I understand the concept of "might is right". My argument is that if everyone was armed, the risk of flexing that might outweighs any benefits. In this context the current situation is: everyone is armed. They live in villages/communities or even cities, with free trade between everyone. Basically, very similar to how it is now, minus the taxes and welfare. I concede that if the situation was different: IE there was a famine, or some new viral outbreak or plague and everyone was scrambling for limited food or medical supplies; then yes, you'd be very right: you'd have to fight for survival. But that would happen regardless of government system. And, in the absence of all that, there'd be simply no justification to fight each other. -------------------------- Onto your point about slaves, it only stopped because of capitalism and everything that came with it (including industrialisation): It's only recently in history that we've realised that willing individuals are much more efficient and productive (even after wage costs) than slaves. Also, thanks to industrialisation, machines designed by willing engineers are much better than slaves. Even if you managed to rather a group of people, convince them to fight for your cause, and enslaved a bunch of other people, what would you do with them? Force them to tend to your crops? You could just pay the wages you would need to pay for security guards directly to a modern farmer, and you'd get much more food than you would otherwise. There just isn't enough value in human labour to justify the expense. Maybe you could simply extort them (weaker people), but you can only do that to a point before they'd revolt, and it'd only be possible if they were disarmed and weak in the first place. Guns are a force equaliser. Very different from suits of armour, swords and horses. ------------------------- tl;dr: The value in human labour (slavery) isn't there to justify the risk of fighting. That's what's different between the past thousands of years, and now.