Do we really need governments?

Despite our belief in free will, there is one entity we generally heed without question - the government. There might be a healthy (or unhealthy) dose of skepticism leveled against authority but generally, we accept government authority. Why is that?

Social contract theory says that people implicitly or explicitly surrendered some of their freedom to authority in exchange for the maintenance of social order. In the modern period, the trade-off is more explicit as power is derived from the people rather than divinity.

However, if we generalize western and eastern societies, liberty seems to matter more in the former while social order matters more in the latter, indicating a difference in how the contract is implicitly structured.

The earliest forms of government likely arose to manage operations that require large-scale coordination and to counter any internal or external threat to such operations and the people who were part of them e.g. the governing system that arose in Mesopotamia to oversee farming.

To maintain that veneer of authority and to validate control, rulers started behaviorally and ritually distancing themselves from the general population. When such notions are built into the social order, people are conditioned to obey authority from the very beginning.

With the advent of liberal democracy, this legitimizing process of putting the ruler on a pedestal has been criticized for creating unnecessary hierarchies. Now, more egalitarian ideals of accountability and representation have bled into our understanding of governments.

Different political strands have criticized the need for a government, the main ones being anarchism and libertarianism. Anarchism believes government functions only through coercion while libertarianism views authority as infringing on personal liberty.

Given the constant changes and evolution regarding authority’s form and role, do we really need governments? That we still continue to have them suggests we are happy with the tradeoff of order vs. freedom, or at least we accept it as a necessary evil.

Bottom Line. In each era, governments adapted to changing conditions and survived - in fact, grew larger. But when imagining a different world, workable alternatives are needed. Could the market and/or technology take on the government's role in managing large human processes?