The African plains ape

That's you. Our fundamental challenge is how we can live in an environment which is radically different from the one in which we evolved. The ape on the savanna lived in small groups of blood relatives that lived by digging up tubers with sticks and maybe killing animals with sharp shards of rock attached to sticks or driving off other scavengers to steal the prey of more formidable beasts. The entire universe consisted of maybe a few hundred people and a 50 mile radius. (There were actually much longer trading networks but people never knew where the goods came from beyond the neighboring group they traded with directly. Perhaps rumors of more distant, and different places came with the exotic minerals and objects, but these were only dimly imagined.)

 

That we lost a good deal, in health, longevity, equality and freedom with the agriculture, the neolithic revolution, and the rise of the state is not in doubt. States, typically controlled by an alliance between a warrior caste and a priestly caste, were oppressive and immiserating to the vast majority of their subjects. But with paleolithic technology, the planet could not possibly have supported a human population of more than a few million. (I think people have tried to calculate a more specific number, but I'm not going to look it up, it isn't important. It's a tiny fraction of the present population, and even the population 10,000 years ago.) 

For people of today, living in a vastly more complex technological and political environment, it is simply impossible for most of them to have a good understanding of how the whole apparatus works. To the extent they are unhappy with their lot, it is not surprising that they see the state as somehow the source of their problems. Where else are they to look? It must be serving the interests of others, whoever those others may be. Their own direct encounters with what they perceive as the state seem mostly annoying or even oppressive. That it provides functions that are essential to their existence is essentially invisible to them. They take the economic and social environment that it produces for granted, and don't give it credit. 

 

I commend to your attention Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, discussing how the incoming administration has cast the state as the enemy of the people and proposes to replace it with something different. Whatever people may have thought they were voting for, that something different is actually what is called a patrimonial state: "based on the arbitrary rule of leaders who view themselves as traditional 'fathers' of their nations and who run the state as a family business of sorts, staffed by relatives, friends and other members of the ruler’s 'extended household.'"

 

Such a state exists only to enrich that extended household, and it is incompetent to carry out the essential functions of a modern state for the benefit of citizens. In fact, it doesn't even care to. As Hanson and Kopstein put it:

 

Social scientists thought that patrimonialism had been relegated to the dustbin of history. And for good reason: Such regimes couldn’t compete militarily or economically with states led by the expert civil services that helped make modern societies rich, powerful and relatively secure.

But a slew of self-aggrandizing leaders has taken advantage of rising inequality, cultural conflicts and changing demography to grab power. The result has been a steep decline in the government’s ability to provide essential services such as health care, education and safety.

 

We'll have more to say anon.