Kill Decision

by Daniel Suarez

“Which is why human society mostly works; people avoid trouble. But behind every law is the implicit threat of force, and behind every vote is the implicit threat of rebellion. That’s the bargain that holds a free society together. And no society with a wide power imbalance remains free for very long.” He motioned for them to keep moving, and in a moment they were bounding down a rocky slope. McKinney was still troubled by his premise. “I’m not convinced that violence is the glue that binds us, Sergeant.” “I didn’t say violence—I said the implicit threat of force. Think about it: Democracy only arose when the ability to employ force was decentralized. If you go back to the Middle Ages, the state-of-the-art weapon system was the armored knight. He cost a fortune to train, feed, and equip. But a mounted armored knight could overpower almost any number of peasants on a battlefield. And the distribution of political power in medieval society reflected that; authority was vested in a tiny minority, and the people had no choice but to obey. “Then, with the advent of gunpowder, that all changed. Suddenly you didn’t need a highly trained specialist warrior to win on the battlefield. All you needed was a warm body who could fire a gun. Anything they could aim at, they could kill. And at that point the edge in warfare went not to highly trained warriors, but to the side that could field the most people. At which point we saw the rise of nation-states—and nationalism as a concept—as ...

Talking point.