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About UF.
Were man, as a popular meme suggests, a net destroyer of resources, our
species would have become extinct a long time ago. In actual fact, man is a
massive net creator of resources, that is, he creates more resources vital to
his thriving than he eliminates:
Take berries, “resources provided by nature,” and rather vital to
hunters-and-gatherers. Note, however, berries have no way to appreciate that
they are desired by human beings, nor do they have the ability to be useful to
human beings of their own accord.
What is customarily called a resource is brought into existence when
humans — by their intellectual creativity — recognise its potential utility and take action to bring it to fruition.
While there may be natural phenomena that do us a welcome service—consider
the warmth and the light provided by the sun—we cannot survive by passive
enjoyment of those resources. In fact, there is a constant need for the human
mind to figure out how to act in order to turn an indifferent or even
destructive object or state of affairs into a resource.
Consider a trivial case: feeling a bit too hot, a person wonders whether
it is wise to stay in the sun, or would it be better to move into the shadow.
Moving into the shadow is already an act of creating a resource, i.e.
recognising something as potentially useful for the satisfaction of a human
need AND utilising this potential successfully in practice. It is natural for
man to face the world as a net resource producer, creating more circumstances
conducive to his survival than detrimental ones. He comports himself quite
naturally in this manner, in every day life as well as in the specie’s grander
projects of economic, scientific and technical advancement.
Analogously, there is a limit to the extent to which men can behave in destructive
ways among one another.
This is why the state evolves, and why it evolves in such a way as to
have a large, yet limited potential for destructiveness as well as an extensive
arsenal of constructive functions. As an ambivalent instrument capable of
destruction as well as support of socially useful outcomes, in order to remain
a viable proposition, the state, at least in the wider perspective of man’s
history, must produce a positive net margin of constructive outcomes over
destructive ones.
As small human groups grow larger, owing to productivity increases from
sedentary agriculture, and larger groups increasingly trump smaller groups, a
new destabilising factor gained prominence about ten to four thousand years ago:
Small groups of hunters and gatherers are capable of providing vital
public goods thanks to voluntary and effectively policed contributions by their members — the groups being structured
to monitor and avoid free riding as well as offering advantageous cost-benefit
ratios that induce individuals to participate in the provision of public goods.
Larger groups lose that capacity, the more so the larger they become.
They get caught in impasses of the prisoner’s dilemma type and minefields of
multiple game theoretic equilibria. Only those groups survive and prevail that
manage to evolve Structures of Maximal Power (SMP) effective enough to enforce
generally binding rules that make cooperation feasible in larger units: the
state makes its appearance.
Written in March 2013
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