@dinofelis, for as long as physical violence is effective, we will continue to have government (per Max Weber's canonical definition of government as a "
monopoly on the use of violence"), because the primary reason government formed was to enable civilization to
progress from warlords to investment in commerce via sea transport (Athenian Empire) and roads (Roman Empire) for the Agricultural (first and second) revolutions. Government was necessary to aggregate the capital and protection for large economy-of-scale fixed capital investments continuing into the First and Second Industrial Ages. We are now entering the Second Computer Revolution which my thesis posits is spawning the Knowledge Age due to network effects from the First Computer Revolution.
I don't fully agree with this analysis. I think cause and consequence are inverted here, although you do have a point. I don't think that government *was needed* ; rather that it was *unavoidably created*. To me, the "warlords" ARE the governments, and they arise BECAUSE there is wealth to steal ; not the other way around. It is not because one created governments, that wealth occured ; it is because there was wealth, that warlords became governments.
That said, it is true that the monopoly of violence (the ultimate winner of the law of the strongest) DID have a positive side-effect: as there was no competition on the violence side any more (there was no incentive to do so, as the monopolist was so terribly strong that it was a waste of effort, and would lead to one's demise), it DID allow for the investment in violence to be left to the government, which, through economies of scale, could reduce the total expenditure for violence (and limit the total amount of capital destruction by violence).
The price to pay was a submission to a warlord (the government). I do not agree that the government permitted less violence: what was local small scale violence, was replaced by inter-governmental wars on large scale. But one did win by economies of scale on the violence effort: instead of everyone investing in some small-scale defence, one could profit from the economies of scale to have relatively modest expenditures for much larger scale violence in warfare.
I think the total amount of violence increased with the advent of states ; but the total investment in it lowered, because of economies of scale. One could kill much more people, and destroy much more property, with less investment using states and armies, than the investment needed by individuals to protect their families and ownership, which was a hugely inefficient way to do mass killings and destruction.
So to get rid of the natural demand for government, then we need to transition the economy away from fixed capital investments to non-fungible, decentralized creativity.
There is no natural demand for government in my opinion. There is a demand for a mutual agreement for non-violence but that doesn't need to go through the concentration of violence in the hands of warlords (states) that use this to fight each other in wars.
Violence is a "market failure" that is only made worse by the advent of governments if you want to. And there's no way to ever become insensitive from violence.
However, there is a way to empower individuals with weapons of mass destruction. As such, the economies of scale on the level of warlords/states will lose its significance.
I see two paths to weapons of mass destruction for modest individual investments. The first is laser-isotope separation. This is a technology of which development was stopped because one realized the danger of it, but one cannot stop eternally technological knowledge. The day that isotopic separation by lasers becomes fully efficient, with table-top equipment it will be possible to turn natural uranium into bomb-grade U-235. You'd need, say, 10 kg to make a bomb, which means you'd need about 1 ton of natural uranium. This is a small truckload to smuggle. It is probably out of reach for a modest individual, but a rich individual, or a small group, can easily do so.
In as much as plutonium production is messy, dirty, and needs huge installations because of the radioactive problems, natural uranium isotope separation doesn't need strong precautions. Also, the triggering of a plutonium bomb is difficult, while an U-235 bomb is easy to build and activate. The most difficult problem is the isotope separation, which still needs huge factories (it is what the Iranians try to hide from the US). Natural uranium can be found a bit everywhere in nature, and if isotope separation can be done with table-top laser equipment, nothing can stop individuals or small groups to make a Hiroshima-type nuke in their basement.
But the second, much more attractive weapon of mass destruction I see evolving, is what I'd call "DNA printers". If you have a DNA (or RNA) synthesizer - which will most probably be developed in the near future and will be of the size of less than table-top - you can synthesize about any known or artificial virus, and its antidote. Give it 20 or 30 years and I think this kind of technology will be available. The spread of a virus (eventually a triggerable virus, that you first let propagate without symptoms to get sufficient people contaminated, and that you can activate afterwards by a second infection that can be much more targetted) can then be done very very easily by just any individual who created or downloaded the right virus file and "printed" it, while giving himself and his kin the anti-dote.
When individuals can whipe out entire cities or continents, I don't see how the governments can keep their monopoly on violence based upon their economies of scale on warfare and killing.