I think this closely tracks Hobbes' social contract theory: governments/nations/etc. are themselves gangs to compete for resources with other gangs. I've thoug

I think this closely tracks Hobbes' social contract theory: governments/nations/etc. are themselves gangs to compete for resources with other gangs. I've thought about this here and there too, with the framing of "how do we break the cycle of violence", or "if we always require a bigger bad to defeat a bad, aren't we doomed to depend on the bad?" My latest thought experiment was the dynamic where electorates sometimes make Faustian bargains with strongman dictators to solve an urgent problem (economic destruction, raids, social change) but then they get stuck with an even worse problem: a brutal dictatorship. A couple of things I think: - Violence is downstream of trauma. Stop the trauma, stop the violence. Frustratingly this can be relative because status factors in (in 800 AD maybe you got called out for your jank farming tools, now you get called out for your year-old shoes), so there's a cultural component to solve as well. But yeah, generally avoid catastrophes (invest in mitigations like levees, heterogeneous crops, insurance, and a free press) and lean on your culture when you can't (community disaster relief for hurricanes, draft every capable person to kick Putin the fuck out of your country, etc.) - If you can't nip trauma in the bud, you can mob a big bad with lots of small violent actions. Like it doesn't matter how good Putin is at judo; if 1000 clumsy townspeople show up he's going down. But like, we know how these things happen, all the way down from dictatorships to street gangs. They're ancient human stories. But they're deeply entwined in our group psychology, so knowing how the dynamic works isn't sufficient to free us from the cycle. We have to collectively rise above. But, that's pretty hard so we haven't been able to do it yet.