History

Years ago - I believe in one of Dostoyevsky's novels, but I haven't been able to run it down - I read a wonderful allegory on this topic.

The basic gist of it, told nowhere near as well as it was originally:

Once upon a time, there was a peaceful village of farmers. They went through their days, tending their fields and caring for their livestock and each other and simply living.

Every few years though, a group of bandits would ride down out of the nearby hills and attack tge village and take all they could carry of the farmers' crops and livestock.

Then one year, an entirely different group of bandits rode down from a different part of the hills, and they attacked the village and took everything.

So when, a few months later, the customary bandits rode down to attack, they found the village already devastated and everything they would've stolen already gone.

The bandits knew they couldn't allow that - they depended on their theft of the villagers' goods for their own livelihood. So they went back to their camp and, over a hard winter, thought about what to do.

The next spring - long before the harvest, so long before their customary attack on the villagers, they rode down and they approached the village elders with a proposal.

Instead of attacking the villagers and taking everything, they would settle for just taking half of everything, and in exchange they would protect the villagers from being attacked by those other bandits and having everything taken.

And the villagers, with no other hope - being allowed to keep hslf of the fruits of their labors was at least better than losing everything - grudgingly agreed.

And thus was government born.

Throughout history society has collapsed over and over again either by mismanagement or by overthrow of the ruling class. It's a natural cycle that we seem to be moving away from- Revolt has been mischaracterized and criminalized in an attempt to maintain the status quo. But things weren't always like this. edit: I'm not advocating for anything, just stating some observations

Changing the title of the article isn't helpful

The impulse to follow big strong loud dangerous people is baked into the our tribal psyche since before we were homo sapiens

The bandits never had to come from outside, they were already the tribal ruling class

The idea of 'a peaceful village of farmers just growing stuff' is a very bad shorthand for how complex the tapestry of human culture has been

The first agriculture workers were likely captured slaves

So it's more accurate to say: A bunch of bandits kidnapped other people and forced them to tend land, leaving the bandits the time and resources to get better at kidnapping, over time the slaves started becoming ambivalent and eventually respecting and in some cases worshiping the bandits that had kidnapped their grandparents, after enough generations are born under the yoke of servitude, it becomes just daily life