> They're part of the social contract binding a society together.
This is an absurdity; what binds a society together is people forming actual relationships of mutual benefit with one another. Complex, formal institutions are an afterthought, and even more of an afterthought is paying some precise percentage of your income to the specific people who operate one of those institutions, so they can can pay others to construct roads (as though no other means could be found to facilitate the pouring of asphalt), or build prisons for the incarceration of people who ingest particular chemicals that some think are per se bad.
If anything, empowering excessively centralized institutions creates intense factional polarization which undermines societies, inhibiting the formation of substantive relationships and communities instead of sustaining them. Our present "culture war" is a clear example of this.
The sole substantive basis for functional societies is the willingness of people to participate in them. Theoretical doctrines of "social contracts" and "nations" are just post-hoc rationalizations.
This is an absurdity; what binds a society together is people forming actual relationships of mutual benefit with one another. Complex, formal institutions are an afterthought, and even more of an afterthought is paying some precise percentage of your income to the specific people who operate one of those institutions, so they can can pay others to construct roads (as though no other means could be found to facilitate the pouring of asphalt), or build prisons for the incarceration of people who ingest particular chemicals that some think are per se bad.
If anything, empowering excessively centralized institutions creates intense factional polarization which undermines societies, inhibiting the formation of substantive relationships and communities instead of sustaining them. Our present "culture war" is a clear example of this.
The sole substantive basis for functional societies is the willingness of people to participate in them. Theoretical doctrines of "social contracts" and "nations" are just post-hoc rationalizations.