This is what Hobbes and Pinker would have you believe, but the "state of nature" take is largely unsupported by historical and anthropological evidence and is also hard to reconcile with findings from modern psychology and behavioral economics.
The heart of the issue is that humans are not mere opportunistic cooperators like hyenas---we get joy from cooperating and working toward common goals and we exhibit spontaneous altruistic behavior, empathy, and self-sacrifice. Cooperation has played heavily in our evolution, seen in our bodies being poorly adapted to solitary scavenging, hunting, and weathering but highly adapted toward leveraging social networks through language and social learning. The idea that society begins as a prisoner's dilemma of mutually-suspicious individuals emerging out of the woods into contact contradicts findings that the earliest societies were extended kin groups whose individuals benefited from the reproductive success of the entire group at a time when resources were abundant and harvesting them benefited from scale.
If there is a trap of violence it doesn't seem to begin until after solitary city life and farming. Before this point power was largely immaterial and based on social standing. The transition from itinerary to sedentary meant 1) people were living in larger societies among strangers and non-kin, so opportunistic violence had more upside, and 2) grain and weapons could be accumulated, so those with access had a new source of material power. These factors combined in the emergence of palace economies of lawgivers who managed the population through retributive justice. But peace existed before the central management of peace. The mistake of Hobbes and Pinker is to think that history began with the latter, but it is no more than the last 3% of human history.