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I've just discovered this website and Stefan's ideas about the state, which have much in common with my own, which I have derived from taking a human-evolutionary, i.e. Darwinian, view of human nature and the situation (states and civilisation) it has over the centuries given rise and shape to. The state, it seems to me, conflates and confounds very different aspects of the original, natural and very tribal environment, in which human nature evolved, long before the advent of civilisation and the state, which now poses, deceitfully, as our tribe or nation (intra- and inter-tribal environment), while at the same time facilitating society's self-exploitation (as an extra-tribal environment) to the advantage of its ruling elite and their favoured clients. I think this goes a long way towards explaining Stefan's observations relating to the state. It also explains the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront and confuse our brain, which evolution adapted to deal with a very different kind of environment from that of civilisation, which has been shaped over centuries to serve the interests of society's ruling elite and their favoured clients at the expense of society at large. What makes the democratic state so special, but inherently unsustainable, is the fact that we are now ALL its clients, albeit very unequally. In order to get our support, politicians have to try, or pretend to try, to satisfy us all, which, of course they cannot possibly do, certainly not on a finite, vulnerable and already overpopulated planet. We have a short window of opportunity, it seems to me, within which to use our hard-won freedoms to make truly radical changes to the state, which I don't believe we can do without completely (some authority has to enforce the rule of law and non-violence which otherwise tends to characterise all tribal societies), before it closes and these freedoms are lost. I elaborate on these ideas on my own blog, The Perverted Darwinian Nature of Civilisation: http://philosopherkin.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/civilisation-evolutionary-cul-de-sac.html