Civilization and Government

Civilization crawled out of the mud and realized it would not survive without government. Cooperation, hence productivity and wealth, could only be maximized if everyone pulled in the same direction. Without the threat of collective force, a densely populated agrarian community would always be in danger of unravelling into what Karl Marx called "the war of everybody against everybody else."

What is there to prevent a rich and powerful financier from defrauding investors of 50 billion dollars? What is there to prevent a strong man from taking his weaker neighbor's crops, animals, and wife? Only the threat of the community seeking justice through state-sanctioned violence.

Many of the earliest civilizations revered the bull. The first farmers, grubbing about in the mud of some delta, encountered the wild bull and realized that to prosper, they needed to somehow steal or appropriate the bull's immense muscular strength. The problem was how to get this dangerous and irritable animal to cooperate without getting killed, and the answer was to turn the bull into an ox. A castrated and docile bovine animal has the same muscular strength as a wild bull, but it's governable.

Jefferson was wrong when he said "(T)o secure these rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed," because he knew as well as you or I that the first concern of any government is to make sure its subjects (or citizens, as they're called) are governable. The South-African writer JD Coetzee explains, "From the moment of our birth we are subject," offering the birth certificate itself as the certificate of subjugation, for no person today is recognized as a living human being unless the government has certified that he or she was born.

Coetzee adds, "Not only may you not enter the state without certification; you are, in the eyes of the state, not dead until you are certified dead, and you can be certified dead only by an officer who himself (herself) holds state certification." This process makes it possible to render each citizen's life a statistic, is the equivalent of castrating the bull, and makes modern citizens into subjects, for our very existence goes unrecognized, and we have no legal identity unless it is conferred on us by the state.

This is why conservatives see government as basically a force for evil. But could civilization exist without government? Could we cooperate peacefully just because it's the rational thing to do, without the threat of government coercion and subjugation? It's a subject worth debating.