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Why we need governments: a plaintive explanation

Previously published as: Hart, G. 2026. Why We Need Government: A Plaintive Explanation. https://www.realityskimming.com/post/why-we-need-government-a-plaintive-explanation

Comedian Lily Tomlin wisely observed that humans created language “because of our deep inner need to complain”. This explains why all human societies evolve some form of government: we desperately need someone we can blame for our misfortunes, and it’s inefficient to have to do this for each individual in our life. Throughout history, people have therefore come together to complain, and some wiseacre always complains how much more efficient it would be to establish an official target for our complaints—and there, my friends, is born a government.

But what specific problems can we plausibly lay at the feet of government? Do we really need governments for this purpose, or are there more effective solutions? In short, what services do governments provide that create plausible mechanisms through which to target our complaints?

If you’re a science fiction or fantasy writer, you’re going to have to grapple with the unenviable task of defining the government services that your story’s protagonist must deal with so you can create a plausible system for attributing blame. That is, you need to craft a fictional government. Fortunately, given all the implausible historical examples that exist on which you can base your efforts, it shouldn’t be too hard to create something complaint-worthy. In this essay, I’ll provide a few thoughts to guide you in creating plausible governments you can use in your own fiction.

With the caveat that this discussion cannot hope to be comprehensive, what things should you be thinking about when you create a fictional government?

Start with citizen needs

Governments exist to serve our needs in ways that invite criticism and complaint. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs lacks these features, but is nonetheless a good starting place for considering human needs. More particularly, though the hierarchy was intended for individuals, it provides a surprisingly useful framework for humanity en masse—that is, for nations and their governments. These needs are:

physiological (e.g., food, breathable air)
safety (e.g., protection against those who move beyond complaining to take action)
love (e.g., finding someone who’s willing to spend time with us despite our obvious flaws)
esteem (e.g., managing to ignore one’s own obvious flaws)
self-actualization (e.g., somehow transcending one’s flaws). A note of caution: carefully study the Peter Principle to ensure that you don’t self-actualize yourself into a government role. Who needs that grief?

Consequences of Maslow’s needs

These five simple needs have distinct consequences for designing a government:

Physiological demands comprise the provision of public goods, such as clean air, and public services, such as medical care to deal with the consequences of abusing or neglecting those goods and services.
Safety comprises defense against others (e.g., nations, neighbors) who might want to take or damage your home. (Comedian George Carlin defined home as “the place where you keep your stuff”.) Safety in a dangerous world usually involves some form of army to discourage other countries from pillaging your stuff, some form of police to discourage your fellow citizens from pillaging your stuff, and a legal system to encourage peaceful, fair, and consistent complaints about conflicts over your stuff—that is, to provide employment for lawyers. This provides social stability, or at least predictability.
The need for love, sensu lato, comprises protection of personal relationships, into which the Government should not pry. Governments that forget this fundamental rule often find themselves hoist on their own figurative emotional petard when their own covert relationships are revealed by the media.
Esteem comprises the right to actions such as free speech that can either generate or lose the respect of one’s family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, thereby altering one’s esteem.
Self-actualization comprises the freedom to achieve one’s goals, so long as those goals don’t create opportunities for others to complain about one’s goals. But, critically, the goals must not lead to employment in government, which is an unwise path; it’s self-defeating to find yourself in the position of having to complain about yourself, to yourself.

Beyond Maslow

Because governments are far more complex and needy than the people they serve, they must also meet needs that Maslow never considered:

Governments must provide economic services such as currency to facilitate bribery and a stable economy based on abstractions such as stock markets that permit trade both within and between nations. In theory, this should reduce the need for complaints, but in practice, it seems more often to create new sources of complaints.
Governments must bring together people and resources to let them solve problems too large for individuals to solve on their own. For example, governments establish committees that can delay decisions far longer than would be possible for a single human. This is also efficient because it concentrates complaints into a single focus rather than dispersing them among many complainants.

Other government functions can be proposed, but the Maslow and post-Maslow lists provide a good starting point for developing your own home-grown fictional political system. (One must, at all costs, avoid the temptation to create a system so plausible that you or your readers actually try to implement it. Remember, you’re just an author. Do not try this at home! Leave this dangerous work to highly trained professionals, such as politicians.)

What types of governance systems already exist and provide, to a greater or lesser extent, the abovementioned services?

Types of governance

As you read this section, keep in mind that the goal of any government is to provide a target for efficient complaints. Each government system accomplishes this in different ways.

Dictatorship

The most effective form of government is arguably an efficient and ethical dictator. Without the impediments created by the need to consult others, such individuals can act or require action with laser-like precision without having to waste time discussing an issue. Here, “efficient” means taking the right action at a reasonable cost to achieve the desired result. That goal is impossible in practice, so dictators may, perhaps with a heartfelt sigh and crocodile tears, disrupt a great many human lives. (Government employment provides little satisfaction, so dictators must take their pleasures where they can.) Proponents of a dictatorship point out, quite correctly, that it’s far more efficient to have a single person as a target for complaints that can then be most efficiently ignored.

The problem with dictatorships is that gifted individuals capable of taking efficient unilateral action are historically quite rare, and even in the unlikely event you should find one, it's highly unlikely their descendants will be equally efficient.

Democracy

Winston Churchill famously observed that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried”, though he appears to have been quoting or paraphrasing someone else’s complaints. On the plus side of the ledger, a democracy nominally reflects the desires of most of the population; on the negative side, successful reflection requires active, educated, and involved citizens who understand the issue and the pros and cons of possible actions. (This is patently unrealistic, but you’re writing fiction; you don’t have to be realistic.) We are repeatedly reminded that a great many citizens fail to meet these criteria.

The corollary is that informed voters tend not to trust individuals who seem more intelligent than they are; most voters figure they can spot the dumb ones easily enough to complain effectively when things get out of hand, but fear that the smart ones will be clever enough to escape detection, thereby robbing citizens of something to complain about. This leads to powerful selection pressure against the smart ones. Evolution theory tells us what to expect when the best and brightest are eliminated from the political gene pool.

Anarchy

Anarchy is the belief that we don’t really need governments to satisfy our need to complain; it is therefore the polar opposite of a dictatorship. Anarchists figure, with considerable justification, that we humans are pretty good at finding reasons to complain and an (un)willing audience without needing to create a government. But anarchists face a formidable problem: this approach is inefficient and unstable in the long run. I’ve attended many panel discussions of anarchy at SF/F conventions, and the panelists universally described the same process: “we brought together a bunch of really smart and really caring people and tried to establish a working anarchy; it worked really well at first, but then things went badly wrong once the libertarians started stirring the pot. So a few years later, we tried again, with the same result. But maybe it will work better next time?”

My 6-year experience belonging to a government union suggests why anarchies fail: the people who want to actually work with others to solve their problems are happy to do so. This frees the others to grow frustrated about the lack of a target for complaints and to begin craving the power to create such a target—by rising to the top of the hierarchy and seizing dictatorial powers. One of my relatives, an (in)famous Canadian labor arbitrator, reminded me how hard it is to solve disagreements between members of opposing systems while their representatives are living at someone else’s expense in a five-star hotel with an unlimited expense account. But the more fundamental flaw with anarchies is that there’s no government to complain about. In short, anarchies eliminate the sine qua non for human satisfaction (a way to complain efficiently) and the casus belli to respond to the resulting dissatisfaction.

We need only remember Marx’s laudable comment about “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" to understand the problem: some of the people in any group are much, much needier (and therefore greedier) than others.

Meritocracy

It seems self-evident that best possible government would be run by the best of us. And that’s hard to argue against if we don’t ask a difficult follow-up question: If they’re so damned smart, what will we have to complain about? And if they’re not so smart, how do they merit political power? Fortunately, we can always focus on who decides the criteria for “merit” and who judges which people meet those criteria, leaving the rest of us free to complain about their choices. For example, is the best candidate for government office a trained ecologist (like me, I humbly add) because we ecologists understand complex systems (or at least try to convince others that we do) or a dentist, since dentists are skilled at identifying and removing rot while preserving a sparkly-clean veneer? Even if we can all agree on what constitutes merit, someone must monitor the behavior of the meritorious to ensure that if it goes astray, we can drag it back on course. Complaining, of course, about the extra work this creates for us.

I’m reminded of the eternal dilemma described in Juvenal’s satires: quis custodiet ipsos custodes? That is, “who shall watch the watchmen”? If you’ve paid attention thus far, bravo or brava: you’ve already figured out the answer. We citizens watch the watchmen, and so long as they give us something to complain about, we’ll be contentedly vigilant.

Why government?

One important goal of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence depends on the optimistic belief that alien civilizations may have invented a different solution to the complaint problem. We won’t know until we meet them over a couple pints and a good bitch session to learn whether they’ve repeatedly fallen into the same government traps we did. Sadly, if they’re a more advanced civilization, there’s a serious risk they’ve come up with even worse solutions than ours.

The world is a complex, often-scary place. It’s therefore very human to desire to be led—possibly by someone we honestly like and trust, but in a pinch, by someone we figure is stupid enough that they won’t pull a fast one and escape with our stuff before we have enough time to complain in a satisfying way. But the root of the problem is that we want someone to do the hard thinking for us so we’ll have something to complain about when they—tragically and inevitably—get it wrong.

My goal in this essay was to give you something to think about, but I hope it has also given you something to complain about. Since I’m not a government, you won’t find it particularly satisfying to complain about me. (Please convey all complaints to me to dev_nul@dev_nul.com.) Some of you may have acquired the desire to find a better solution for our deep-rooted need to complain. You may even feel the temptation to design your own fictional but plausibly complaint-worthy government. (Well isn’t that what fiction’s for?) Hopefully you’ll create something plausible. Hopefully, you won’t create something more effective than the systems we’ve already tried. But whatever you choose, choose to resist the temptation to actually implement that system. That way lies madness.