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~calgacus

What are you thoughts on the likes of laws, law enforcement, and prisons? To me, their existence

suggest human bias more toward greed than cooperation, especially when it seems those who "get

caught" constitute the tip of a "everything's okay so long as you can get away with it" iceberg.

Said another way, is it *really* cooperation when it - at least seemingly to me - mostly occurs

under threat of punishment if-and-only-if caught?

I think what you're missing is that "laws, law enforcement, and prisons" do not and have not existed in all societies for all of history. Yes, the *current* arrangement of *our* capitalist societies relies on coercion and prison, but that does not mean *all* arrangements did. For instance, the Iroquois confederation and many Huron tribes did not have any form of "prison" or "laws." When somebody murdered somebody else (which of course did happen from time to time) the families and confederations themselves were responsible for the perpetrator, would have to "make right" with the victims in some form or another, and perhaps exile or help to educate the murderer. This is not an isolated case, by the way—many societies operated similarly, and may operate this way again. If this is interesting to you, I would implore you to read *The Dawn of Everything* by Graeber and Wengrow, which is a wonderful volume that directly argues against the line of thinking you're pursuing here with a plethora of real world examples and evidence!

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~blackwood wrote:

Damn you got to it before me. This was basically the same point that I was going to make. That not all societies exist in the configuration that modern European societies exist in today.

~inquiry wrote (thread):

> I think what you're missing is that "laws, law
> enforcement, and prisons" do not and have not
> existed in all societies for all of history.

It wasn't that I missed it for not being able to imagine such having *ever* been the case. Rather, I assumed "laws, law enforcement, and prisons" was so mathematically vastly the case that edge cases (relatively speaking compared with predominant case assumption) seemed a non-factor in my "coming to conclusions" department.

I mean, I understand "have not existed in all societies for all of history". But if that phrase numerically works out to be sufficiently small an overall percentage of all cases to be considered "negligible" by people in the habit of "doing the math", then I don't find it too horrific to have spoken in a general way based on that assumption.

That said, if you've got actual numbers so I can see with my own eyes such cases *aren't* negligible over all societies over all time, I'm all eyes.

> For instance, the Iroquois confederation and many
> Huron tribes did not have any form of "prison" or
> "laws." When somebody murdered somebody else (which
> of course did happen from time to time) the families
> and confederations themselves were responsible for
> the perpetrator, would have to "make right" with the
> victims in some form or another, and perhaps exile or
> help to educate the murderer. This is not an isolated
> case, by the way—many societies operated similarly,
> and may operate this way again.

Sounds wonderful.

But, again, how representative a situation is that over all societies/time?

> If this is interesting to you, I would implore you to
> read *The Dawn of Everything* by Graeber and Wengrow,
> which is a wonderful volume that directly argues
> against the line of thinking you're pursuing here
> with a plethora of real world examples and evidence!

People (going back to your "for instance" case) behaving better than they usually do interests me. But the word 'plethora' sans numbers doesn't move me with respect to lines of thinking. Whenever words like that appear without numbers, the words "hand-waving" come to mind. (To be fair, my initial post contained implied hand-waving in the form of my assumption that "laws, law enforcement, and prisons" constituted the vast majority of cases of all societies and time.)