Were man what 'greenish correctness' makes him out to be, a net destroyer of resources, our species would have become extinct a long time ago. In actual fact, man is a massive net creator of resources, as I explain here:
[T]ake berries, which you may call "resources provided by nature", much liked by hunters-and-gatherers. The berries have no way (a) to appreciate that they might be liked by human beings nor do they have the ability, of their own accord, to make themselves (b) useful to human beings. What Zimmermann and later Simon call a resource is brought into existence when humans do (a) and (b) for the berries and other resource candidates. While there may be natural phenomena that do us a welcome service - consider the warmth and light provided by the sun - we cannot survive by passive enjoyment of those resources. In fact, the human mind has to figure out in a given situation if it is wise to move into the sun or, to the contrary, if one should move into the shadow. Moving into the shadow is already an act of creating a natural resource, i.e. recognising something as potentially useful for the satisfaction of a human need AND utilising this potential successfully. Hence, the most important final conclusion: man is a net resource producer, quite naturally, rather than a destroyer of resources, including natural resources.
As analogous, there is a limit to the extent to which men can behave in destructive ways among one another.
This is why the state evolves, and why it evolves in such a way as to have a limited potential for destructiveness and as well as a large potential for constructive functions. As an ambivalent instrument capable of destruction as well as support of socially useful outcomes, the state, at least on the level of man's history, must produce a positive net margin of constructive outcomes over destructive ones.
As small human groups grow larger, owing to productivity increases from sedentary agriculture, and larger groups increasingly trump smaller groups, a new destabilising factor gains in prominence.
Small groups are capable of providing vital public goods by way of voluntary contribution by their members, being structured to monitor and avoid free riding as well as offering advantageous cost-benefit ratios for the individual that induce individuals to participate in the provision of public goods.
Larger groups lose that capacity, the more so the larger they become. They get caught in impasses of the Prisoner's dilemma type and minefields of multiple game theoretic equilibria. Groups survive and prevail who evolve Structures of Maximal Power (SMP) effective enough to enforce generally binding rules that make cooperation feasible in larger units: the state makes its appearance. In future posts, I shall have more to say about the ideas roughly outlined in this last paragraph.
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