Quote Originally posted by Duder View Post
Quote Originally posted by guacamole View Post
Leviathan 101 and Thomas Hobbes. In any situation characterized by a lack of a social order, some sort of state, you will have the "bellum omnium contra omnes", the "war of everyone against everyone else".
Hello, Guaca -

I don't believe that the ungoverned society Hobbs discusses ever did or ever will exist. Wherever there is a group of organisms, whether it be a modern human nation or some microbes in a Petri dish, it will always happen that some organisms will bump into other organisms - that is, they will have conflicting objectivies goals. When this happens, the conflict is always resolved by some means. Either the means are "dictatorial", where one organism carries the day through brute force, or it is more "democratic", where the organisms end their conflict without force and cooperate toward a common end. Either resolution represents a kind of rudimentary state.

"The state" is simply a name given to the ways in which we organisms resolve situations where we bump into one another. The only way we could have no state at all would be to totally avoid bumping into one another, and I don't think that is possible.

Just my $.02

Nicely said.