Right but that gets into scaling problems and arguments... for a hundred people sticks might work, for a thousand it gets dicey, by 10,000 things start to break

Right but that gets into scaling problems and arguments... for a hundred people sticks might work, for a thousand it gets dicey, by 10,000 things start to break down as factionalism spontaneously emerges: within our tribe we handle things via social cohesion and weak displays of symbolic force, outside our tribe we handle things via stronger displays of retribution Point is that "hit with a stick" happens to also centralize power, albeit dynamically, at scale. If you're really looking for a counterexample to centralized institutions, a better metaphor is probably "ecosystem." No centralized authority tells the lions to be kings and queens of the savannah, their status as apex predators comes dynamically from some transform {biosphere} -> {biosphere} finding a natural fixed point which has stability simply from the abstract mathematics of fixed points. A similar dynamic stability exists in the US in the balance of power between Republicans and Democrats, no central authority says that there have to be only two parties, but rather the rules of the game state "we divide everything into districts and every race is run as winner-take-all" which naturally induces this 50/50 two-party split that will destroy the country eventually