Law & Order

"[...] maintaining public order and curbing violence [...] is potentially a big and underappreciated advantage of centralized societies over noncentralized ones. Anthropologists formerly idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent, because visiting anthropologists observed no murder in a band of 25 people in the course of a three-year study. Of course they didn't: it's easy to calculate that a band of a dozen adults and a dozen children, subject to the inevitable deaths occuring anyway for the usual reasons other than murder, could not perpetuate itself if in addition one of its dozen adults murdered another adult every three years. Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death. For example, I happened to be visiting New Guinea's Iyau people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: "My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder." Such biographies prove common for so-called gentle tribespeople and contributed to the acceptance of centralized authority as tribal societies grew larger."

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, chapter "From egalitarianism to kleptocracy".

So much for the idealization of tribal societies of ancient times that I have read in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Too bad, I liked this myth of gentle tribespeople... But can I keep my dream of gentle "civilized" people in an hypothetical future, please ?

De la désobéissance civile

"La désobéissance civile est le droit imprescriptible de tout citoyen. Il ne saurait y renoncer sans cesser d'être un homme. La désobéissance civile ne donne jamais suite à l'anarchie alors que la désobéissance criminelle peut y conduire. Sous peine de disparaître, chaque État met fin à la désobéissance criminelle par la force. Mais ce serait vouloir emprisonner la conscience que de faire cesser la désobéissance civile."

Mohandas Gandhi, Tous les hommes sont frères, chapitre "Le peuple et la démocratie".

An alternative to right and left

"Anarchists, I discovered, did not believe in anarchy as it is usually defined - disorder, disorganization, chaos, confusion, and everyone doing as they like. On the contrary, they believed that society should be organized in a thousand different ways, that people had to cooperate in work and in play, to create a good society. But, anarchists insisted, any organization must avoid hierarchy and command from the top; it must be democratic, consensual, reaching decisions through constant discussion and argument. What attracted me to anarchism was its rejection of any bullying authority - the authority of the state, of the church, or of the employer. Anarchism believes that if we can create an egalitarian society without extremes of poverty and wealth and join hands across all national boundaries, we will not need police forces, prisons, armies, or war, because the underlying causes of these will be gone."
(Howard Zinn, Passionate declarations).

Highly utopic, but I like utopies, without them life would be flavourless...