Newsflash: Cavemen Enjoyed Food and Sex

And some were good at art. And some were violent. Just. Like. Us. (DN 1.12)

Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12

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Chapter 1: WHY

1.12 — The State of Nature

We are now, as Winston Churchill said, at “the end of the beginning.”

We have laid our moral groundwork. Each and every individual human is a person: a sovereign, rights-holding being who must not be subjected to the initiation of coercive force, and whose consent must not be violated. Since this is exactly what all involuntary governments do—when they are functioning normally—we know that involuntary governance is morally impermissible.

But that is not the end of the matter. Some people will now say, Fine, Cook, I agree with you. It is indeed morally impermissible. But there is no better alternative.

Others will argue that this problem can be fixed within the system we have. Or that democracy is the highest possible evolution in human political and social organization. Or that the American Founders somehow solved all these problems, if only we can return to the blueprint they originally bequeathed to us.

All of these are, in some sense, flawed or incorrect. So, our task for the remainder of this chapter is to deal, briefly, with each in turn. In doing so, we will have blazed a trail to the notion that a new evolution is needed.

Let us begin with the first—the notion that there is no better alternative.

The argument here, in essence, is that as bad as government is, the “state of nature” is worse. Without government, it is said, we would not be able to enjoy any of our freedoms, so our best bet is to surrender some in exchange for the rest.

This is an assumption that almost everyone seems to make. The state of nature (a condition in the absence of government) is automatically presumed to be one of Hobbesian chaos. Nasty, solitary, brutish, and short. A war of “all against all.”

Why?

Because Hobbes said so? Because Hollywood portrays it so? Because cavemen were monsters? What actual evidence do we have?

Archaeologists have unearthed prehistoric graves of people with grievous head wounds, clearly dealt by vicious blows from vicious weapons. Okay. But we have also found bodies of people whose broken limbs had been set by their fellows.

What have we learned? That man is a both wondrously loving and hideously violent creature. What exactly does that tell us about conditions in the absence of government?

Most of the record of the human story comes from a time after which governments were an established reality in most places. It is thus difficult to judge what things were like in its absence. The common assumption, however, is that it was not only bad, but worse.

Why? After all, a great deal of violence throughout history has been committed by people acting on the orders of some authority—of a government of one sort or another. Much of the violence…and just about all of the actual war.

So why are people today so high and mighty about our pre-governmental ancestors? Why are they so sure that cavemen, for example, were so terribly worse than we are?

G.K. Chesterton certainly wasn’t convinced:

Today all our novels and newspapers will be found swarming with numberless allusions to a popular character called a CaveMan. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the hippopotami are effected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy.

Sorry for the long quote, but he has a point. Quite a few points, in fact. Novels, newspapers, and “science” are all sure that cavemen were vulgar savages. This “knowledge” is then applied to all sorts of current problems, from psychology to politics.

It’s all just presumed, a priori. They were brutes. We are not.

Is that fair? The human brain has various structures that mediate emotions and thoughts involved in moral behavior: compassion, empathy, forbearance, conscience, etc. Those structures did not arise yesterday. Or a century ago. Or with the rise of government.

Cavemen (and cave-women and cave-children) had them too.

We are wired for moral behavior. That does not mean that we are exclusively good—obviously. It does mean that we very likely weren’t inherently worse before the rise of government. We were, by and large, the same people—just under different circumstances.

But government, we are told, is what restrains the worst among us. 

Does it?

Without it, we are told, brigands and raiders would run amok.

Would they?

Perhaps they would. But there is another school of thought that contends that governments are what happen when brigands and raiders figure out that it is easier to tax a captive people under the color of authority than it is to raid free people who might just fight back.

Did the state arise to protect people from brigands? Or did brigands create the state, as Franz Oppenheimer posited? We may never know exactly where that truth lies.

Here is what we do know—

Prehistoric humans had weapons. They also had pottery. They enjoyed sex, as indicated by the many fertility idols archaeologists have uncovered.

They also enjoyed making cave paintings (mostly drawings of their food) and some of them were quite good at it. There were violent tribes and peaceful tribes.

Some violent, some not. Enjoyed food and sex. Some better at art than others.

Sound familiar? 

It sounds like they were just like us. There is certainly no evidence to suggest that they were substantially different.

So if we were not different as people, what is left?

The common claim is that government protects people against crime and invasion to a greater degree than would exist in its absence. But is that really so? Governments have existed in most places for most of recorded history. As such, we have a pretty clear record of their performance. And that record is, at best, extremely mixed.

In terms of internal crime, government’s performance is mediocre. Some crime is punished. Incapacitation of violent offenders no doubt prevents some amount of repeat-offending. But there is still plenty of crime. And plenty of repeat offenders.

Police will come draw a chalk line around your body, but they are under no obligation to protect you. But you can be damn sure they will protect the state, and the ruling class, from you.

Worse still, a significant amount of violent crime is caused by government.

Drug prohibition, for example, raise the risks associated with the production, transport, trafficking, and use of drugs. This causes a massive increase in their price, creating a lucrative opportunity for criminal gangs—an opportunity that only exists because of the prohibition. Gangs fight over customers and turf. They fight pitched battles with law enforcement. Violence spills over into communities and impacts entire countries.

This violence exists because of the laws. The gangs are a creation of government. Without drug laws, addiction would still exist, but a large source of violent crime, and property crime, would dry up virtually overnight.

Legalizing drugs, prostitution, gambling, and similar activities would not be a panacea, but it would end the monetary incentive for criminal activity, thus dramatically reducing a major source of violence in our lives.

Government’s record gets even worse when it comes to “protecting” people from external invasion.

Without a doubt, humans have a violent side. Without a doubt, prehistoric bands of humans attacked other bands in order to steal their resources or territory, or to capture and enslave their people. Government is not to blame for the existence of this side of our nature.

But governments sure are good at inciting and organizing such attacks. And they have far more incentive to do so…

Ambitious leaders are far more likely to cast a greedy eye toward the polities around them, seeing them as prizes to capture like territories in a game of Risk®. A government can conscript soldiers and impose taxes to pay for war. Governments can stir up bloodlust against so-called enemies.

Average Joe has none of these incentives or powers. 

The stronger governments have gotten over the centuries, the worse the attacks have become. In the 20th century—the century of “democracy”—wars claimed over 150 million lives. Add in another 250 in various democides, and you have nearly half a billion people murdered by governments in under 100 years.

Not by random brigands.

Not by darkside Jeff Bezos with his two ICBMs and the small private army he was able to field for six months before all his money ran out.

By governments.

Once central banking got started, even money ceased being all that much of a constraint. Kings at least had to lean on nobles for contributions, or bleed the people white with taxes, to collect enough gold to wage a small war.

Now government just tells the central bank to add few zeros in the ledger and then fires up the printing press. Is it a coincidence that the first global-scale war began after central banking got rolling, and the second after we went off the gold standard?

In the absence of government, there would still be violence, but nothing even close to that scale. It simply isn’t possible. Normal people have neither the incentive nor the resources.

We do not have much evidence for exactly how things were before the rise of regular governance. We have a ton of evidence after, and that evidence does not point to a record of success.

Those claiming they are sure that things would definitely be worse without government are doing so without proof, and largely without evidence. It’s an article of faith. A piece of dogma straight out of government’s own brochure.

Once again, it is Homer Simpson’s paradoxical toast: To alcohol government—the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. 

Even if we look to government’s temporary absences—during disasters, for example—we see mixed results. Some populations loot. Others are well behaved and help each other. The absence of government is not an automatic predictor of bad behavior. 

Obviously there need to be mechanisms for creating order, security, and justice. I am not (and no anarchist is) talking about replacing government with nothing. What I am saying—and what by now we all should be thinking—is this:

If government is fundamentally moral impermissible and has this sketchy a track record, don’t we owe it to ourselves to see if there’s a better way?

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