Indians

For full disclosure I should say that I have some American Indian ancestry.

I was wondering how political coops operate and I was thinking about what you would do with the people who were removed from power. If you just made them forget what they were doing for a while, eventually I would think they would remember and decide to reinstall themselves. In the case of the American Indians, they have people who watch the situation and would not allow them to develop a military or get together as a complete nation again. If they showed signs that they planned to develop a military, I am sure that the reservations would be invaded and all of them would be killed.

You could say that Europeans are the invaders here, but in a lot of places they were wise enough to kill every last person who might be a threat when they invaded and repopulated an area. The Spanish were very efficient at that and I do believe that they destroyed and disseminated enough of the native South Americans that there is no sense of heritage except in small pockets. Their empire has long since faded and all that is left is the genes of the conquistadors.

In Africa this has happened recently and South East Asia , and numerous places. I think that these things are cyclic and quite often those who hold power only keep it by being constantly paranoid of those who seek to have it for themselves or back. I think in Cuba they simply killed every member of the old opposition and thus there was never any issue that they would reform.

I am not so much interested in the acquisition of power as the absence of the process that is a form of selective pressure based on the brutality of the people involved. It reminds me quite a bit of the type of organizations that develop in prisons. I am sure that not all people would choose to kill another person for their own personal self agrandisement, however, in the absence of a common despotic brutal presence, there would be a certain number of people who would choose to act without any sense of consequence. I am not sure how much of a person's social ethic comes from biology and how much from environment.

I think that there is a point at which there would be a method that made this type of action less attractive. I don't think that a society that has progressed as far as humanity should continue to mire itself in the foolish concept that it is necessary to breed the most vicious predator to have a reasonable chance of survival in a harsh universe. As much as the military minds might like to imagine it, there will never be a soldier elite bred to punch out asteroids. The evolution of brutality has long ago passed it's effectiveness and the remnants of this concept are a form of pollution. The natural evolution requires that some must die, this is true.