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most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what she calls ‘autonomy’. What matters to Montagnais-Naskapi women, for instance, is not so much whether men and women are seen to be of equal status but whether women are, individually or collectively, able to live their lives and make their own decisions without male interference.
these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power.
This is why the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his licence to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.
Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion.
By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity – but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves.
The only other theory on offer to date has been to assume that there were no origins of inequality, because humans are naturally somewhat thuggish creatures and our beginnings were a miserable, violent affair; in which case ‘progress’ or ‘civilization’ – driven forward, largely, by our own selfish and competitive nature – was itself redemptive. This view is extremely popular among billionaires but holds little appeal to anyone else, including scientists, who are keenly aware that it isn’t in accord with the facts.
the collapse of what we would term the first basic freedom (to move away or relocate), and how this paved the way for the loss of the second (the freedom to disobey).
