We live in a world of nation states. But why nation states are formed? In a previous post we discussed about Why societies are formed. Similarly formation of nations have also reasons.
Because human don’t have suitable body, they live together as groups. That groups are called society. Finding food was the most important job. They gathered fruits nuts, hunted small animals. Similarly they need water and secure place to sleep. Old ages human searched for this kind of place and lived as group.
Eventually these societies may got divided. Sometimes those who don’t followed their social rules may be expelled or sometime while on the trip to food gathering some may be lost or may be natural disaster made them to slit. Whatever it is human moved to different places constantly.
Thus human who reached different places had different environments. Depending on that environment their body changed in thousands of years. For example, most of the humans living today in the world are dissidents of one woman who lived 150,000 years ago in Africa. Her genetic markers are with all of us. She was the great great great great great grandmother of all of us. But see how much physiological changes happened to our body who live in different continents. See the difference of Arctic people, Americans, Asians, Latin Americans, Australians.
Not only climate, natural resources are also different in different places. Sometimes that difference appear over time. What ever it is people adjusted with available resources. To some extend we now also live like that. For example a low level paddy field cannot be used for cardamom farming.
But with the depletion of natural resources society feel its pressure. That society have to do extra effort to do the additional job of saving the available resources and find new resources.
If there is scarcity of water and there is river then can build dam to store water. If food items are scarce then start farming and store the crops. For finding resource rich places and forcing people living there to move you need soldiers. To protect the resources in the store you need forts. For all these you need lot of people.
Not only that, if 10 people go for building fort then they have only time for that work. Then do they need to eat? Yes. But they are building fort. So what to do? Somebody else have to prepare food for them. Some people went for that. Like that works are divided for people in the society. There are people to co ordinate these. The requirement for planing and organizing appeared because of this division of work.
Human society which faced resource scarcity grow from small groups to big population in vast geographical region, especially after the inventing agriculture. Eventually they are called as kingdoms. Big forts, ditches, palaces are built. To organize people like beads in a chain and make them obedient they created king as representative of god. Priests gave the ideological legitimacy and physical legitimacy wealth and power to the king. All these is to make the king extra ordinary.
But in those places where resources are abundant the society may not use that kind of thought. What ever they need are abundant in nature. They live happily with that. Because of that they did not built big forts or big secure palaces. They don’t need them. Their kings are almost ordinary people.
A good example for this is the kingdoms of Kerala. Kerala has all natural fortunes like 44 rivers, sea, hills, rain in 2 seasons, fertile land. So life here was comfortable. even when the european conquistadors came to kerala and local people complained about their looting, a king in Kerala said, let them take, but they can’t take our monsoon. From this it is clear that people of Kerala ware very happy and safe with the natural environment. Because of that kings of kerala do not need to build big strong forts or palaces. There were no long roads because people used the 44 rivers and its branches for transportation . Till recent time, all people in Kerala followed a primitive lifestyle.
But those kingdoms which don’t have resources went to conquering other places. Rivers of blood flown [check]. They built big kingdoms. They wrote their history. They considered others are uncivilized. Even today we are seeing the same behavior. the drama that the new emperors like CEOs and bureaucrats playing for resources, and obedience.
Part 1: Why society?