amass wealth, and then translate that to power, also increase significantly?
Yes and no. Human societies in general have concepts of personal property (i.e. something you use, like your toothbrush).
Not all societies have concepts of private property that we have today i.e. something you never use but still control. This is a complex set of viewpoints with many conflicts. They changed a lot over time. Many are very modern.
E.g. you can become owner of land by adverse possession.
In many egalitarian societies a person hoarding excessive amounts of objects is seen as unhinged.
In any system where wealth converts to power, it does because the majority of people implicitly agree with playing the game that way.
In a practical egalitarian society, if the person with all the furs decided one day to not share, then the people would stop sharing their food, tools, building skills, childcare, medicinal treatments, fire, feasts, etc. with this person. They wouldn't have any choice but to rejoin society or try to go truly independent.