On Stateless Societies

Is the primary mechanism by which stateless societies cooperate to prevent unequal distributions of power really just to suppress the innovators? You would think that some tribe would instead consider forcing the innovators to share their methods with everyone else, which would allow everyone to prosper while still preventing anyone from getting too far ahead. I guess punishing the one is easier than educating the many, but I would like to think that humanity could evolve toward doing things the other way around.

I suspect you'd enjoy The Dawn Of Everything, an anarchist-tinged anthropological survey of the different nonlinear paths stateless societies and state formation have taken. Or, well, it discusses a wide range of related topics, with lots of creativity and decent enough rigor. I haven't finished yet.

I do agree that states can be seen as a game-theoretic trap, though. Once you have some centralized social violence or institutional monopoly on power, for a huge range of goals the easiest way to achieve them becomes "get the state/king/local bigwig on your side to impose what you want." Not direct problem-solving or building up consensus. Just fighting over control of the leviathan, powerful but blunt and low-bandwidth. So in that sense, it's pretty useful to have robust norms curbing power imbalances before they reach that tipping point.

I don't think the conclusion "stateless societies are not in a Hobbesian state of constant war" is warranted here. With stateless societies or those in a weak state, the war isn't between members of the group/family/clan/tribe. It's between different groups. Within a group people are still subject to rules, sanctions for bad behaviour etc...

Sounds related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Boehm 's reverse-dominance hierarchy (paper).

In turns out that in Congo there is a set of tribes

Is this the Tiv, or a different society?

Typo: "accused the which doctors", which > witch.

About eliminating those who grow successful or powerful in order to establish a stateless society:

In Italian author Dino Buzzati’s short story La lezione del 1980, God decides to eliminate every Tuesday at midnight the most powerful person on Earth. It takes two months for the world population to understand and be fully convinced of the mechanism, and in the following weeks there is a race down the bottom to give up any little power one has and take every decision collegiately. In three months, with 12 deaths, power becomes an outdated concept. In the following years, when once in a while an ambitious strives for a little power, the Tuesday night sentence reminds everyone of the rules.

I really liked this naive anarchist story.

I recently narrated the story to a Chinese friend who “escaped” Xi’s China. She was very surprised of the end of the story. Hearing that God kills the most powerful person every week, she was convinced that it would lead to a continuous race for entering the restricted Pantheon of the “once most powerful person on Earth” and would in fact reinforce the logics of hierarchy and power, especially among old men who care more for their power and legacy than for anything else.

I enjoyed this post. Thanks.

Re. the question where and why the governance pattern transitioned from stateless to hierarchical. This has been traditionally placed into times and places when foragers (hunter-gatherers) became farmers. There is a more modern school of thought that places the transition into locations abundant with natural resources, for example along the salmon-rich rivers in the Pacific Northwest. Canadian anthropologist Hayden is one of the proponents of the idea. See for example here:

Hayden, B., 2011. Big Man, Big Heart? The Political Role of Aggrandizers in Egalitarian and Transegalitarian Societies. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116269_7

An interesting aspect of the stateless societies from the modern economics point of view is the observation that exceptional producers of resources (like a talented hunter) would continue to asymmetrically provide resources to the group, regardless of the group members not being ever able to reciprocate in kind. There are a bunch of theories why this behavior is stable, but I like the one which argues that reciprocity in fact exists in this case also, but the talented hunter gets a non-monetary, psychological reward (reputation) instead.

The researchers made the people from this area play different economic games and find out that people with a state are less cooperative than stateless people.

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In the new dog-eat-dog society there are no rules. Everyone fights for himself and there's no shame in behaving in an anti-social way.

Did they control for the size of the village? I'd have thought a smaller village is naturally going to be more cooperative, since they're ingrained with social norms that lean on the fact that everyone knows everyone. E.g. if you screw someone over, then you can't "escape" that reputational damage by moving to a different group of friends - everyone knows what you did. As societies get bigger they can't lean on those benefits of culture as much, so they need to move to a "trustless" model - i.e. lots of laws, formal procedures, etc.