We have government because we live in a world where violence is a potentially effective tactic for achieving goals. Government exists to curb and control this tendency, to govern it.
The state can be thought of as a sedentary bandit, who instead of pillaging and burning a village of farmers extorted them and eventually started making sure no one else pillages or burns them since that interferes with the farmers paying him. The roving bandit has no incentive to assure the sustainability of a particular farming settlement he parasites. A stationary banding in a sense farms the settlement.
Government can expediently be defined, ultimately beneath all the full, as a territorial monopolist of violence. There is a trade off between government violence used to prevent anyone else from exercising violence and violence by other organized groups. How do we know we are at the optimal balance in a utilitarian sense?
Also Moldbug dosen’t want to do away with government he wants to propose a different kind of government. And we have in the past had systems of government that where the result of people sitting down and then trying to design a political system. To take modern examples of this (though I could easily pull out several Greek city states), perhaps the Soviet Union was a bad design, but the United States of America literally took over the world. In any case this demonstrates that new forms of government (not necessarily very good government) can be designed and implemented.
Uncontrolled violence turns out to be destructive to both the subject of the violence and also the wielder --
Government violence s ideally more predictable than the violence it prevents (that’s the whole reason we in the West think rule of law is a good idea). Sure the government has other tools to prevent violence than just violence of its own, but ultimately all law is violence. In the sense of the WHO definition:
...as the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.
You can easily make the violence painless by say sedating a would be rapist with the stun setting on your laser gun, and you can easily also eliminate the suffering of imprisoning him, by modifying his brain with advanced tools. But changing a persons mind without their consent or by giving them a choice between 6 years imprisonment and modifying their brain has surely just experienced violence according to the above definition.
it turns out that it’s potentially more fun to be in a citizen-soldier in a democracy than a menial soldier in an tyranny, or a member of a warlord’s entourag
The point of the the cryptographically controlled weapons is that you need a very small group of people who thinks being a citizen soldier is less fun than being paid handsomely by Blackwater to work.
The state can be thought of as a sedentary bandit, who instead of pillaging and burning a village of farmers extorted them and eventually started making sure no one else pillages or burns them since that interferes with the farmers paying him. The roving bandit has no incentive to assure the sustainability of a particular farming settlement he parasites. A stationary banding in a sense farms the settlement.
Government can expediently be defined, ultimately beneath all the full, as a territorial monopolist of violence. There is a trade off between government violence used to prevent anyone else from exercising violence and violence by other organized groups. How do we know we are at the optimal balance in a utilitarian sense?
Also Moldbug dosen’t want to do away with government he wants to propose a different kind of government. And we have in the past had systems of government that where the result of people sitting down and then trying to design a political system. To take modern examples of this (though I could easily pull out several Greek city states), perhaps the Soviet Union was a bad design, but the United States of America literally took over the world. In any case this demonstrates that new forms of government (not necessarily very good government) can be designed and implemented.
Government violence s ideally more predictable than the violence it prevents (that’s the whole reason we in the West think rule of law is a good idea). Sure the government has other tools to prevent violence than just violence of its own, but ultimately all law is violence. In the sense of the WHO definition:
You can easily make the violence painless by say sedating a would be rapist with the stun setting on your laser gun, and you can easily also eliminate the suffering of imprisoning him, by modifying his brain with advanced tools. But changing a persons mind without their consent or by giving them a choice between 6 years imprisonment and modifying their brain has surely just experienced violence according to the above definition.
The point of the the cryptographically controlled weapons is that you need a very small group of people who thinks being a citizen soldier is less fun than being paid handsomely by Blackwater to work.