Civilized Society

In our current society, most people defend our democratic systems almost reflexively. For them, state order is the price for our so-called civilization: after millennia of alleged barbarism and chaos, established power structures and laws are said to have tamed the “wild human” and made an ordered society possible.

In the Western-modern civilization myth, indigenous communities are therefore often considered “primitive” or “backward” because they manage without central monopolies on violence, rigid hierarchies, or institutions. In such societies, conflicts are frequently resolved through social and communal mechanisms — which contradicts the modern understanding of order and control.

However, if one places a civilized society in the logical context of truth and peace, it would above all have to achieve one thing: minimize violence, resolve conflicts peacefully, meet needs justly, and pass on knowledge freely.

Violence

A look at the last 200 years, however, shows a different reality: inter-state wars and civil wars — from the Napoleonic Wars through the World Wars to Vietnam and the conflicts in the Middle East — have cost an estimated 150-200 million human lives. Added to this are state-organized mass murders, genocides, and famines under dictators such as Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, or through colonial oppression, which claimed a further 100-120 million victims. Even at conservative estimates, the total number of state-caused killings is in the range of 200 to 400 million.

Thus, the state order — regardless of whether it calls itself communist, fascist, monarchical, or democratic — is historically the most deadly actor of recent human history.

The American political scientist Rudolph J. Rummel coined the term “democide” (Death by Government, 1994) for this. With it, Rummel wanted to create a collective term for the deliberate killing of people by a government, including genocide, political murders, state-caused famines, executions, and war crimes.

In recent centuries, the state has claimed almost exclusively the (incorrectly considered legitimate) right to kill. The monopoly on violence replaced religious authorities, patriarchal structures, and noble rule — without changing their symbolic logic. Instead of God, the state now elevates itself to the highest authority. Instead of patriarchal control, bureaucratic control reigns. The state presents itself as a neutral institution, but acts as a symbolically charged power organism with a built-in self-justification mechanism. The modern state has taken over the legitimatory role of religion and patriarchy without changing their basic structure: It is the new “transcendent” authority to which one brings sacrifices and under whose banner killing is permitted.

The idea of legitimate killing is not an objective moral principle but a narrative construct for securing power. No state authority possesses this monopoly on violence by nature. In fact, no human being has the natural right to kill another human being and therefore cannot lend this right to any third party. Statehood therefore does not mean justice or morality but the enforcement of an artificially created order through institutionalized violence.

It is precisely the systematic dimension of this violence that would not be implementable in a society without central authority — that is, without state, religion, or patriarchy. In a society that does not subordinate its social coexistence to an artificially created higher authority, be it a government, a god, or the patriarchy, one could never legitimize and justify the systematic killing of other human beings. While there would also be violence and manslaughter in a ruler-free society, these would be neither systematically organized nor morally sanctioned. No one would watch as another person is handcuffed, simply because they feel morally called to do so. Similarly, one would help one’s fellow human being if a third party attacks them, because otherwise one runs the risk of being next, and because one does not want to live in a violence-tolerating society.

In reality, however, the state monopoly on violence is reproduced by education, media, and jurisprudence itself — without external, independent control. Thus it is perceived as legitimate to bomb countries, imprison people, or shoot down protesters.

It is not the unleashed human who kills the most — it is the human in the service of an external authority. The greatest danger does not come from the lawless but from the lawmaker who sees themselves as morally legitimized.

Institutions (state or religious) that see themselves as the source of moral truth will always have a tendency toward the elimination of deviant reality — often with deadly consequences.

Not chaos, but order kills. Not individualism, but collective authority is the main source of deadly violence.

Knowledge

Just as violence is instrumentalized in our society, knowledge is traded as a commodity.

To quote Ivan Illich:

“In school, the teacher keeps their knowledge to themselves insofar as it does not fit into the daily timetable. The media informs us, but withholds those things that it does not consider printworthy. Information is encoded in specialized languages and specialized teachers live from re-translating it. Associations sit on protected patents, bureaucracies guard their secrets, and professional associations, institutions, and nations jealously guard their power to keep others out of private reserves, be they cockpits, law firms, garbage dumps, or clinics.”

[Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society]

In our current society, knowledge has become a strategic resource. Patents on medicines, software, or seeds secure not only economic power but enable the ethical control of entire societies. Instead of libraries as open knowledge stores, closed archives, paywalls, and legal barriers dominate. Such a society deliberately restricts knowledge and acts against its own nature. It produces progress without participation, truth without access, knowledge without justice.

In fact, knowledge is a non-rival good: whoever shares it loses nothing — on the contrary, it grows through sharing. Property is based on exclusion. If one applies this logic to knowledge, one creates a systemic contradiction: what could serve everyone is artificially made scarce in order to exploit it. The patent system institutionalizes this contradiction — it justifies itself with the argument of promoting innovation by protecting knowledge. In truth, it impedes its free development.

What is Civilized?

A civilized society functions according to objective moral principles. Killing in the name of a “higher authority” — whether state, god, patriarchy, or matriarchy — would be impossible to legitimize in such an order. Equally, knowledge would not be a trade good but would be understood as a universal good that only grows through sharing.

In such a society, the passing on of knowledge would have to be a cornerstone of social organization. For truth, understood as the result of logically consistent knowledge, is not property — it is universal. If civilization is an expression of cultural maturity and moral development, then it is measured not by the height of its walls but by the openness of its archives.

Only a society that frees itself from the external control of an artificially created authority, lives according to the principles of an objective morality, and understands knowledge as a common good, is truly civilized and would consequently live according to natural law.