Rien

I think if I boil down my original post it comes down to questioning this. Is the use of force always win-lose (or even lose-lose)? Can it be win-win? And come to think of this, I remember a podcast in which Stefan said as much. It was along the lines: if the person that is forced (for example a child) can be assumed to later appreciate that he/she was forced (for example brushing your teeth), then the use of force was justified. So there are win-win situations even if force is used. If these kind of win-win situations exist, then it is at least possible that forced leadership might have had a beneficial effect on the fitness of a group. And that this might have found a place in the gene. I like your observation that: Which seems to suggest that the time were forced compliance was useful has passed. Today, yes probably. But not necessarily in the past. Two groups that never interacted may have had quite different futures. To the extend that one group, possibly with perfect ethics, starved to death while another group in similar circumstances but through the use of force was able to survive. An easy example would be failed crops followed by certain starvation. A group that would without remorse kill the weaker members might survive while a group in which the use of force was unthinkable might all have died. I know that this is a very unpopular lifeboat scenario, but that does not make it less true. And I suspect that in a time where human population was scattered and rarely had contact this kind of scenario's might have happened a lot. Often enough to leave an imprint on the gene. May this is the reason why sociopaths exist.

Listening to FDR2531 set the following train of thought in motion: Not all people are equally good at allocating their resources. Differences in intelligence and experience will cause some people to be better at this than others. People don't survive on their own, people survive in groups. In a group there will be people that are better at allocating resources than others. Since groups will be competing, evolution will favour those groups in which the assets are best allocated. Even if there was some kind of force involved. Creators with little social skills might find that their chances at survival are better in a group that has little respect for self ownership than in a group that perishes because they value self ownership. It might even be that the genome has this build in. Care to shoot any holes in this? PS: I am not defending the existence of a government. I fully subscribe to the NAP. I do see that governments exist, and I wonder what role they play in human evolution, and if we might be predisposed to accept a government.