Inherent Violence

Throughout human history, governance and violence have been virtually synonymous. Nations amounted to “might makes right,” lands were taken by conquest and held by strength, and the people of a land were subject to the diktats and whims of the powerful. The powerful, in turn, had to tread with a bit of care, because they needed a sufficient fraction of the people on their side in order to keep their power. A king, alone, was powerless. A king overseeing a plethora of nobles and other leaders, each recognizing that he was better off within the structure than fighting it, and each managing a host of people who also recognized they were better off following his lead, could govern a land.

Your value as an individual was, across most of history, based on accident of birth. If you were noble born, your life was far more protected than if you were a commoner. Even in war, nobles were treated differently. Taken hostage and traded back or ransomed rather than simply killed, in some cases. In the West, starting with the Magna Carta, the lot of the commoner started to be given some deference. That deference grew, over time, until the Enlightenment presented the world with the idea that all individual lives matter, that we should not treat people differently simply because of who their parents are or where they were born.

Out of that principle came the Constitution of the United States, which broke in radical fashion from the disparate treatment that was the norm across the world.