DemocracyRequiresViolence

I have heard of people lives in the AmazonForest, or the Mongolian desert, or in mountain ranges in China, or in outbacks of Australia. They don't use any 'systems' as we described it (I think it is a primitive form of Monarchy), yet violence and crime rate is low in such self-sustaining society. But again, prehaps comparing these small settlement to cities or contraries doesn't really work... or perhaps we're not designed to live in really big groups? -ColinLeung

1) can you name one of these societies?

2) what happens when two people want to be king?

I would expect those villages to be 'rule' by elders of sort... I'm no geographer (or whatever that studies society), but I know those kind of settlement does exist in more 'rural' areas.

Sociologist?  Anthropologist?  Anyway - the point was 'less violence' not 'no violence'.  --Vitenka

Well, in a democracy, if two people want to be "king", you have an election.  So what happens in one of your (apparently anonymous) primitive societies?  If you know they don't use violent means to make the decision then presumably you know what means they do use.

MoonShadow can't put names to Colin's societies either, but wonders what happens in kibbutz camps and similar communes. Those appear to be nonviolent and self-forming; on the other hand, it is an artificial example - the people in them are those who have already chosen to be in them and obey the rules, so persuasion is unnecessary; and a lot of them are also dependent to some extent on the society that inhabits the rest of the country they are based in. Still, no reason in theory why persuasion invariably has to be violent to even a large minority (singles and very small groups don't count - otherwise you have to debate the possibility of a crime-free society before you can debate a violence-free one, since police can be forced to use violence to various degrees against the criminal fringe and this is generally seen as an AcceptedLevelOfViolence?). - MoonShadow

I'd say the latter - though here's an interesting thought.  What if the 'violence' and 'crime' are simply downscaled - not by frequency but by scope.  Instead of getting drunk and brawling, they scowl at one another or make snide comments.  Ok, this theory is both silly and unlikely, but wouldn't it be neat?  --Vitenka (Seriously, it's going to have a lot to do with opportunity - in a smaller scale there are fewer cracks)

The pat answer is struggle for power.  The best answer I have heard, however, is JuvenileRituals? gone wrong.  That is, the usual attention getting mechanisms of a child usually get squashed as the child grows up - but in a large society, there are too many situations where the people involved do not know the child and are afraid to interfere - and thus the child grows up continuing their ViolentBehaviour.  Eventually they rationalise this behaviour as something beneficial to them.  The reason I like this theory is that it legitamises smacking unruly teenagers about the head because 'otherwise they will never learn'  --Vitenka (BikeLocks? make a good excuse to carry an IronBar?)