Autumnal
Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune
Most people do not, of course, particularly want to make war. And when they do, it’s very often what gets called “big game, small war” in the context of indigenous American nations. Those are opportunities for individuals to show off their bravery and general awesomeness, and to score trophies - everything from significant trophies to leaving highly visible scars. (Scalping got introduced from Scots-Irish soldiers.)
It appears that warmaking is one of the reasons government as we might think of it developed. It made it possible to scale up “big game, small war”-type activities into much larger, more organized, and longer-lasting kinds of things. And the surrounding social institutions like patriotic fervor and religious sanctification of the cause developed in the wake of that.
(This is all intensely speculative based on necessarily fragmentary evidence, and so on, many disclaimers are active in this area.)
As people who live inn societies, we inherit a lot of social luggage that has complicated origins and can and deserve a lot of purposes. And there’s no “original” pure state to recover - the very first humans came with a ton of baggage from their nearest primate neighbors. But it is to say that we are in the vast middle ground between the most violent primates and the most peaceful ones, more behaviorally flexible than most species, and kinda weird.
It appears that warmaking is one of the reasons government as we might think of it developed. It made it possible to scale up “big game, small war”-type activities into much larger, more organized, and longer-lasting kinds of things. And the surrounding social institutions like patriotic fervor and religious sanctification of the cause developed in the wake of that.
(This is all intensely speculative based on necessarily fragmentary evidence, and so on, many disclaimers are active in this area.)
As people who live inn societies, we inherit a lot of social luggage that has complicated origins and can and deserve a lot of purposes. And there’s no “original” pure state to recover - the very first humans came with a ton of baggage from their nearest primate neighbors. But it is to say that we are in the vast middle ground between the most violent primates and the most peaceful ones, more behaviorally flexible than most species, and kinda weird.
