Literally everything is the way it is because people agree on it. “You” and “I” are imaginary characters to two human bodies made up to explain themselves to each other.
Going out from there, “Family” is another imaginary construct. This is built around people living together, typically composed of adults and children who might or might not claim to share more DNA than usual. You can have foster families where there’s no traceable DNA connection between anybody, but it’s still a “family”.
From there you expand to clubs, churches, businesses, and all sorts of other voluntary relationships. None of it real except for the shared beliefs of its members. Religions are great at this.
“Government” comes next: exactly the same thing. There is no such thing as The United States of America or the State of California or France or China or Brazil except for the shared beliefs of billions of people.
National borders: all made up, totally fictitious.
Cops and armed forces: people with guns who get to shoot people and (usually) get away with it.
Officials: people who make up reasons to shoot people and tell the people with guns whom to shoot and when, based on whether they obey the “laws” the officials made up.
Money: numbers whose original intent was to reflect exchanges of value between peaceful strangers, but which purpose got distorted almost beyond recognition after officials realized they could use their guns to get the money and benefit themselves and their pals. Same as robbery, but if they called it “taxes” nobody would notice and complain.
If some space aliens zapped a ray at the earth that wiped those beliefs out of everyone’s mind, people would look around and, as they reassembled their thoughts, would intuitively understand the life-giving functions of agriculture and medicine and the productivity-yielding function of honest money; these they would continue with, but they would be aghast at the horrible trove of death tools governments have been been storing for the expressed purpose of killing people.
They would be shocked as they came to understand from scouring through the data that the foundation of “government” is violence and the threat of violence.
They would understand, then, the connection with all the death tools, and, being sane, they would organize themselves along the lines of voluntary association so that there would be little need of violence. The death tools would be systematically destroyed because of their inherent danger and their uselessness in a peacefully-organized world.
We need those space aliens! Where are they?
