Rock the vote!
If evolutionary theory were true, that would mean that modern forms of government came extremely late in the game. It could be argued that we are biologically adapted to form tribes and to seek leadership or eldership as a form of guidance for a tribal collective. In that sense, some form of government is a natural outgrowth of biomechanics that could be trimmed through trial and error.
But if the state gets too large and authoritative, it can (and does) seek to disconnect and rewire our natural tendencies, for good or bad, through a series of perverse and conflicting incentives, backed by the use of force. So, for instance, we have a highway system, built by a large, centralized government, with laws concerning its use. This makes drivers feel safer and therefore drive faster (enforced safety rules begets higher risk-taking), but then there’s the artificial disincentive of speeding tickets which is a contradicting incentive to drive slower. This adds an additional layer of risk management that our minds wouldn’t normally need to reconcile.
This is all assuming that roads and their usage would be different under a free market system, but you can see where I’m going with this. Large governments (“large”, as in, a larger set of administers and executors than what we’d get from a tribal, semi-panarchist structure…I don’t know the numbers) have incentives to grow itself, and to convince people to “allow” them growth is to create problems that aren’t really there and offer itself as the only avenue of resolution. The methods are insidious, i.e., Marxism aims to fix am inequal class structure based on arbitrary levels of income and somewhat unarbitrary social status, state-sponsored feminism aims to reconcile an inequal balance of power of genders, that may just be a automatic, uncoerced division of labor brought about by millions of years of biochemical tinkering by God/nature.
There’s more but I’m too uneducated to go much deeper. The point is, how is it that so many lawmakers think they can, right or wrong, wish away the conclusions of evolution—the automata of human drive and adaptability—by fiat and force? People, individually or in small groups, tend to discourage the initiation of force applied against it, but the use of force has become institutionalized and even supported by most of the group in the form of governments. The power of managing risk under a government seems unsuited to the mental skillset of the evolved human brain (pure coincidence, in a new Stephan Molyneux video he mentions human adaptability vis-a-vis the state).
There’s a danger of falling into an argument from antiquity with this, and it can apply to other aspects of civilization as well. Does anyone know if this question has been explored at all?
* I am mostly undecided on the evolution debate. I swing between orthodox evolution to that one form of “animals and plants evolved, humans experienced direct creation” type of theistic evolution. The amount of knowledge needed, both biologically and theologically, to make an informed decision is too large for me to be overly concerned with it.