The State is Depoliticizing

 

As Yudkowsky says, "Politics is the mind killer."  Holding back scientific progress, technological innovation, economic growth, math, philosophy, poetry, literature, art, music, entertainment and who knows what else, was that fact that for millions of years, humans and our pre-human ancestors had to spend a huge portion of our time and energy fighting against neighboring tribes and arguing (and sometimes fighting) within our own tribe to gain power in order to compete for mates, resources, etc..  It was not fun.  

Social groups grew and split, grew and split, perhaps hovering around Dunbar's number.

But eventually, larger social networks formed - larger systems of power and obligation.  The effect is depoliticizing - the larger one's group is, the less of a chance any one individual has of making any substantive difference in collective decision making, and so it becomes less of a worthwhile use of one's time and energy to engage in politics.  Eventually, one is profoundly oppressed and exploited, with no meaningful ability to change the conditions of one's own social relations.  

But from a certain perspective, the degrading, impersonal powerlessness that is imposed on us by large-scale social organization is not a bug but a feature.  Individuals have less of a voice and are silenced.  Conflicts are quashed; resistance is futile.  Since it's no longer meaningful, practical, or feasible to engage in politics, this leaves people time to work on other things, like science, technology, economic growth, math, art, etc. (military organization, weaponry, survival skills....)  These advances, coupled with sheer quantitative size, give large-scale social organizations a distinct competitive advantage over smaller groups where individuals matter and thus politics still functions.  There's a snowball effect - once this process gets going, it reinforces itself.  Thus we should expect the size of social groups to correlate roughly with the degree of authoritarianism.  At first, in this process, one, very small part of society (perhaps, in the extreme, merely one person) is hyperpolitical, and exerts extreme will-to-power; the rest of society is depoliticized.

This is even less fun.  But natural selection doesn't care about your happiness.  It only cares about how many offspring you produce.  With less people fighting, less people are killed, and thus more people are available for reproduction.  Thus the misery spreads.  It's a coordination problem.

A loose analogy here can be drawn between the rise of large-scale human social organization and metabolic scaling in multicellular organisms, which causes animals to evolve towards larger and larger sizes.

Growth in the size of social group is not the same as the establishment of a state.  But if this pattern continues, it will seemingly inevitably lead to the development of the state.  Thus it's fair to say that the state is depoliticizing, or better yet that the state is a symptom of depoliticization.  (Again, an analogy can be drawn towards colonies of single-celled organisms, and then, with greater cooperation, a single, multicellular organism.)

This also correlates well with domestication.  Just as humans domesticated dogs, cattle, and other animals, we also domesticated ourselves, and made ourselves more docile, obedient, and cooperative. 

As already noted, at the beginning of this process, one small part of society (in the extreme, a single person - but this is probably an ideal abstraction) would at first become hyperpolitical, dominating, taming and domesticating the rest of the population. But eventually the leadership would be passed to people who were themselves increasingly tamed and domesticated (perhaps that original leader's descendants).  

One effect of this process would be that while in early phases dominance was determined through struggle, eventually the process would become more rule-bound.  So, for instance, a system of inheritance of authority would eventually be accepted.