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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

Evo-psych arguments are always weak, but this one would work slightly better if it were focused on violence rather than property. It isn't as if Homo sapiens evolved in an environment of flatscreen televisions and automobiles. A Neolithic tribe "owned" a couple of arrowheads and a big flat rock for cracking nuts. If they lost those they'd presumably just get some more.

More to the point, we didn't evolve in an environment that included police. Police were invented in the 19th century (for largely questionable purposes such as racism and anti-unionism). For hundreds of millennia before that, we survived without them. It's true that there existed various forces of "authority" over that period, but these were concerned about people taking the authority's shit. A cursory familiarity with history and archaeology convinces one that "coercive and alienating forces" rarely prioritize the interests of the general public.

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Just to comment on this. A common google search would have pointed out that your ideas about local police forces are largely incorrect. Police have been a thing for much longer. The big thing that happened in more recent history (Meaning 1700s) is separating them from the private market, the military or unregulated local mobs. You can trace the enforcers of civil law through force all the way back to ancient Babylon because civil unrest is bad for raising taxes. You could argue this were not police but rather various forms of 'authority,' but it's dishonest to say that they were not acting like police.

Easy example of this would be Cohortes Urbanae in ancient Rome which was specifically formed because the Praetorian Guard was too corrupt even by Roman standards at the time and mobs, gangs and 'random' violence were common.

The Romans had slaves. What are the chances that "Cohortes Urbanae" prioritized their interests? Do you argue here that police now are not different in significant ways from whatever those forces were? BLM might agree with you (me too!), but that isn't an argument against anarchism...

This is how fearful people fool themselves. They paint over the authoritarian excess of the past with anachronistic illusions of the present. Instead, they should realize that the unmistakable evils of authoritarians past indict those of the present, even if we tell ourselves that it's different this time.

My argument was that you said police were invented largely as a force in the 19th century for "largely questionable purposes such as racism and anti-unionism." I brought up a pretty clear example of a police force existing in the time of Augustus which had no ties at all to the modern climate. I'm not arguing for or against anarchism. I am arguing for historical accuracy. You can define it as taking the authorities shit as much as you want, but I'm sure I could hear plenty of reasonable counter arguments from state loving people as well about how enforcement of the rule of law provides a stable framework for settling legal disputes and references to Hobbes.

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