I’ve mostly avoided needing to involve the state, too. My personality is more of “compete by being better” and I regard violence (and regulatory capture) as cheating.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an anarchist — I agree that state monopoly on violence would be spontaneously recreated if it was removed. I’m also a lot more dubious about the political future than about the technological future.
But, that’s beside the point: I’m saying that we could, plausibly, have social and political structures that suppress our violent tendencies and in so doing make it not ridiculously unsafe to live in a fragile space habitat.
This is not without precedent, as we are less violent now than we were a mere few hundred years ago, and have managed this with little in the way of actual evolution.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an anarchist — I agree that state monopoly on violence would be spontaneously recreated if it was removed. I’m also a lot more dubious about the political future than about the technological future.
But, that’s beside the point: I’m saying that we could, plausibly, have social and political structures that suppress our violent tendencies and in so doing make it not ridiculously unsafe to live in a fragile space habitat.
This is not without precedent, as we are less violent now than we were a mere few hundred years ago, and have managed this with little in the way of actual evolution.