[icebraining]

"Governments", as in executive bodies, yes. "Governments", and in systems of government, definitively not. There are multitudes of non-hierarchical, stateless mechanisms that arise from communities and societies trying to solve a cooperation problem.

Just four years ago, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her work demonstrating how institutional arrangements were developed in various societies facing the problem of resource exhaustion due to overconsumption, without the intervention of the State.

But these are just a few concrete examples of an uncountable number of norms and institutions there are everywhere, and much more there would be if the State intervention didn't crowd them out by imposing its own solutions and banned all others.