Okay. I don’t claim to know what the proper “purpose” of civil government is, or to have visions of a perfectly just society, but in practice government is a set of systems set up by people living near each-other for mediating disputes, defending the group from common threats, and regulating behavior in a formal way (that is, there is some explicit process involved, unlike with informal norms).

Citizens seem to be generally happier when their basic physiological needs are met, when they feel valued and respected by the community, when they aren’t treated violently for their thoughts and private practices and associations, when they have meaningful work to do, and meaningful goals and aspirations and especially some common purposes with others in the society with whom they can cooperate, when their frustrations and desires are considered & acted upon by their fellow citizens. When they can provide some feedback to the system itself, and thereby improve both it and their own lives and the lives of their neighbors and children.

Now of course, there’s all manner of difficulty with this, because different people have different ideas of what the society should look like and what their roles should be in it, because human societies are very complex games which involve competitive as well as cooperative aspects, and because frequently military, economic, technological, social shocks lead some groups to starvation, disempowerment, etc., in which position they become either depressed or pissed off. Prevention of civil violence is certainly crucial to government (Hobbes’s Leviathan). But that government isn’t working when its information-sharing systems are broken and it fails to respond to citizens’ grievances, to the extent that they are willing to take up arms against it.

Civil wars are horrible and destructive and terrible, and often fail to fix anything, or even make matters worse.

On the other hand, colonial society in places like Honduras (or Chiapas, where I spent half my childhood) was terribly oppressive and violent. It was mostly a kind of constant low-level violence of forced labor, routine rape and torture and murder, political and economic disempowerment through control of every local institution, theft or destruction of any capital accumulation and suppression or subversion of any attempts to form independent institutions. Occasionally dissatisfaction flared up into larger-scale violence, always brutally suppressed.

I don’t know whether this was “higher [...] quality [...] by any sane metric” than the 19th and 20th century governments. I didn’t personally live through it. I do know that nearly the whole history makes me cry to think about.