◄ Paper 70
  Part 3 ▲
Paper 72 ►
Paper 71

Development of the State

The Embryonic State  •  The Evolution of Representative Government  •  The Ideals of Statehood  •  Progressive Civilization  •  The Evolution of Competition  •  The Profit Motive  •  Education  •  The Character of Statehood

THE state is a useful evolution of civilization; it represents society’s net gain from the ravages and sufferings of war. Even statecraft is merely the accumulated technique for adjusting the competitive contest of force between the struggling tribes and nations.

71:0.2

The modern state is the institution which survived in the long struggle for group power. Superior power eventually prevailed, and it produced a creature of fact—the state—together with the moral myth of the absolute obligation of the citizen to live and die for the state. But the state is not of divine genesis; it was not even produced by volitionally intelligent human action; it is purely an evolutionary institution and was wholly automatic in origin.


 
 
71:1 ►
The Urantia Book