[JTbane]

>I mean when I think about it, I was born into an established system that imposed its rules on me from birth. I had no say in accepting/rejecting the rules. I'm essentially property of the state, subject to its whims with little to no hope of changing them.

Would you rather be born into a state of anarchy? I think Hobbes addressed this.

[adolph]

As a counterargument to Hobbes here is an excerpt from "The Dawn of Everything" in which Graeber and Wengrow argue that Hobbes' assertion isn't based in evidence.

https://lithub.com/the-dawn-of-everything-is-not-a-book-abou...

[Manuel_D]

Most of the anthropological evidence sides with Hobbes. The rates of violence in hunter gatherer societies is massive, with 10-15% of people dying at the hands of other humans. For the 20th century, despite two world wars, this figure was about 2%

[tnjm]

The evidence is very sparse, and what we do have suggests that modern hunter-gatherer societies are, on average, no more violent than humanity in general. (My personal if limited observation, having lived briefly with several, is that they seem to be notably less violent than the -- often frontier -- communities around them.)

Steven Pinker has muddied the water with quite a lot of nonsense in The Better Angels of our Nature. An interesting, better-sourced and less cherry-picked read is a 2013 paper in Science[0].

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1235675

[Manuel_D]

The evidence is not sparse, it comes from a diverse set of sources from observation of existing hunter-gatheter communities across different continents as well as archaeological evidence. It's true that violence is much lower in absolute numbers. But by virtue of drastically lower overall populations, the proportional rate is much higher. 5 people killed our of a kin-group of 100 people is like 15 million people killed in the USA.

There is an appeal to the thought that humans in a natural state are peaceful. Because if modern society has made mankind violent, then we can hopefully roll back it's influence and restore us to that peaceful state. But that's not what our evidence suggests.

This article examines existing hunter gatherers: https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2007/12/19/nobl...

For a book that dives into the archaeological evidence, see War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat.

[tnjm]

The problem with this is that all modern hunter-gatherer societies are under extreme pressure due to the theft of their lands and resources. This is particularly true in the context of the anecdotes given in the linked article, even if its characterization of today's !Kung or aboriginal peoples in Australia as being in a state of "almost constant tribal warfare" is bizarre (to put it kindly and assume good faith).

There is also an idealogical appeal by the likes of Pinker to the idea that nation states are the only structures that can prevent us from a return to a kind of endemic violence amongst hunter-gatherers. This thought has historically been exploited by those who would steal their lands, and do it "for their own good".

You might call it "doing a Chagnon" - precipitate violence, use that to characterize a people as warlike, then use that as a pretext to take even more resources.

Of course it's possible to find a hunter-gatherer society which is more violent than a particular modern nation state. It's also trivial to find an inverse example. When you look at what evidence we do have, you see that hunter-gatherers are no more or less violent than the rest of us, and when violence does flare it happens for the very same reasons it happens anywhere else.

[Manuel_D]

Your point about butter gatherers being pressured by the encroachment of civilization is true. But in those situations, the rates of violent death are mostly in the 25-60% range, as was observed in many of the Native American societies during the colonial period. It's important to exclude these outliers due to the influence of encroaching civilizations. But even absent these outliers, and exclusively drawing on archaeological evidence, the rates of violence in hunter-gatheter societies is drastically higher [1].

1. https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...