Paper 71

^71:0.1  The state is a useful evolution of civilization; it represents society's net gain from the ravages and sufferings of war. Even statecraft is merely the accumulated technique for adjusting the competitive contest of force between the struggling tribes and nations.

^71:0.2  The modern state is the institution which survived in the long struggle for group power. Superior power eventually prevailed, and it produced a creature of fact—the state—together with the moral myth of the absolute obligation of the citizen to live and die for the state. But the state is not of divine genesis; it was not even produced by volitionally intelligent human action; it is purely an evolutionary institution and was wholly automatic in origin.